Your Journey Starts Here
Baku City Tour aims to showcase the key attractions and architectural landmarks of Baku, painting a luxurious image of the city. Explore both modern and ancient facets of city life through this tour.
Highlights
Yanardag
The main attraction of Yanardag, which literally means “burning mountain”, is a spectacular hill with a constantly burning wall of flames. Thanks to tectonic shifts and volcanic material below the earth’s surface, natural gas leaks from the rocks. The Italian trader and traveler Marco Polo even mentioned the flames during his travels to Baku and its surroundings, but most probably the fire has been burning for over more years at Yanardag.
On the opposite side of "Yanardag" another hill used to burn for thousands of years, but as its natural gas leakage moved on due to tectonic shifts the three flames ceased to burn a few hundred years ago. Nevertheless, this fire is believed to have inspired the symbol of Baku which features three flames and the sea. Around the Absheron Peninsula more of these burning rocks used to exist and were used as sacred places by Zoroastrians in ancient times.The larger Yanardag reserve offers more heritage sites such as an active mud volcano, a natural sulfur spring, the Girmaki valley and others which can be visited with one of our tourist guides.
Ateshgah
Ateshgah is situated in the center of the Absheron Peninsula in Surakhani settlement (now it is called Amirjan). The temple is situated in a place where from the ancient times until the XIX century natural gas oozed out of the surface being a reason of the Eternal Flames phenomenon. Historical roots of the temple go to the ancient centuries when Zoroastrianism was a ruling religion. About the construction of the first Ateshgah temple proclaims Mobed Mobedan’s writing on the “Kaaba of Zoroastr” (III century A.D.), which also informs that he founded sacred temples in Transcaucasia region and assigned the priests to serve there. Arab geographer Estakhri in 930 in his “The ways of states” book mentioned that not far from Baku, the settlements of Zoroastrians were existed. But eventually when Islam was asserted as the main religion in Azerbaijan local people desisted to visit the fire temples including Ateshgah which later had been decayed.
