Ateshgah, the fire temple of Baku: who built it, why it burned by itself, what you see in the pentagonal courtyard and how to get to Surakhani

Surakhani is a district on the outskirts of Baku where you can still see the nodding donkeys of the oil wells, and in the middle, between low houses and a railway line, there is a stone wall in the shape of a pentagon, a gate with a tower on top and, inside, a courtyard with a four-arched altar from which a flame rises: this is Ateshgah, the house of fire, the temple that Hindu and Sikh merchants from Punjab and Sindh built in the 17th and 18th centuries in a place where natural gas seeped through the cracks and burned by itself, day and night, for as long as anyone could remember. Today the gas comes through a pipe, because what lay beneath ran out in 1969, and the temple is a museum, but the altar, the cells and the Sanskrit inscriptions in an oil suburb of the Caspian are still one of the strangest things you can see in the Caucasus. This guide tells who came, what remains and how to go.

Who built it and why here

The Absheron peninsula sits on one of the largest oil and gas fields in the world, and for centuries gas escaped through the ground and burned in flames that medieval travellers described with wonder; that Zoroastrians, for whom fire is the symbol of the divine, venerated these places in antiquity is likely, although nothing in the temple you see predates the 17th century. What stands was raised by merchants from India, Hindus and Sikhs from Punjab and Sindh, who traded along the Caspian route between Astrakhan, Baku and Persia and who saw in the eternal flames a manifestation of their deity, Jwala Ji, the goddess of the flame, and of Shiva; they built the enclosure between the late 17th and mid-18th centuries, with cells for the pilgrims and ascetics who spent years of penance here, and left inscriptions in Devanagari and Punjabi, with one in Persian, that invoke Ganesha and give dates. When trade changed routes and industrial oil extraction began in the 1870s, the pilgrims stopped coming, the last left around 1880, and the temple was abandoned; in 1969 the extraction all around exhausted the gas beneath and the flame went out, until the Soviet Union restored it and opened it as a museum in 1975 with the fire fed by pipe.

What you see

The enclosure is a pentagon of stone walls with an entrance gate crowned by a room, the balakhane, where the keeper lived; inside, a courtyard with the altar at the centre, a square pavilion of four arches with a dome, the chahartaq of Persian tradition, with the main flame in the middle and the four small flames at the corners, which burn always. Around the courtyard, in the wall, open twenty-six small cells with low doors, which were the rooms of the pilgrims and ascetics, today turned into a museum with life-size figures showing how they lived, slept on quicklime or hung weights from their limbs, and panels on fire, oil, the Zoroastrians and the Hindus of Baku; above the doors of several cells are the inscriptions carved in stone, with the date and the donor's name. It is small, seen in an hour, and best visited at sunset, when the flame shows better and the courtyard empties.

Fire and oil

What makes Ateshgah strange is the setting: around the wall are the nodding donkeys, derricks and pipes of the Surakhani oilfield, where in 1848 one of the first industrial wells in the world was drilled, and the same wealth that drew pilgrims with its flames was what put them out once extracted. To see real fire coming out of the ground you have to go to Yanardag, the burning mountain, at the other end of the peninsula, half an hour by car, where a ten-metre hillside has been burning since someone lit it decades ago and nobody has put it out; the two sites together make the half-day trip that explains why Azerbaijan is called the land of fire.

How to get there

Surakhani is some 25 km from the centre, towards the east of the peninsula. By public transport you take the metro to Koroglu, on the red line, and from the bus station beside it a city bus runs to Surakhani, stopping next to the temple in about forty minutes; you pay with the Baku transport card, bought at the metro. By app taxi it is half an hour from the centre, and the comfortable way is to hire the car for the morning or afternoon and link Ateshgah with Yanardag, which are at opposite ends and have no public transport between them. The museum opens every day in the daytime, charges a small entry fee and has signs in Azerbaijani, English and Russian.

Frequently asked questions