The Baku Ateshgah, often called the "Fire Temple of Baku", is a religious temple located in a suburb in Baku, Azerbaijan. "Ātash" (آتش) is the Persian word for fire.
The complex, which has a fire altar in the middle, was built during the 17th and 18th centuries. A vent from a subterranean natural gas field located directly beneath the complex fed the fire. The temple ceased to be a place of worship after 1883, with the installation of petroleum plants. The natural eternal flame went out in 1969, after nearly a century of exploitation of petroleum and gas in the area. Today, gas piped in from Baku feed the fires and the fires are only turned on for the benefit of visitors.
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| Attribution: painter from Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (between 1890-1907), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
Persian and Indian inscriptions suggest that the temple was used as a Hindu, Sikh, and Zoroastrian place of worship. Inscriptions on the Ateshgah are in either Sanskrit (in Nagari Devanagari script) or Punjabi (in Gurmukhi script), with the exception of one Persian inscription. Below is an inscription in Sanskrit from the temple that I used as a cover for my course in Sanskrit.
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| Attibution: Wikifex, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons |
In 1925, Zoroastrian priest and academic Jivanji Jamshedji Modi went to Baku to determine if the temple had been once a Zoroastrian place of worship. Modi observed that after examining this building with its inscriptions, architecture, etc., any Parsee who is familiar with Hinduism or Sikhism and their temples and their customs would conclude that this is not a [Zoroastrian] Atash Kadeh but a Hindu Temple. The trident (Trishula) mounted atop the structure is a distinctly Hindu sacred symbol.
Source:
En.wikipedia.org. n.d. Ateshgah of Baku - Wikipedia. [online] Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateshgah_of_Baku> [Accessed 16 August 2022].
