Fire Temple of Baku

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Atashgah or Ateshgyakh

Inner courtyard of the complex. Visible in the foreground - with a trishula on the roof - is an Agnihotra stage. Along the wall in the background are the doorways of cells for monks.
Name: Atashgah or Ateshgyakh
Date built: 18th century
Primary deity: Jwalaji
Location: Surakhani, Azerbaijan

The Fire Temple of Baku, known locally as the Atashgah ("place of fire") or Ateshgyakh ("home of fire"), is a castle-like Hindu temple and monastery complex in Surakhani near Baku in Azerbaijan. The complex is now a museum, and is no longer used as a place of worship. The fire was once fed by a natural gas vent.

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[edit] Temple description

Inscriptions in the temple in Sanskrit (in Nagari Devanagari script) and Punjabi (in Gurmukhi script) identify the sanctity as a place of Hindu or Sikh worship. These inscriptions date from Samvat 1725 to Samvat 1873, which though unambiguous references to the Hindu calendar, cannot be precisely dated since there is more than one Samvat calendar. Samvat 1725 could thus be either c. 1646 CE or c. 1782 CE. However, "local records say that it was built by a prominent Hindu traders community living in Baku and its construction coincided with the fall of the dynasty of Shirwanshahs and annexation by Russian Empire following Russo-Iranian war [of 1722-1723]."[1]

According to A. V. Williams Jackson,[2] the Punjabi language inscriptions are quotations from the Adi Granth. The Sanskrit ones are from the Sati Sri Ganesaya namah, invoke Ganesha, and state that the shrine was built for Jwalaji, the flame-faced goddess worshipped at Jawalamukhi, in the Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh, India.

Also according to Jackson,[2] the oldest reference to the temple is in Jonas Hanway's Caspian Sea,[3] a report from 1753 that is roughly contemporaneous with the inscriptions. Hanway apparently did not visit the temple himself, but bases his account on "the current testimony of many who did see it."[2] He refers to the worshippers as being 'Indians', 'Gaurs', or 'Gebrs'[3] (in common usage, 'Gaur'/'Gebr' is synonymous with kafir, that is, a non-Muslim).

Several references from the late 18th century and early 19th century record the site being used as a Hindu temple at that time. Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin's Reise durch Russland (1771) is cited in Karl Eduard von Eichwald's Reise in den Caucasus (Stuttgart, 1834) where the naturalist Gmelin is said to have observed Yogi austerities being performed by devotees. Geologist Eichwald restricts himself to a mention of the worship of Rama, Krishna, Hanuman and Agni.[4]

"The Ateshgyakh Temple looks not unlike a regular town caravanserai - a kind of inn with a large central court, where caravans stopped for the night. As distinct from caravanserais, however, the temple has the altar in its center with tiny cells for the temple's attendants - Indian ascetics who devoted themselves to the cult of fire - and for pilgrims lining the walls."[5]

The fire was once fed by a vent from a subterranean natural gas field located directly beneath the complex, but heavy exploitation of the natural gas reserves in the area during Soviet rule resulted in the flame going out in 1969. Today, the museum's fire is fed by mains gas piped in from Baku city.[6]

[edit] Public recognition

Image of the Fire Temple on an Azerbaijan postage stamp from 1919.
Image of the Fire Temple on an Azerbaijan postage stamp from 1919.

An illustration of the Baku Fire Temple was included on two denominations of Azerbaijan's first issue of postage stamps, released in 1919. Five oil derricks appear in the background. [7]

[edit] Local legend

Local legend associates the temple at Surakhany with the Fire temples of Zoroastrianism, but this is presumably based on a misunderstanding of the term Atashgah, which literally means any 'place of fire' in Persian, but in Zoroastrianism is the technical term for the altar-like repository for a sacred wood-fire or for the protected innermost sanctum where that fire altar stands (but not of the greater building around it).

Besides the present-day physical evidence that indicates that the complex was a Hindu place of worship, the existing structural features are not consistent with those for any other Zoroastrian place of worship. That the site may once (prior to the 1780s) have been a Zoroastrian place of worship cannot be ruled out, but there is no evidence to suggest that this may have once been so. The use of natural gas is not in accord with Zoroastrian ritual use. (See, the Zoroastrian cult of fire).

In 1925, a Zoroastrian priest by the name of Jivanji Jamshedji Modi, an Indian Parsi-Zoroastrian also familiar with Hindu rituals, travelled to Baku to determine if the temple had indeed been once a Zoroatrian place of worship. In his Travels Outside Bombay, he came to the conclusion that it "is not a [Zoroastrian] Atash Kadeh but is a Hindu Temple, whose Brahmins used to worship fire".[8]

[edit] See also

[edit] References and further reading

  1. ^ Rare Hindu temple in Muslim Azerbaijan. Sify (2003).
  2. ^ a b c Jackson, Abraham Valentine Williams (1911), “The Oil Fields and Fire Temple Baku”, From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam, London: McMillan .
  3. ^ a b Hanway, Jonas (1753). Historical Account of British Trade over the Caspian Sea. .
  4. ^ von Eichwald, Karl Eduard (1834), Reise in den Caucasus, Stuttgart .
  5. ^ The Ateshgyakh Temple. Sputnik Tourism (in-baku.com) (2006)..
  6. ^ Elliot, Mark (2004), Azerbaijan with Excursions to Georgia (3rd ed.), Hindhead, UK: Trailblazer Publications, p. 153 .
  7. ^ Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue (2007), "Azerbaijan", cat. nos. 9 & 10. Vargas and Bazleh, Ajerbaijan International 3.2 (Summer 1995).
  8. ^ Modi, Jivanji Jamshedji (1926), “Baku”, My Travels Outside Bombay: Iran, Azerbaijan, Baku, Bombay: Royal Asiatic Society  (extract includes present-day photographs).