Preamble
Every city needs ground. Streets. Foundations. Soil. That's just how cities work... right?
So how do you build a city sixty miles from shore, in the middle of the Caspian Sea, with no land at all beneath it?
You sink ships. Seven of them.
That city is Neft Daslari.
Oil Rocks.
Soviet engineers built it out in the open sea, and at its height, around five thousand people lived there.
Roughly 200 miles of bridges and roads stitched it together. Cars drove them. And today? It's still standing.
Part of it is still working while much of the rest is disappearing into the sea.
Today, Neft Daslari is run by SOCAR, the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic. About two thousand people continue working there and there's even talk of turning it into a museum.
So we have two questions. How did a smell recorded in a ship's logbook lead to a city on the sea?
And now that the oil is fading... What do you do with a place like this?
Let’s Run It Back
To understand Neft Daslari, we have to understand the ground it grew out of (pun entirely intended). Because around Baku, on the Absheron Peninsula, oil isn't new.
It's ancient.
As early as the tenth century, writers like al-Baladhuri said the economy of Absheron rested on oil.
Scholars like al-Masudi and al-Istakhri documented it, and they even distinguished white oil from black oil.
Later on, around 1295, Marco Polo described a spring near the Caspian so rich that camels carried away the loads. People burned it for light and they healed camel wounds with it.
A generation later, in about 1330, the missionary Jordanus Catalani wrote about locals praising the oil's healing power, not its fuel. And that's evident today where oil spas are still in use. I'd love to go there and check them out some day.
Then, in 1647, the Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi sorted it by color: red, yellow, black. The yellow, he noted, fetched the highest price in the markets. He is also the famed author of Seyahatnâme.
Next came the industrial age.
In 1796, the botanist Friedrich Marschall von Bieberstein reported oil here in inexhaustible volumes. Baku's first refinery opened in 1859 and by 1867, fifteen were running.
By the turn of the century, this one peninsula produced a substantial share of the world's oil.
And the fortunes followed. The Nobel brothers (yes, those Nobels) arrived: Robert came to Baku in 1873, invested in a small refinery, and founded Branobel in 1879.
The French arm of the Rothschilds family was drilling here too.
And Azerbaijani tycoon, oil baron, and philanthropist Zeynalabdin Taghiyev helped fund exploration through the early 1900s.
Then 1920.
The Red Army took Baku.
Branobel was nationalized.
The Nobels had sold their shares to Standard Oil of New Jersey, who had betted that the communist revolution wouldn't last.
It did last.
They lost that now infamous investment.
But the Nobel name found its legacy elsewhere: in the Nobel Prizes which was initially funded substantially by the money made from oil wealth in Azerbaijan.
However, Black Rocks hadn't yet been tapped as a rich oil source just yet, even amidst the centuries of intersecting reports all pointing to it.
The Run Up
On the third of October, 1896, an engineer named Vitold Zglenitsky made a formal request to begin drilling in Bibi-Heybat Bay.
Vitold was a renowned Polish geologist, philanthropist, and engineer who had been working in Baku during the oil boom at the turn of the century. He is credited as as the pioneer of modern offshore oil extraction.
And his plan was bold: a waterproof platform rising 12ft (4 meters) above the waves, with giant barges to carry the oil safely to shore.
The Mining Department said no.
But they noticed something. The seabed near Absheron really was oil-bearing. Someone, they said, should check.
Just don't waste money.
Nobody did. Not yet. Then in 1934, a mining engineer named Fatullabey Rustambekov began writing articles in Azerbaijan Oil Industry, arguing that the future of oil lay out in the Caspian. He named six possible oil exploration sites on the Caspian shelf.
Fast forward to 1946, a renowned geologist named Agha Kurban Aliyev is reading through the logbook of a ship called the Maria, an old Caspian schooner that had sunk many years before during a storm at Black Rocks.
In it, the captain wrote something that read like an illuminated clue or sign to Aliyev: “If the wind blows from the north, the seamen – even at a great distance – can detect by smell alone the treacherous surface rocks and underwater ridge.”
One smell.
Could be a fluke.
So he started asking. He talked to navigators. To captains. And the answer kept coming back the same.
Same smell.
Same place.
Same rocks.
He concluded that an oil-prospecting expedition to Black Rocks had to happen.
And at the very top, someone was very interested in what was out in the Captain Sea.
Joseph Stalin.
He demanded that oil production in the Caucasus expand, and placed Nikolai Baibakov in charge.
Baibakov approved the project.
1949. Out in the Caspian Sea, a drilling master named Mikhail Kaverochkin lowers the drill... and he strikes oil.
Rustambekov had been right. The discovery of Oil Rocks proved it.
But now came the era-defining challenge: How do you build on open water? The answer was very unique and resourceful. They took decommissioned ships (seven in all), including a steel tanker named the Zoroaster, and anchored them as the foundation. The Zoroaster, named for the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra. In Baku, a land of fire, fire worship, where vents once ignited on their own.
On top of those hulls, they raised a settlement. Steel trestle bridges. A network of drilling rigs. A city on wrecks. The Soviets had built on open water.
After Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev took power and visited Neft Daslari.
He did not like the wooden structures built there.
So he ordered something bigger: residential blocks, a cinema, a hotel, a bakery, a tree-lined park, a hospital, a heliport, a laundry, a bathhouse, a soccer pitch, a cultural center, a library.
A park. With trees. In the middle of the sea.
The 1960s were its zenith: oil flowing, five thousand residents. A true marvel and powerhouse on multiple fronts for the Soviet and non-Soviet world.
Then 1991. The Soviet Union fell, and by 1993, control of the site slipped into disarray.
Maintenance faded.
The sea, proving the second law of thermodynamics true yet again, reminded the people where this site actually was: sitting on the surface of an unforgiving sea.
After Its Height
Afterward, the energy sector was restructured and Neft Daslari came under SOCAR, which still runs it today, though much of the funding now flows to other ventures.
About two thousand people live there now. There's a power plant. A waste incinerator. A traditional tea house and a mosque.
The vital infrastructure is maintained whilst non-essential stretches are left to be claimed by the water.
Unfortunately, there were deaths during its history, and the lack of upkeep shows.
It’s not an open site and visitors need permission to go.
Measures are being discussed, and taken, to prevent an environmental disaster.
So, it's still producing, just not like before.
So, back to our questions.
How did a smell lead to a city?
Because someone listened.
A geologist trusted a sailor's nose, an engineer kept writing for decades, and an idea that was refused in 1896 became real in 1949.
And what do we do with a place like this?
Honestly... that's still being decided.
Turn it into a museum?
Keep it running?
Let the sea have the rest?
Places built for one purpose have a way of outliving it. What gets kept and why?
Neft Daslari wasn't built by one person, one country, or one idea.
It's a thread running from medieval travelers, to merchants, to engineers, to the workers who lived on water.
So as you go about your week, maybe ask yourself: what stories are sitting out there, past the horizon, waiting for someone to notice the smell?
