When you look long enough at the above image you will feel it – the house, or its remnants, is weeping. You need to listen carefully – the house has not much life left and it is more a moaning and whining than a crying out loud. It suffers from heavy wounds, which it will not survive. It misses the people who had lived inside for years, decades. It was a different time and the new Baku decided that the house is not any longer wanted here.
I have seen quite some demolition in Baku, but coming across this site was a saddening walk. Some parts look like a war zone and pictures of the German “Truemmerfrauen” came to my mind. “Truemmerfrauen” were the women in the years after WWII who used the debris of the bombed houses to build new ones. Here in Baku the reconstruction will be done by construction businesses for the sake of money.
Normally you will not see the demolition sites as a wall is built first to hide what is going on behind. From outside you just see a little boy playing, lost in his own time. Glimpsing behind the wall you see the destruction and the few traces of former living here.
This woman just makes a phone call, but it looks like she is communicating with the invader, standing up for her cause, her home.
The bulldozer looks like an alien that destroys everything in its new territory. Its teeth are biting into the neighborhood, voracious in its destruction.
Only traces of former life are left: layers of wall papers peeling off, noble ornaments, signs of sophistication from a lost time. However, some of the old times seem to be saved, like this outdoor seating with its former home in the background.
Families just gone, the intimacy of their housing revealed to the public, their closets, their cupboards and even a few glasses left. This debris of life in the old Baku is the scenery of the playground of the little boy. A few families still life here – the boy’s grandmother invited me to their modest home for tea. People do not have much, and yet they are happy to invite foreigners. I fear they will have to relocate soon and they won’t be able to take their cats with them. Nor their neighbors, their friends, their social life of many years and decades.
Much of this demolition reminds me of China ten to 15 years ago, when I lived in Shanghai and Beijing. Neighborhoods vanished there more or less over night, more accurately over a fortnight. I saw the transition in Beijing with the old hutongs, the traditional housing, being destroyed and the old China reduced to the Forbidden City and other sightseeing places. Will the same happen with Baku, where the old city, İçəri Şəhər, will survive as the touristy remnant of old times, and the rest of the city will become like any other modern city?
I do not romanticize the simple housing, which is currently torn down in Baku and one or two decades ago in China. But do we really know what is lost? What are the changes in a society, where people are used to sit on the street in the evenings, chat with their neighbors, the kids are running around and then they are put in comfortable, anonymous boxes.
Life in Baku 