The dust that stings and covers downtown doorsteps is symptomatic of the changes Baku's citizens are experiencing as oil revenue rapidly facilitates a construction boom last experienced between the 1890s and the start of the 190os. Standing within sight of H.Z. Taghiyev's Mansion, four buildings are enclosed by scaffolding and are in various stages of stonework repointing and remodeling. In the time it takes a watchmaster to explain that he has already swept his front entry five times his doorstep becomes covered by rock debris as the second and third floors of the building continue to be worked on, notwithstanding it is noon on a Saturday.
An independent store owner explains that in the last 13 years since he first opened, this summer has been the worst in terms of noise and dirt, as well as visits by the tax inspector. He explains that the scaffoldingthat has covered his store's entry was placed there without prior warning nor advanced notification.
As a gentleman who sells telescopes and teacups on Torgovaya/Nizami points out, buildings that had been stained black are now sandblasted beige and roads that previously had been "directions" are now asphalted smooth and straight.
Azerbaijan's facelift, seen most dramatically in Baku but visible throughout the country, has offered some employment possibilities, including for the flip-flop wearing young men working above the capital's streets and those rolling tar on the city's streets. Azerbaijan's government has been increasing its funding for international educational scholarships while the State's Oil Fund grows annually. Caspian oil has provided employment for about one to two percent of Azerbaijan's work force and makes up as much as 90 percent of its exports. At the same time, the non-oil sectors may have experienced about a 54 percent drop in employment.
The international attention that Azerbaijan attracted at the turn of the 19th century helped shape Baku's urban landscape, and given the petroleum engineering that subsequently developed here, arguably Baku later contributed to the shaping of the industrial landscape of Western Siberia's oil regions. Oil barons such as Ashurbeyev, Mukhtarov, Naghyev, and Taghiyev left not only their mansions but a variety of civic works that are pointed to today at times in contrast to contemporary "barons" whose civic mindedness is perhaps less in evidence....
