Azerbaijani culture: a Turkic language sung in Persian modes

Why Azerbaijani music sits closer to Iran

The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, as quoted in Wikipedia's account of the country, puts it plainly: "in terms of ethnicity, culture and religion the Azerbaijani are musically much closer to Iran than Turkey." The language points the other way, towards Turkish.

Mugham is the classical form at the centre of it. UNESCO describes it as a modal genre with a large degree of improvisation, performed by a male or female singer with players of the tar, a long-necked lute, the kamancha, a four-string spiked fiddle, and the daf, a large frame drum. A performance is usually a suite, sung poetry alternating with instrumental passages, and the poetry is most often about divine love and tied to Sufism. UNESCO's file also names its relatives, and they lie south and west: the Persian radif, the Iraqi maqam and the Turkish makams.

The same file lists where mugham used to be heard. There were two secular settings, the toy, a wedding feast, and the majles, a private gathering of connoisseurs. Sufi orders kept it too, as did the performers of the religious dramas called ta'zie or shabih, and reputations were made in official competitions and in informal contests. Wikipedia's comparison is with jazz: the Azerbaijani form is freer and less rigid than the mugham of Central Asia.

How mugham passes from teacher to student

UNESCO states that mugham cannot be transcribed in a fixed form, so masters teach students to interpret it and several versions of the same piece stay in circulation. The file also records a loss: the form has shed some of its expressive character under European influence, visible in how younger musicians are trained. UNESCO proclaimed Azerbaijani mugham a masterpiece of oral heritage on 7 November 2003 and moved it onto the Representative List in 2008.

Wikipedia records fourteen string instruments, eight percussion and six wind, among them the saz, the oud, the balaban, a double-reed pipe, and the naghara drum. The tar was inscribed in its own right in 2012, the kamancha in 2017 and the balaban in 2023.

Why the mugham festival left Shusha

An annual mugham festival was held in Shusha, in Karabakh, until 1988. The First Nagorno-Karabakh War began that year, and Armenian forces took Shusha on 8 May 1992. The festival reopened in Shaki, in the north, in November 1994. Shusha's historical and architectural reserve has been on Azerbaijan's tentative list for World Heritage since 2001. Azerbaijan: history covers the war and its aftermath.

How the Azerbaijani language sits beside Turkish

Azerbaijani belongs to the Oghuz branch of the Turkic languages, in the same group as Turkish and Turkmen, and Britannica dates its literary tradition to the 15th century. Wikipedia's language article adds the other half. After Uzbek, it may be the Turkic language most reshaped by Persian, above all in vocabulary, and most of its Arabic words arrived through literary Persian.

Speakers of the two languages understand each other unevenly. A study in 2011 tested 30 Turkish participants on written and spoken Azerbaijani and found understanding lower than expected, while a study in 2017 found that Iranian Azerbaijanis understood an average of 56% of spoken Turkish. Many Azerbaijani speakers follow Turkish more easily than the reverse, and Turkish soap operas have an audience on both sides of the Iranian border.

The alphabets trace the same pull. The Latin alphabet the republic adopted in 1991 is based on the Turkish one, which had itself been built on an earlier Azerbaijani Latin alphabet of the Soviet 1920s. Three letters, Ə, X and Q, exist in Azerbaijani and not in Turkish. The script changes before 1991 belong to Azerbaijan: history.

The name settled before the letters did. Speakers called the language türk dili or türkcə, and early Soviet documents still called it Turkic; it became "Azerbaijani" officially in the 1930s, and it became the official language of the Soviet republic only in 1956. Article 21 of the constitution now makes it the state language.

The count of speakers runs across a border. Wikipedia gives some 9.23 million speakers of North Azerbaijani as of 2011, including 4 million who speak nothing else. South Azerbaijani, spoken in Iran, is still written in Perso-Arabic script and has no official status there.

A dozen smaller languages are spoken natively, Avar, Budukh, Georgian, Juhuri, Khinalug, Kryts, Lezgin, Rutul, Talysh, Tat, Tsakhur and Udi among them, some by communities Wikipedia describes as tiny and shrinking. The state budget pays for radio in Russian, Georgian, Kurdish, Lezgian and Talysh.

