In the house of fire

Neeta Lal 

After driving 20 km out of Baku, Azerbaijan’s beautiful capital city, we find ourselves amid the stark landscape of Surakhani town on the Absheron Peninsula marked by dry, dun-coloured earth and oil fields. 

Here lies one of the world’s most famous fire temples — Ateshgah inscribed as a Unesco heritage site in 1998. As we enter the castle-like shrine temple, the incantation ‘Shri Ganeshaya Namah’ scribbled on the entrance’s archway, catches our eye. More such incantations — in Devanagari, Sanskrit, Gurmukhi invoking, among others, Jwala Ji, the Hindu deity of fire — pop up on every doorway leading into the exquisite temple.

The salutations to Hindu gods and goddesses seem somewhat incongruous in this Muslim-dominated, former Soviet nation. The local guide soon puts things in perspective. “The word ‘Ateshgah’ means a ‘house of fire’ in Persian, and Azerbaijan is often referred to as ‘The Land of Fire’,” he says. “The temple was built by Indian travellers, who arrived here in the late 16th and early 17th century. They worshipped the sacred flames, alongside their own deities such as Ganesha and Shiva.”

Fact file

An elegant ode to cross cultural synergies between India and Europe, the shrine gradually started drawing people of many faiths — Hindus, Sikhs and Zoroastrians. Azerbaijan was an integral part of the Silk Route. It is believed the country attracted Indian merchants to the legend of the ‘burning earth’ and ‘eternal flames’ that the Absheron peninsula was known as.

Most of the Indian travellers came from northern India, and were predominantly Sikhs. Parallels are also drawn between Ateshgah and a shrine to Jwala Ji in the Himalayas, located in Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh. Historians record that some Jwala Ji devotees used to refer to the Kangra shrine as the ‘smaller Jwala Ji and the Baku one as the ‘greater Jwala Ji. 

Ateshgah’s architecture is strongly reminiscent of a caravan serai or an ancient inn where traders and pilgrims travelling on the Silk Route rested and refreshed themselves. A four-sided construction, it is open on all sides with four rectangular columns joined by arches and topped by a cupola.

No longer a place of worship, Ateshgah was converted into a museum in 1975. Lining the temple’s central courtyard today are 24 cells and rooms, which used to accommodate the pilgrims. In cell number 19, a picture of an Indian goddess with six raised hands, greets me. Cell 13 has four stone rings on a side wall for tying horses as well as stone cribs for feeding the animals. 

Many cells showcase life-size sculptures of farmers, locals and families going about their daily chores, worshipping deities or feeding cattle. The cells are cavernous with a small round vault but no windows. Religious inscriptions are engraved above the entrance of each cell and there’s also a small raised platform on the side walls resembling a sleeping ledge.

Ateshgah’s central altar is akin to traditional Zoroastrian fire altars, and one of the inscriptions in the temple compound is in Persian as well. The Zoroastrian influence in Azerbaijan is strong and can be traced back to pre-Islamic Persian dynasties, which ruled the region. Gradually the Baku Ateshgah emerged as the philosophical and pilgrimage centre of the Zoroastrians.

Perhaps the most attractive feature of the temple is the sacred flame that burns eternally in the raised main altar of the sanctum sanctorum. The flame burnt eternally because of surrounding oil fields where natural gas was trapped at the subterranean level and would burst forth wherever it found vent.

Relentless mining of Azerbaijan’s natural gas has depleted the reserves of this precious resource leading to the flames being extinguished in 1969. The dying flames also drove away the pilgrims. Be that as it may, the Baku Ateshgah still draws thousands of curious visitors every year and remains a powerful symbol of how faith and inclusion can be the glue to bind communities together.