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The 'Fire Temple of Baku', known locally as the 'Atashgah' ("place of fire") or 'Ateshgyakh' ("home of fire"), is a castle-like Hindu temple and monastery complex in Surakhani near Baku in Azerbaijan. The complex is now a museum, and is no longer used as a place of worship. The fire was once fed by natural gas.

Contents

Temple description

Local legend

See also

References and further reading

Temple description

Inscriptions in the temple in Sanskrit (in Nagari Devanagari script) and Punjabi (in Gurmukhi script) identify the sanctity as a place of Hindu or Sikh worship. These inscriptions date from ''Samvat'' 1725 to ''Samvat'' 1873, which though unambiguous references to the Hindu calendar, cannot be precisely dated since there is more than one ''Samvat'' calendar. ''Samvat'' 1725 could thus be either ''c.'' 1646 CE or ''c.'' 1782 CE. However, "local records say that it was built by a prominent Hindu traders community living in Baku and its construction coincided with the fall of the dynasty of Shirwanshahs and annexation by Russian Empire following Russo-Iranian war [of 1722-1723]."^[1]
According to Abraham Valentine Williams,^[2] the Punjabi language inscriptions are quotations from the Adi Granth. The Sanskrit ones are from the ''Sati Sri Ganesaya namah'', invoke Ganesha, and state that the shrine was built for ''Jwalaji'', the flame-faced goddess Jwalamukhi, of the Kangra district in Himachal Pradesh, India.
Also according to Williams,² the oldest reference to the temple is in Jonas Hanway's ''Caspian Sea'',^[3] a report from 1753 that is roughly contemporaneous with the inscriptions. Hanway apparently did not visit the temple himself, but bases his account on "the current testimony of many who did see it."² He refers to the worshippers as being 'Indians', 'Gaurs', or 'Gebrs' ('Gebr' is literally a 'non-believer', that is, a non-Muslim).³
Several references from the late 18th century and early 19th century record the site being used as a Hindu temple at that time. Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin's ''Reise durch Russland'' (1771) is cited in Karl Eduard von Eichwald's ''Reise in den Caucasus'' (Stuttgart, 1834) where the naturalist Gmelin is said to have observed Yogi austerities being performed by devotees. Geologist Eichwald restricts himself to a mention of the worship of Rama, Krishna, Hanuman and Agni.^[4]
"The Ateshgyakh Temple looks not unlike a regular town caravanserai - a kind of inn with a large central court, where caravans stopped for the night. As distinct from caravanserais, however, the temple has the altar in its center with tiny cells for the temple's attendants - Indian ascetics who devoted themselves to the cult of fire - and for pilgrims lining the walls."^[5]
Heavy exploitation of the natural gas reserves in the area during Soviet rule resulted in the flame going out in 1969, and the complex is now supplied by a natural gas line.

Local legend

Local legend associates the temple at Surakhany with the Fire temples of Zoroastrianism, but this is presumably based on a misunderstanding of the term ''Atashgah'', which literally means any 'place of fire' in Persian, but in Zoroastrianism is the technical term for the altar-like repository for a sacred wood-fire or for the protected innermost sanctum where that fire altar stands (but not of the greater building around it).
Besides the present-day physical evidence that indicates that the complex was a Hindu place of worship, the existing structural features are not consistent with those for any other Zoroastrian place of worship. That the site may once (prior to the 1780s) have been a Zoroastrian place of worship cannot be ruled out, but there is no evidence to suggest that this may have once been so. The use of natural gas is not in accord with Zoroastrian ritual use. (See, the Zoroastrian cult of fire).
In 1925, a Zoroastrian priest by the name of Jivanji Jamshedji Modi, an Indian Parsi-Zoroastrian also familiar with Hindu rituals, travelled to Baku to determine if the temple had indeed been once a Zoroatrian place of worship. In his ''Travels Outside Bombay'', he came to the conclusion that it "is not a [Zoroastrian] Atash Kadeh but is a Hindu Temple, whose Brahmins used to worship fire".^[6]

See also

★ Yanar Dag

★ Hinduism in Azerbaijan

References and further reading

1. Rare Hindu temple in Muslim Azerbaijan
2.
3. Historical Account of British Trade over the Caspian Sea, , Jonas, Hanway, , 1753,
4.
5. The Ateshgyakh Temple
6. (extract includes present-day photographs.)


★ Azerbaijan - Land of Fire