Yanardag Fire Mountain
Yanardag is a small mountain (rather even a hill) on the Apsheron Peninsula, 25 km north of Baku. Literally, the word “Yanardag” means “burning mountain”. And the mountain is burning, burning for real – here and there, bright flames burst out on the rocks and on the ground … The mountain burns in rain (they say that in rain the flame becomes bright blue), and in snow, and in strong wind, because natural combustible gas bursts out of its depths. Here it comes from thin porous layers of sandstone. In ancient times, there were many such places of natural eruption of fire from under the ground in Absheron.
Highlights
According to Azerbaijani culturologists – oil and gas were buried so shallow that in some places they spurted outward in the form of flames. Literally up to the middle of the 19th century, there were places in Absheron where the earth began to “burn with a torch” from a lit wick…. And there is documentary evidence of this – such natural “torches out of nowhere” are described by many travelers, including Marco Polo and Alexander Dumas.
Three tongues of flame are depicted on the coat of arms of the city of Baku. The territory of the Absheron Peninsula was one of the centers of Zoroastrianism in ancient times, and is still a place of pilgrimage for fire worshippers from India and Iran – precisely because of the “eternal fires.”
.Watching the lights is most spectacular at night. After reaching the rock, people stand for a long time, unable to take their eyes off the flames. It is mesmerizing, creates a sense of mysticism of all that is happening. As one of the tourists said: “I begin to understand fire worshippers…”
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