Azerbaijan

Why so much of Azerbaijan meets on one peninsula

Greater Baku, divided into 11 districts, takes in almost the entire Absheron Peninsula, and the chemical town of Sumqayıt stands on the same ground. The city counted 2,300,500 inhabitants on 1 January 2021. The country's record gives Azerbaijan 10,180,770 people on 1 January 2023. The two counts sit two years apart.

The land there is low and dry, and the hydrocarbons under it reach the surface unaided. Yanar Dag, a hillside near Baku, burns continuously where gas escapes through a thin layer of porous sandstone. Zoroastrians treated the natural fires of Absheron as sacred, and at Surakhany, 30 kilometres from the city, Hindu, Sikh and Parsi traders built the Ateshgah fire temple around a pocket of gas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wikipedia's account of the country states that nearly half the mud volcanoes counted on Earth are in Azerbaijan. The ravines of Gobustan, south-west of Baku, hold mud cones beside a rock-art landscape that UNESCO inscribed in 2007.

Beyond the peninsula Azerbaijan borders Russia and Georgia to the north, Armenia to the west and Iran to the south. The exclave of Nakhchivan, separated from the main territory by Armenian land, adds a short border with Türkiye.

How Baku's oil drew empires and companies

In 1803 Haji Kasimbey Mansurbekov dug two wells into the sea in Bibi-Heybat bay, 18 and 30 metres from the shore, and a storm destroyed them in 1825. In 1846 the engineer Nikolay Alekseev used a percussion drill to reach oil 21 metres down at Bibi-Heybat, thirteen years before Edwin Drake struck oil in Pennsylvania.

Commercial extraction began in 1872. The Nobel brothers founded their production company in 1877 and Branobel in 1879, and the tanker Zoroastr, built for them in Sweden in 1877, was followed on the Caspian by 345 tankers in service by 1890.

In the Foreign Policy Research Institute's account, Lenin held that a workers' state needed heavy industry and therefore oil, and ordered the Red Army to take Baku as soon as possible; the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic was established on 28 April 1920. Azerbaijan produced 23.5 million tonnes in 1940, a record that stood until 2005. Between 1939 and 1940, while the Soviet Union was supplying oil to Germany, Britain and France planned a bombing offensive, Operation Pike, against the Baku fields, and the German plan for the Caucasus in 1942, codenamed Edelweiss, set a date for Baku's occupation. The history article follows the boom and the strikes that came with it.

Why the first republic began outside Baku

The name Azerbaijan belonged for most of two thousand years to the region around Tabriz, south of the Aras river. The Treaty of Turkmenchay of 1828 fixed the border between the Russian and Iranian empires on the Aras. The Foreign Policy Research Institute estimated in 2019 that only about a third of the world's Azerbaijanis live in the Republic of Azerbaijan, and that most of the rest live in Iran.

The first republic could not be proclaimed in Baku. Between 30 March and 2 April 1918 Armenian Dashnak militias with Bolshevik backing fought Baku's Muslims, between 3,000 and 12,000 Muslims were killed, and a Bolshevik-led commune took the city. The Muslim faction of the Transcaucasian Sejm therefore proclaimed the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic on 28 May 1918 in Tiflis, and Ganja became its temporary capital. Azerbaijani units and the Ottoman army took Baku in September 1918. The state that declared the restoration of independence on 30 August 1991 named itself that republic's legal successor in the Constitutional Act of 18 October 1991, and it keeps 28 May as Independence Day.

How the Karabakh question redrew the map twice

The Soviet settlement left the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, created in 1923 with a population that was 94% Armenian, inside Azerbaijan. Ownership of the region is contested, and this catalogue records both positions without adjudicating between them. Azerbaijan holds that the Soviet borders became international ones in 1991; the Armenian majority of the region held that it had voted in 1988 to leave. The war that followed killed about 30,000 people before a ceasefire in 1994 left the region under Armenian control. Fighting resumed in 2020, an Azerbaijani offensive in September 2023 ended the self-declared republic, and by October more than 100,000 of about 120,000 ethnic Armenians in the region had fled, in Britannica's figures. The leaders of the two states signed a joint declaration committing to a peace agreement in Washington on 8 August 2025. Azerbaijan: history sets out both wars and the displacement on each side.

How the presidency came to hold the centre

The constitution adopted by referendum on 12 November 1995 defines Azerbaijan as "a democratic, law-governed, secular, unitary republic". Parliament, the Milli Majlis, has 125 deputies elected in single-member constituencies for five years. Executive power belongs to the president and the Cabinet of Ministers answers to that office. The labels differ by source: the country's record classes the system as semi-presidential, the Inter-Parliamentary Union files it under presidential-parliamentary, and the Wikipedia article on the country reads the constitution as establishing a presidential republic.

