Baku's culture runs on oil money and Silk Road memory: Soviet-era mansions turned art museums, a naval barracks reborn as contemporary art space, and mugham sung over jazz. Three days of galleries, opera and Absheron fire temples.
Zaha Hadid's column-free white wave, opened 2012 and built without a single straight line. Inside: a classic-car collection, a hall of Azerbaijani dolls and rotating international shows. Open 11:00–19:00, closed Mondays.
Franz Janz's building is shaped like a half-rolled carpet. Three floors trace flatweaves through to knotted Karabakh, Guba and Tabriz pile rugs, with weavers working looms on site. Open 10:00–18:00, last entry 17:15, closed Mondays.
Two joined 19th-century mansions hold some 15,000 works: Bahruz Kangarli's Nakhchivan landscapes, Sattar Bahlulzade's volcanic Absheron colour, plus Dutch and Russian rooms. The De Boure mansion staircase alone earns the ticket.
A Soviet naval building on the Bayil seafront converted by Aida Mahmudova into Azerbaijan's leading contemporary art institution. Two floors of commissioned installations, an artist residency programme and a strong art bookshop. Free entry.
The turquoise-tiled facade carries six statues of Azerbaijani writers, from Nizami to Vurgun. Inside are 30,000 manuscripts and illuminated Khamsa pages; the restored Metropol Hotel interiors are as much the draw as the books.
Founded 2009 with Altay Sadikhzade curating and Jean Nouvel consulting on the layout — no straight walls, canvases meeting at angles. Around 800 works of Azerbaijani avant-garde from the 1960s on, plus Picasso and Dalí sketches.
Some 50,000 items: tar and kamancha instruments, Uzeyir Hajibeyov's manuscripts for Leyli and Majnun — the Muslim world's first opera, staged 1908 — and recordings of Vagif Mustafazadeh's jazz-mugham experiments from the 1970s.
Built in 1911 in ten months on a merchant's wager, the gilded hall still stages Hajibeyov's Koroghlu and Gara Garayev's Seven Beauties. Season runs September to June, curtain at 19:00, tickets from 10 AZN.
A pentagonal 17th–18th-century caravanserai-temple built by Indian Shaiva and Sikh merchants over a natural gas vent. Devanagari and Gurmukhi inscriptions ring the pilgrim cells; the central flame now runs on piped gas. Open 10:00–18:00.
An open-air reserve in Gala village on the Absheron: reconstructed stone dwellings, tandir ovens, a working blacksmith and coppersmith, and 5,000-year-old petroglyphs and burial mounds relocated from the surrounding fields.
The Nobel brothers' 1884 residence in Black City, restored with Swedish funding in 2008. Ludvig and Robert's oil-empire archive, period drawing rooms and photographs of the Balakhani derrick forest that once produced half the world's oil.
The painter's atelier, recognisable by its hand-painted blue door and cat sculptures on the wall. Shamsi works in the front room and waves visitors in; canvases lean everywhere and tea appears if he is not mid-brushstroke.