Discovering Azerbaijan's provinces: Xirdalan

By Kamal Ali

Xirdalan is a town 20 kilometers north of Baku, lying along the Shamaxi highway. In 2006, Xirdalan received city status, becoming the closest city to the capital, Baku. 

It has a population of almost 100,000 people. Tourists are rarely seen in the city. Foreigners often ask us: “We know that Baku is a beautiful city with amazing buildings. What about the provinces?”

Xirdalan is an example of how the provinces look like. It can be viewed as a “town for sleep”: its residents go to Baku every morning for work and come back in the evening for sleep. 

Xirdalan is one of the satellites of the capital, which has over 3 million inhabitants.

The city has the largest beer producing plant in the Caucasus, run by Russia’s Baltika. It also a number of smaller furniture factories.  

Xirdalan drew international media attention at the beginning of 2011 when the city authorities had to cope with an uneasy task. While hundreds of thousands of Egyptians demonstrated in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, demanding the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, the Xirdalan authorities were mulling on what to do with a monument erected in a central park to the Egyptian dictator. 

After the overthrow and the subsequent arrest of Mubarak, the Xirdalan authorities removed the monument overnight in June 2011, replacing it with a faceless sculpture of an Egyptian official.  

In the pictures posted above, you can see new houses owned by posh people and also old Soviet multi-story apartment blocks that have undergone some repairs.

There is a lot of construction going on in the provinces. The white building with columns under construction in Xirdalan will house the city administration.

On Sundays, men kill time in cayxanas, or teahouses. Young people can be seen biking or enjoying themselves in merry-go-rounds. They are very fast, by the way. So fast that I could not take their pictures.

While I was walking around in Xirdalan, three wedding convoys drove past me. I could only shoot the last one. Can you see the decorated Land Rover driving past a billboard?

Bakudaily.az