The archetypal Baku story of rags to riches to rags was that of Haji-Zeinalabdin Tagiev.
The initials of the early oilmen and their wives are entwined in stone over the lintels of their houses. There is an exuberant concert hall copied from the casino at Monte Carlo, a Muslim Philanthropic Society housed in a Venetian palazzo and a Palace of Weddings based on an Italian castello.
The confidence of that period is still evident in the architecture of Central Baku: on one street, named in accordance with the successive protocols of tsarism, Communism and independence, Neoclassical balconies and buttresses scroll extravagantly off big limestone buildings modelled on originals in Italy and the South of France. For a time it seemed as though East and West were in fertile union. A small-scale cultural renaissance followed, bankrolled by the new millionaires, and in 1907 the new Baku theatre proudly showed the ‘first opera of the Islamic East’, Uzeir Hajibeyli’s Leyla and Majnun. Poor Muslim farmers became millionaires when oil was discovered on their land. The newcomers included Nobels and Rothschilds and thousands of poor Jews attracted by the possibility of freedoms they didn’t have in the rest of Russia. Immigrants flooded in, turning a desert town in Azerbaijan with a population of 14,500 in 1872 into a metropolis of 143,000 inhabitants by 1903. Oil production in Baku on the Caspian Sea began in the late 19th century and within a few years the city had become the wealthiest in the Russian Empire, producing more oil than the United States.
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