The Vahid monument in Baku: the bust made of figures of the poet of the ghazals, who Aliagha Vahid was, where it is and why it deserves the detour in the Old City

In the garden between the Philharmonic Park and the walls of the Old City of Baku, under the plane trees, there is a bronze bust which at ten metres is the head of a man with a moustache and at two metres is something else: the hair, the forehead, the beard and the neck are made of dozens of small figures, men and women embracing, musicians, lovers, drinkers, who are the characters of the poet's verses. This is the monument to Aliagha Vahid, the last great poet of the ghazal in Azerbaijani, and one of the strangest and best sculptures in the city, which almost nobody stops to look at. This guide tells who he was, what he wrote, why the bust is like this, where it is and how to see it on the way between the Old City and the seafront.

Who Vahid was

Aliagha Isgandarov was born in 1895 in Masazir, a village on Absheron next to Baku, into a poor family, worked as a carpenter and began writing verse young under the pen name Vahid, the unique one, in the tradition of the classical poets; throughout the Soviet era, while official literature demanded something else, he went on writing ghazals, the classical Persian and Turkic form of couplets about love, wine and separation, in a plain Azerbaijani that the people of Baku understood and memorised, and he became the city's popular poet, the one recited at weddings and in taverns. He died in 1965 in Baku, with belated official recognition, and his verses live on in meykhana, the improvised sung poetry of the Baku neighbourhoods, whose singers hold him as their master, and in mugham music, which sets his ghazals at concerts.

The bust

The sculptor Natig Aliyev made it in 1990, in bronze, and it is a portrait in which the head is built from the figures of the ghazals: looking closely, the hair is a crowd, the beard is embracing couples, the nape is a musician with his tar, and the whole, from a distance, is the poet's face with the moustache and the lowered gaze. It is a simple idea well executed, of the kind you do not forget, and it is worth walking round it slowly and looking at each figure, because each one is a scene. It first stood elsewhere in the Old City and was moved to this garden, which bears his name, beside the walls, where it stands in the shade with benches.

The ghazal and meykhana

The ghazal is the poetic form of Hafez and Fuzuli, five to fifteen couplets all rhyming with the first, each complete in itself, with the poet's name in the last, about impossible love, wine, the tavern and the beloved who does not come, and in Azerbaijani it was cultivated by Nasimi and Fuzuli in the 14th to 16th centuries and by Vahid, the last, in the 20th. Meykhana is its opposite and its twin: improvised poetry in two or more voices, with rhythm and rhyme, which the singers of the Baku neighbourhoods throw at each other about whatever is going on, and which has Vahid as its reference; you hear it at weddings and in videos, and on Fountains Square some Saturdays.

Where it is and how to see it

Vahid's garden is in the lower part of the Old City, outside the walls, between the Philharmonic Park, with its fountain and its 1912 building, and the gate in the walls through which you enter Icherisheher from the promenade; five minutes from Icherisheher metro and ten from the Maiden Tower. It takes ten minutes, with no entry fee or hours, and the sensible thing is to cross it on the way: from Ali Shamsi's studio on Kichik Qala street you go down along the walls to the garden, look at the bust, carry on through the Philharmonic Park and end at the seafront and the Carpet Museum, which is the Old City morning done at leisure. Anyone wanting to hear Vahid's ghazals sung finds them at any mugham concert at the Philharmonic or at the Mugham Centre on the promenade.

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