Photo essay: Why you should miss that bus and go to the Old City, Baku

“Are they — are they leaving without us?!“

We stopped in our tracks and stared incredulously.

A few yards ahead, the bus pulled out into the street, turned left, and disappeared.

We waved frantically at the bus. Someone waved back.

Very helpful.

“They left without us!” We couldn’t believe what we’d just seen. The bus, full of our colleagues and friends, had left for a nearby fire temple instead of waiting the ten seconds it would have taken for us to walk over.

Fine then.

The three of us — a Colombian, a Mexican, and me — decided to take our cameras (the cameras that caused us to miss the bus in the first place, as we’d gone back to our hotel to fetch them) and go on a photo walk through the Old City.

The Old City, or İçəri Şəhər, was built sometime between the 7th to 12th century. The historical center of Baku, it was full of artisans, markets, local government and community structures. Today it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and you can still walk the narrow alleyways and feel what it was like to live in medieval Azerbaijan.

So the three of us walked.

And as we walked, we talked, and we bonded — with each other, with shopkeepers, with the local kittens. (But not with the military guys. They weren’t keen on having their photo taken.)

There’s not much else I can say about the Old City. The photos I think — I hope — speak for themselves.

It’s a peaceful place, and after our first trip I would return often when I wanted a tea break, or just needed an escape from work. Sure it’s a bit touristy now, but there are still people who live and work here, who pray here, who drink tea and go to hammams here — just as they did a thousand years ago.

(The souvenirs, while plentiful, were quite pretty to look at:)

As dusk fell, we all agreed that this was one of the best days we’d had in Azerbaijan. I will always remember that afternoon — navigating our way through the cobblestone lanes, learning how to drink tea with jam, buying Azerbaijani scarves that we’d wear until the day we left to show our solidarity as “the trio”, the ones the bus left behind. To this day, my two friends message me often to say they miss me, and each time they call me hermana.

It’s a beautiful place, the Old City.