Which languages Azerbaijan's poets wrote in

The literature counted as Azerbaijani was written in three languages for most of its history. Nizami Ganjavi, born in Ganja and writing under the Seljuks, wrote his Khamsa, five long romantic poems including Leyli and Mejnun, in Persian. Izzeddin Hasanoghlu, the earliest named poet in Azerbaijani, composed a divan of ghazals in both Persian and Turkic, and signed the two with different names.

The 14th century is where Azerbaijani became a literary language in its own right, under the Qara Qoyunlu and Aq Qoyunlu confederacies, whose rulers wrote poetry themselves. Jahan Shah wrote as Haqiqi. Imadaddin Nasimi, a Hurufi mystic of the late 14th and early 15th centuries, wrote in Persian and Arabic as well. Fuzuli, in the 16th century, wrote ghazals in Arabic, Persian and Azerbaijani. The Safavid ruler Shah Ismail I wrote about 1,400 verses in Azerbaijani under the pen name Khata'i, later collected as his divan.

The Book of Dede Korkut, twelve stories from the oral tradition of the Oghuz nomads, survives in two manuscripts copied in the 16th century. The Koroglu epic is shared with Turks, Turkmens and Uzbeks. UNESCO inscribed the heritage of Dede Qorqud in 2018 under three spellings of the name.

The bards kept the oral line going. Ashiqs are travelling bards who sing to the saz, and their songs are partly improvised around a common base; UNESCO inscribed the art in 2009. Meykhana is the unaccompanied relative, one or more singers improvising on a set subject.

Print came under Russian rule. Akinchi, founded by Hasan bey Zardabi in 1875, was the first newspaper published in Azerbaijani in the Russian Empire. Under Stalin, writers who did not follow the party line were persecuted, and in the 1930s many became, in Wikipedia's words, "mouthpieces for Soviet propaganda". Uzeyir Hajibeyov, who wrote the music of the national anthem, also wrote the musical comedy Arshin Mal Alan, and its centenary was marked under UNESCO's framework in 2013.

What Azerbaijan has placed on UNESCO's lists

Azerbaijan joined UNESCO in 1992 and ratified the World Heritage Convention on 16 December 1993. As of 2026 the World Heritage List holds five of its properties, four cultural and one natural: the Walled City of Baku in 2000, the Gobustan rock art in 2007, the historic centre of Sheki with the Khan's Palace in 2019, and the Khinalig transhumance route in 2023, beside the Hyrcanian Forests.

The intangible lists hold far more. UNESCO's register showed 24 Azerbaijani elements in September 2026, inscribed between 2008 and 2024, and two were on the list for urgent safeguarding.

The titles show how much of this is held in common. Eight of the 24 give the practice several names, as the languages that share it write them: the kamancha is also the kamantcheh, the flatbread is lavash, katyrma, jupka and yufka, the anecdotes belong to Nasreddin Hodja and Molla Nesreddin, and the New Year entry of 2024 spells Novruz twelve ways. Two other titles add a qualifier, "in the Republic of Azerbaijan", to the carpet and to chovqan. The name also belongs to a region of north-western Iran, where Azerbaijani is spoken in the provinces of East and West Azerbaijan, and the qualifier says which Azerbaijan the file belongs to.

How a carpet is made in an Azerbaijani family

UNESCO's file on carpet weaving, inscribed in 2010, describes a division of labour by sex and season. Men shear the sheep in spring and autumn. Women gather dyestuffs and spin and dye the yarn in the three warmer seasons. The weaving is done in winter by the women of the extended family, on horizontal or vertical looms, with wool, cotton or silk coloured with natural dyes. Girls learn from their mothers and grandmothers, and wives work beside their mothers-in-law. Cutting a finished carpet from the loom is marked with some ceremony.

Pile carpets are made by knotting yarn around the warp threads; flat-woven ones by interlacing warps and patterning wefts. Carpets are woven for weddings, births, mourning, prayer and medical treatment, and at Novruz girls sit on them to tell fortunes and sing.

The patterns are sorted by region. Baku carpets use about ten motifs, medallions and stylised plants among them. Ganja carpets use between eight and 20 patterns and Gazakh carpets about 16, and the Gazakh district in the north-west gives its name to the Gazakh and Borchaly groups. The Shirvan school, woven in Shemaha, Maraza, Akhsu and Kurdamir, has 25 compositions and depicts people and birds in scenes of daily life. The Karabakh group takes its name from the region. The study of the carpet as a subject is associated with Latif Karimov, a Soviet-era scholar and artist, and the national Carpet Museum in Baku is built in the shape of a rolled rug.

