Ganja

Ganja is one of the oldest cities of the Caucasus, founded by an Arab governor in the ninth century on the caravan roads between the Kura valley and the passes of the Lesser Caucasus. Under the Seljuks and their successors in the 12th century it was a wealthy trading city and a centre of Persian learning, and it was here that Nizami Ganjavi wrote the narrative poems that made his name. Its most famous gates, carried off after a Georgian raid in 1139, are still kept at the Gelati monastery in Georgia. The earthquake of the same year destroyed much of the city and brought down part of Mount Kapaz to the south, damming the river that formed Lake Göygöl.

Revived under the Safavids from the 16th century, Ganja became the capital of their Karabakh province, and the brick mosque and caravanserais of the old quarter date from that period. After Persian power weakened in the 18th century the city was the seat of the Ganja khanate; its last ruler, Javad Khan, was killed when Russian forces stormed the town in 1804. Under Russian and then Soviet rule it was renamed twice, first Elisavetpol and then Kirovabad, before taking back its old name.

In 1918 the city served for several months as the seat of government of the newly declared Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, while Baku was held by other forces. The Soviet decades brought aluminium, textile and food industries, wide avenues and apartment districts. During the fighting over Karabakh the city was struck by missiles in 2020, with civilian casualties. Ganja today is a regional capital rebuilding its historic centre while its factories and university carry the economy.

Ganja's identity is built around Nizami Ganjavi, whose mausoleum outside the city is a national monument and whose name is attached to streets, institutions and the city's self-image as a place of poetry. The medieval poet Mahsati, remembered for her quatrains and traditionally said to have been born here, is claimed with equal pride, and literary evenings and recitations remain part of civic life. Mugham, the classical vocal music of Azerbaijan, is heard at weddings and on formal occasions, and the city has its own philharmonic.

Daily manners are those of provincial Azerbaijan, and stronger here than in Baku: guests are fed before anything else is discussed, elders are deferred to, and an invitation to tea is a social obligation rather than a courtesy. The tea house is a male institution, with backgammon, newspapers and long conversation; family life happens in courtyards and in the parks in the evening, when whole families walk the central streets.

Religion is Shia Muslim for most, observed in a largely secular and Soviet-shaped way, with Novruz — a pre-Islamic spring festival — the most enthusiastically kept occasion of the year. The German colony founded nearby in 1819 left a Lutheran church and a winemaking tradition that survived the deportation of its community in 1941, and the surrounding districts are known for carpet weaving and for craftsmanship in copper and wood.

About 335,000 people live in Ganja, making it one of the largest cities in the country after Baku and Sumqayit. It is an industrial and educational centre: an aluminium plant and textile, carpet and food-processing works are the traditional employers, alongside Ganja State University, a technical university and the hospitals. A good many households also depend on money sent home by relatives working in Baku, Russia or Turkey.

Most people live in the Soviet-era apartment blocks along the broad avenues or in low courtyard houses on the older streets, where vines are trained over the yard and fruit trees grow behind the walls. Mornings begin early, with the markets busiest soon after dawn; the middle of hot summer days is quiet; and the evenings belong to the parks and the pedestrian street, where families walk and children play late. Weekend outings go up into the forested hills to the south, where picnics beside the lakes are a firm local habit.

The city has been rebuilt in stages over the past two decades, with restored brick facades in the centre, new parks and repaved streets. The concerns discussed locally are those of a provincial city everywhere: work, the price of housing, water supply in dry summers, and the pull of the capital on the young. The displaced families who settled here from Karabakh in the 1990s are a lasting part of the city's population, and the resettlement programme in the districts to the south is followed closely.

Ganja eats the food of western Azerbaijan, built on lamb, bread from the clay tendir oven, and the fruit of the surrounding orchards. Kebabs grilled over vine wood are the centre of a restaurant meal: lamb from the rib and the leg, minced lyulya kebab, liver wrapped in caul fat, and whole aubergines, peppers and tomatoes charred beside them, eaten with flat bread, raw onion dressed in sumac and narsharab, the thick sour syrup of pomegranate juice.

Before that come the cold dishes and soups that are the same across the region: dolma of vine leaves or of aubergine and pepper stuffed with lamb and rice; bozbash, a broth of lamb and chickpeas with chestnuts or plums; dushbara, small dumplings in soup; and qutab, thin folded pancakes filled with herbs, cheese or pumpkin. Plov, rice steamed with saffron and served with a separate stew of meat, dried fruit and chestnuts, is the dish of weddings and feasts.

What is particular to Ganja is the produce. The foothills behind the city grow grapes, pomegranates, quinces, persimmons, figs, walnuts and chestnuts, sold in the markets in autumn and turned into the thick preserves — cornelian cherry, white cherry, walnut — served with tea. Vineyards around Göygöl and Shamkir make much of the country's wine, a trade begun by German settlers in the 19th century. Tea itself is constant: black, in small glasses, with jam, and never hurried.