The Merchant Baku

When the Caucasus and Mercury Joint-Stock Company built its headquarters in 1858, Baku was on the cusp of becoming the world’s oil capital. By 1901, this Caspian port produced over half the globe’s oil, more than Pennsylvania, more than anywhere. The company that commissioned this building was part of the same Caspian shipping boom that produced the world’s first oil tanker, the Zoroaster, launched in 1878. Today, the former shipping headquarters houses a hotel where frescoes of old merchant vessels line the walls, and a ceramic fireplace recalls the era when Baku earned its nickname: the Paris of the Caucasus.

The building’s original occupants ran steamships and schooners across a sea with no ocean access, which forced a kind of ingenuity now easy to forget: every innovation had to solve for a body of water that connected to nothing but itself. Oil built the fortunes, but oil also needed somewhere to go, and the ships and terminals threading out from this office made Baku a city that moved liquid wealth before it fully knew what to do with it. Guests today sleep where clerks once tracked cargo manifests, under murals of the vessels that made the whole operation possible. The company outlasted an empire. The frescoes outlasted the company.