Post Soviet Journal | Azerbaijan | 2023
Xinaliq
What felt like the edge of Planet Earth, sat on a mound overlooking the green valleys of the Caucuses Mountains, Xinaliq stands as a time machine back to ancient times. My journey here started in Quba, in northern Azerbaijan. I managed to hitch a ride in an old Soviet Zil-130 taking supplies to a village called Jek, halfway to Xinaliq. It wasn’t long before I had found another lift from a Lada going to the village, driven by a man I wouldn’t be surprised if he was drunk judging by his driving.
The road up to Xinaliq.
The road to Xinaliq is an adventure itself, with the land becoming more impressive the more remote you go, with ancient villages and dramatic rock formations. Some points barely big enough to fit one car and some points flat plateaus hidden between mountains. Arriving in Xinaliq, I got dropped just by the sign on the road up to the village, next to a child watching over a small heard of sheep. Walking up, I passed the only shop in the village selling essentials like dried food and water, if the old soviet trucks were absent, it could easily be five hundred years ago. I continued up the winding paths in search for a guesthouse.
Xinaliq Village sign.
Estimated to be over five thousand years old, the village is the highest in Azerbaijan, sitting over two thousand meters above sea level and has a population of about three thousand people residing in it. Interestingly, the people here do not speak Azeri but speak Ketch, or ‘Xinaliq Language’, an ancient caucuses language not related to anything known today. One man I met in Xinaliq told me it was the language of Noah and that the people there are the direct descendants of him, something however many communities in the caucus region claim. The population is almost all Sunni Muslim, with a handful of mosques in the village, but the Xinaliq people have roots back to Zoroastrianism and fire worshipers, with an ancient fire temple not far from the village called Atash-Kadeh.
Views of the village.
All houses in Xinaliq are built out of stone and wood, many have stood here for hundreds to thousands of years but have had recent upgrades with corrugated metal and glass windows. When walking around the piled-up cobblestone houses was the presents of animal dung everywhere, but in bricks. The locals use it as a local fuel supply for fires, drying it and stacking it to use later. The village itself is built around a hill, with the roofs of some homes acting as the terrace, walkway or even garden for the one above it, walking around I constantly found myself in someone’s vegetable patch or front porch. At the top of the village there is a communications mast, and surprisingly I found the signal here better than that of most places in the UK. The roads and paths were littered with old Soviet trucks and vans, mostly used for agricultural use or transporting people back and forth between other villages and Quba, with no new vehicles in sight, one could easily be back in the seventies or eighties. Down the hill from the main village in the valley, some new buildings have been constructed including a small army station and a school.
A street in Xinaliq.
The people, like the rest of Azerbaijan, were warm and hospitable, and from the second I got out of the car there, welcomed me and pointed me in the right direction. A couple of occasions during my time in Xinaliq I was invited for tea or a snack, always something traditional and fresh, with flat bread always baked in the ancient method. The children of the village caught my attention from arriving in the village, from how independent they were at such a young age. I was walking in the mountains, about an hour from Xinaliq one afternoon when I stumbled upon a cave, where inside were four children, aged no more than six or seven, cooking meat on a small fire they had made with no adult about. I had seen the same children in the village that morning walking towards the path to the mountains but had not expected to find them here. Reflecting on my own childhood, it amazed me how children so young knew how to cook and make a fire. Many other young children could be seen in the village herding sheep, collecting water and working the land.
A shepherd in the mountain above the village.
Most homes in the Xinaliq keep domesticated animals, usually cows, sheep and chickens. It is also the place where ‘the cows come home’, literally. I enjoyed sitting at the base of the village each evening and seeing a shepherd direct the cows down from the mountain to the village, once at the village, the cows would walk themselves to their home, just as a human would. Some women could even be seen in the streets sitting or standing on their porch waiting for their cows so they could shut up for the night. A bizarre sight, seeing groups of cows walk home together unattended, something I have yet to see elsewhere.
A cow walking home.
Collecting sheep wool on the roof.
One gentleman I met there was called Rahmon, who owned a guesthouse I ended up staying in. I had a chat with him one afternoon whilst sat out in his yard with a pot of tea, he tells me life in Xinaliq is the best way to live. He had been to Baku once, the modern flashy capital of Azerbaijan, and hated it, preferring the simpler way of life in the mountains. The house that he lives in has been in his family for generations, growing up here himself, he enjoys knowing everyone and ‘having friends everywhere’. I asked him what life was like in the Soviet Union, but his response indicated that there was hardly any change, highlighting the fact they are so remote that the ‘Russians didn’t notice them’ in Rahmon’s words. After the Soviet Union fell however it became easier to acquire vehicles which connected the village to other settlements and towns easier. His first car was a Lada Niva, the same model he has today, and has made life easier as he can go to Quba to get supplies as well as take tourists on tours of the mountains. He smiles and calls the Lada one of his children.
Rahmon and his Lada Niva.
Rahmon's Neighbour and his Lada Niva.
I left Xinaliq after almost a week staying there, I was able to negotiate with a truck driver going back to Quba for a few manat to drop me off at Jek to explore the other villages along the way. In 2007 Ilham Aliyev made Xinaliq an ethnographic and cultural reserve, and in turn promoting tourism to the village, something that, although still relatively low, is increasing. In time Xinaliq may modernise and adapt to the tourist industry but seeing a place as such preserved in time in the twenty first century, hearing the ancient language and seeing the traditions is something very special.
A Soviet truck in Xinaliq.
Sheep outside Xinaliq