The office has grown by referendum. A revision of 2009 removed the two-term limit. The referendum of 26 September 2016 lengthened the term from five years to seven, let the president call early elections and dissolve parliament, and created a First Vice-President whom the president appoints and dismisses. The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe wrote in October 2016 that the longer term, coupled with the earlier removal of the limit, "concentrates power in the hands of a single person"; the Constitutional Court had confirmed on 25 July 2016 that the changes complied with the constitution. Both new powers over the calendar were used in 2024, with an early presidential election on 7 February and early parliamentary elections on 1 September. Freedom House classed Azerbaijan as "not free" in 2024.

Nakhchivan keeps an Ali Majlis of 45 members. Azerbaijan: politics works through the succession and the courts.

What the oil fund saves as the wells decline

The oil the independent state could sell lay offshore. On 20 September 1994 the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic signed a production-sharing agreement with a group of foreign companies for the Azeri, Chirag and deep-water Gunashli fields, known as the Contract of the Century. The Baku to Tbilisi to Ceyhan pipeline has carried the crude west across Georgia to the Mediterranean since 2006. Britannica records output above a million barrels a day at the peak in 2010, falling steadily to slightly more than 600,000 barrels a day in 2025, a decline offset by gains in gas.

The surplus revenue goes to the State Oil Fund, founded by decree on 29 December 1999. It held 73.5 billion dollars at the end of 2025, equal to 97% of that year's GDP in the World Bank's figures. The World Bank puts 2025 output at 75.9 billion dollars, or 7,411 dollars a head and 26,113 at purchasing power parity, with growth of 1.4%, inflation of 5.6% and unemployment of 5.5%.

The IMF counts 92.3 billion of the 129.1 billion manats produced in 2025 as coming from outside oil and gas. Spending outside oil ran a deficit of 18.6% of non-oil GDP that year, and the fiscal rule aims to narrow it to 13% by 2029. How the budget leans on the fund, and how the manat has held against the dollar, is the business of the economy article.

Where the land beyond Absheron rises and turns wet

Away from the peninsula the country is framed by mountains. The Greater Caucasus runs along the northern border, where Bazardüzü reaches 4,466 metres, the Lesser Caucasus enters from the south-west, and the Talysh Mountains close the south-east against Iran. The Kura, 1,515 kilometres long, and its tributary the Aras carry their water down into a central lowland that ends at the Caspian shore.

Rain rises from the peninsula's 200 to 350 millimetres a year to 1,600 to 1,800 at Länkäran, under the Talysh. The Hyrcanian Forests, a relict broad-leaved forest whose history UNESCO dates to 25 to 50 million years ago, reach Azerbaijan there, and the World Heritage listing was extended in 2023 to two component parts in Hirkan National Park. Nakhchivan is dry and continental, and both of the country's recorded temperature extremes, minus 33 °C and 46 °C, were observed in its districts of Julfa and Ordubad. The transhumance route of the Khinalig herders and the Caspian's moving shoreline are in the geography article.

What Azerbaijani culture takes from across the Aras

Azerbaijani is an Oghuz Turkic language in the same group as Turkish, and Britannica dates its literary tradition to the fifteenth century. The poetry and music around it lean south. Nizami Ganjavi, born in Ganja, wrote his five long poems in Persian, and UNESCO's file on mugham, the improvised classical form it proclaimed in 2003, names the Persian radif among its relatives. The alphabet moved from Perso-Arabic to Latin in 1929, to Cyrillic in 1938 and back to Latin in 1991, by the dates in Wikipedia's account of the language, while speakers in Iran kept the Perso-Arabic script.

The 2019 census counted 94.8% of the population as Azerbaijanis, 1.7% as Lezgins and 0.9% as Talysh. Britannica puts more than three-fifths of the population as Shia Muslims and about a third as Sunni, and Article 18 of the constitution separates religion from the state. By September 2026 UNESCO listed 24 Azerbaijani elements of intangible heritage, from mugham in 2008 to Novruz in 2024, alongside five World Heritage properties. The carpet schools and the four Tuesdays before Novruz belong to Azerbaijan: culture.

Who travels to Azerbaijan and from where

The State Statistical Committee counted 2,570,200 foreigners and stateless persons arriving in 2025, from 189 countries. Citizens of Russia made up 23.9% of them, citizens of Türkiye 17.7% and citizens of Iran 8.1%, while the member states of the European Union together sent 120,100. Of those arrivals, 75.8% came by air. The electronic visa introduced in January 2017 covers a single-entry visit of up to 30 days. The Wikipedia survey of the country's tourism records that the government bars entry to citizens of Armenia and to citizens of other countries who are of Armenian descent.

Inside Baku, UNESCO inscribed the Walled City with the Shirvanshah's Palace and the Maiden Tower in December 2000. The roads out to Gobustan and to the ski resorts of the Greater Caucasus are traced in Azerbaijan: travel.