Other crafts share the register. The kelaghayi, a woman's silk headscarf, was inscribed in 2014, the copper work of Lahij in 2015, and sericulture and silk production in 2022.

How Novruz is kept over four Tuesdays

Novruz marks the New Year at the vernal equinox, on 21 or 22 March. Its rites are rooted in Zoroastrianism and resemble those kept in Iran, and preparation begins weeks ahead. Each of the four Tuesdays before the holiday is given to one element, water, fire, earth and wind, and on those evenings children jump over small bonfires and candles are lit.

Houses are cleaned and trees planted. Eggs are painted, and shekerbura and pakhlava are baked. Wheat is fried with raisins and nuts into govurga, and sprouted wheat, semeni, stands on the table. On the eve of the holiday families visit and tend the graves of relatives, then gather at a table laid with the holiday's dishes, and the days that follow end with dancing and music.

The Soviet state treated Novruz as unofficial and at times banned it. Since independence it has been a public holiday. The Muslim feasts of Ramazan Bayrami and Gurban Bayrami are also on the calendar, and the country keeps days of remembrance for Black January and for Khojaly.

What Azerbaijanis eat and drink at the table

Saffron rice plov is the central dish in Wikipedia's account, and black tea the everyday drink, served in the armudu, a pear-shaped glass. UNESCO inscribed the culture of çay, tea, in 2022 as a practice of hospitality. The cooking rests on fish from the Caspian, on mutton and beef, and on seasonal vegetables, and fresh herbs go to the table beside the main dishes: mint, coriander, dill, basil, tarragon and seven others.

Bozbash is a lamb soup made differently from district to district. Qutab is a fried turnover filled with greens or minced meat, and dushbara are small dumplings of spiced meat. Dolma was inscribed in 2017, flatbread in 2016 and bread baked in the clay tandir oven in 2024.

Pomegranates have a festival of their own. Goychay District holds one each October with a parade and dancing, and UNESCO inscribed Nar Bayrami, the pomegranate festivity, in 2020.

How religion is kept in a secular state

Britannica puts more than three-fifths of the population as Shia Muslims and about one-third as Sunni. Article 18 of the constitution separates religion from the state, declares all religions equal before the law and makes state education secular.

Observance is light by the measures available. In a Gallup poll of 2006 to 2008, 21% of respondents in Azerbaijan said religion was an important part of their daily lives. Religious education was banned in the Soviet period and has been restored since. The culture article on Wikipedia describes Muslim identity as resting more on culture and ethnicity than on practice, and notes that the line between Shia and Sunni is not sharply drawn.

The religious minorities are small. Orthodox Christians belong to the Russian and Georgian churches, and three Jewish communities live in the country, Mountain Jews, most of them in Baku and Guba, Ashkenazi Jews and Georgian Jews. Zoroastrian traces survive at Ramana, at Khinalig, at Yanar Dag and at the Atashgah fire temple in Surakhany, which has been on the World Heritage tentative list since 1998. All religious communities have to register with the State Committee on Religious Associations to meet, and registration is often refused.

Which games Azerbaijan asked UNESCO to protect

Chovqan is played on a flat grass field by two teams of five riders mounted on Karabakh horses. Each team fields two fullbacks and three forwards, and they drive a small leather or wooden ball with wooden mallets. Instrumental folk music called janghi punctuates the game. The players and trainers are local farmers, and the rules pass from older riders to beginners in collective training. UNESCO put chovqan on its urgent list in 2013, because young people have lost interest and urbanisation and migration have left a shortage of players, trainers and Karabakh horses. The yalli group dances of Nakhchivan followed onto the same list in 2018.

Wrestling carries more weight. Freestyle wrestling is treated as the national sport, and the older strength culture of pehlevanliq, with its zorkhana games, was inscribed in 2022. Football and wrestling are the popular sports in Wikipedia's account, and chess has a following of its own: the national team won the European Team Chess Championship in 2009, 2013 and 2017. Backgammon is played widely, and Azerbaijani players have worked out variants of their own.