‘YASAMAL YEK!’ (Yasamal Rules): Baku’s Gangstas’ Paradise Lost

For all the time I’ve lived in Baku, Yasamal District has been my neighbourhood, my ‘mǝhǝllǝ’.  You wouldn’t catch me living anywhere else. There’s a bit of gangster kudos attached to coming from this part of the city.  Azeri friends shudder when I tell them that I freely walk through its streets in the middle of the night.  Apparently it’s dangerous.  News to me. It’s hardly Brooklyn after dark. Though, do a Google picture search for the place and up come pictures of lads pretending to be knifing each other, burning cars, rap groups and handcuffed hoodlums.  Nasty.

Yasamal comprises a rather large district covering much of the northwest side of the natural amphitheatre that partially encircles the city.  It’s all ‘wild’, but the wild part I’m writing about in particular is known to Bakuvians as ‘Sovetski’.

This is the old name for the present day street, Narimanov Prospekti, that runs straight through the district north to south, separating the newer part of the suburb above from its, apparently dangerous, older one tumbling down the hill in seried ranks of streets to the city centre. It’s bordered on the south by Baksoviet and on the north by the ‘6th Parallell’ – not the street’s real name, but those of us who are in the know can tell you where that is. Abdulla Şaiq is the main thoughfare cutting down the centre of it all, and I live at its northern end, my turf.  If you come from this part of town, you’re a ‘Sovetski uşağı’, implicitly a wideboy rascal from Yasamal, and don’t even dream of messing with one of us.

This wrong side of the track has fascinated me ever since I came here.  The narrow streets, designed for carriages, not cars, run grid-like along the slope, or straight down it.  The houses, many of them, date back to the oil boom at the turn of the last century two of Baku’s few surviving grand mosques, Imam Hüseyin and Tǝzǝ Pir, are found there.

Indeed, it’s a slum, though a ruly one.  The houses, some stately, some simply in a state, long ago saw their better days pass by, but soldier on.  Old carved wooden doors open into private or shared gardens, or ‘hǝyǝts’.  The Azeri domestic way is to lavish most care on the inner world contained by a building, rather than its exterior.  Hence, most of the buildings are falling to bits on the outside, while better kept inside.

Still, architectural details survive: sculpted cornices; Arabic or Cyrillic inscriptions and dates above door lintels; wooden panel doors with carvings and several generations of paint layers flaking off them; disused stone well-heads; enclosed balconies of decorative woodwork. To me, the appeal of the place is that there are such odd and unlikely beautiful examples of Russo-Gothico-Oriental Art Nouveau domestic architecture, but you have to search them out – it takes time and effort.  It gives you something to do on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

Too often these buildings’ original details have been hacked away at, AC units mounted onto facades, original doors and windows replaced with inferior modern plastic versions, or the whole thing just plastered over and covered with some Have-a-Go-Hamid’s clumsy home improvement project.  The place is left to its own devices and anything that survives intact, even in a small way, is purely a gift of happenstance.  In lieue of something like a National Trust, soon those remaining bits will disappear too as the new wideboys move in.

Greedy speculators are busy buying up entire blocks, levelling them to throw up fifteen storey apartment complexes or business centres.  Some of the places in these photos, no doubt, don’t exist anymore.  It’s often hard to tell.  Very quickly the mind forgets.  One day you notice something’s been torn down, and lament its passing, though hard put to remember exactly what was there before.

I like to think that I’m not completely deluded, or sentimental: sure the old houses and streets are picturesque in their tumbledown way, but they’re hardly in a state that anyone would want to live in given a choice. I’m sure many would gladly accept the slick developer’s offer of a wad of cash and an apartment in some shiny happy block of flats somewhere else, in return for them shifting it so he can make a pile.  However, too often the new buildings are so poorly constructed that they could become a pile of rubble before they ever fill up with rich punters.  One collapsed and killed several people a few years back.

And never mind the luxury housing glut that already exists.  Many envision Baku as the next Dubai.   Apparently, the internationally rich and playful are going to flock here, where there are no casinos, decent luxury shops or cosmopolitan nightlife to spend their petro-dollars on, well I can’t even begin to imagine what. 

However, I digress.  Let’s have a look at things as they stand, teetering, today.  These are just some of many photos I’ve taken over the past years, at great physical risk to myself in the mean streets of the ghetto, of a part of the city’s heart that will be entirely ripped out some day.  Whatever comes in its place, this is what it used to be like. 

So enjoy the less than threatening, but very threatened, posturing of the remaining street toughs while you still can.  This too will pass.  It was fun while it lasted.