The fountains surge at mechanical intervals against the Caspian night, their waters catching fragments of light from small fireworks that bloom and die in children's hands. Their sound mimics conversation—the rhythmic murmur of voices just beyond comprehension, like the Russian phrases that drift past my ears, half-familiar syllables that force me to strain for meaning that hovers always just out of reach. Art nouveau facades curve around the square in elegant contradiction—wrought iron railings twist into filigree dreams while Soviet concrete slouches behind them like a guilty secret. I stand among the cobblestones, foreign feet on ancient ground, watching elegant women drift past in their narrow-shouldered blazers and dark lipstick—the careful glamour of a decade that promised everything and delivered fragments.
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| photo by susan smith nash |
The kimancha's bow draws across steel strings, weaving mugham's modal lamentation through the crowd. This is music that builds meaning note by note, like Wittgenstein's language games—each phrase a world, each ornament a way of seeing. The musician's eyes close as he navigates the ancient pathways between joy and sorrow, his instrument's voice threading through conversations that switch between Russian's familiar harshness and Azeri's liquid syllables, languages dancing around each other like cautious lovers constructing reality from borrowed words.
Wind from the Caspian carries the eternal scent of oil and gas seeps, that petroleum incense persistent as the fires that once burned without end from this earth. The wind is relentless, constant as the flames that now burn in hearts rather than temples. I think of Zoroastrian altars, of Leyla and Majnun's doomed passion, of Dede Gorgud's twelve tales that shaped meaning from nomad memory long before empires learned to name this place. The fountain spray catches my cheek, cold and sudden against the warm breath of ancient fires, and I am reminded that language, like love, like revolution, constructs the world it claims to describe. Here in Azerbaijan, at the crossroads of empires and languages, meaning shifts like the wind patterns across the Caspian.
The old Soviet buildings lean against art nouveau's flowering iron, concrete socialism crumbling into capitalism's uncertain embrace, while the mugham continues its spiral ascent through modal territories that know no borders. Above it all, Persian arches and Islamic geometries remember older grammars of power.
Tonight feels less about reconstruction than about witnessing—the way midnight fireworks illuminate faces caught between worlds, between languages, between the weight of empire's end and the lightness of small hopes ascending like sparks into the winter sky. In planters between the fountains, olive trees stand patient as prophets, their silver leaves catching wind and light, while winter roses cling to thorny stems with the same stubborn grace that keeps the human spirit flowering in the harshest seasons.
The kimancha falls silent, and in that silence, the wind carries whispers of Majnun calling Leyla's name across the centuries, while gas flames flicker in the distance like punctuation marks in an endless sentence we are all still learning to read. Here, among the poppies that will push through cracks in concrete come spring, among the jasmine that perfumes summer nights regardless of which flag flies overhead, I understand that the human heart rebuilds itself with the same persistence as these ancient fires—unvanquishable, eternal, finding ways to bloom even when the world above seems to crumble.
Yeni il mübarək, someone calls out, and the New Year arrives with the taste of petroleum and the promise that the spirit, like these olive trees, like the fountains that flow regardless of empire, endures and renews itself from sources deeper than any human design.
Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.
Norman, OK
