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The geographical location of the Absheron peninsula midway down the western shores of the Caspian Sea, its isolation by the surrounding semi-desert, its abundance of natural building stone and its particular historical setting impose certain artistic and aesthetic influences on its architecture. Rich oil-gushing bedrock and natural gas blazing on land surfaces led since ancient times to the siting of some original monumental structures.

Naturally burning fires by the Caspian shores were considered in the past to be sacred and had attracted many worshippers. A large settlement, formed around one such clutch of natural fires, gradually expanded into the city named Baku.

J. Saint-Martin, the early-19th century French orientalist had observed: "La ville de Bakou est regardée par les Parsis comme un lieu saint, à cause du grand nombre de sources de naphte qui s’y enflamment naturellement, et qui, en plusieurs endroits, y entretiennent un feu perpetue (The city of Baku is regarded by Parsis as a holy place on account of the several naphtha springs with naturally igniting fire which, in many places, maintains a perpetual flame).”

The ancient origins of Baku have been noted in works by recent researchers. S. Ashurbeyli derives the etymology of Baku from the Old Persian Baga for God. Earlier Armenian chroniclers, Movses Khorenatsi (5th century), Ananias of Shirak (7th century), and Ghevond (8th century) all mention the city of Bagavan with its eternal fires in fire temples, as Atshi-Baguan. S. Ashurbeyli believes Atshi to be a corruption of Atesh, "fire,” and Atshi-Baguan is thus "place of sacred fire.” Kesravi Tabrizi likewise identified Bagavan and Ateshi-Baguan with the ancient names of Baku.

In his Eskandar-nameh the poet Nizami Ganjavi wrote: "In that place was a fire built around with stone/which the fire-worshippers called Khudi-soz. For it, a hundred gold-collared priests (herbadhan) tended the fire temple.” Khudi-soz, "self-burning,” refers to the self-igniting of gushing oil and natural gas jets. The presence of "hundred priests (herbadhan)” attending the fire temple to chant before the sacred flame would indicate very spacious premises indeed.

One such large tiered fire temple, sufficient for the accommodation of this number of priests could be the Baku temple tower, long known as the Maiden Tower. Following Niza­mi’s line, "In that place was a fire built around with stone,” it may be assumed that this very edifice contained the self-burning fire which was within the round stone walls of its tall tower.

From the analysis of the mortar used during the construction of the tower scientists have concluded that it was built between the 3rd and 7th centuries — namely, during Sasanian times. The singularity of the Maiden Tower lends itself to conflicting opinions concerning its dating and purpose.

The Maiden Tower is surrounded by a halo of legends. Most popular among these is the following: In far-off times an old widower decided to marry a girl far younger. Terrified by the prospect of her forthcoming marriage, the young lady decided upon placing a condition — he was to build a tower for her as token. In one version of this story, upon completion of its building, she locked herself away in the tower. Another version: after locking herself in, she rushed onto the top platform and hurled herself into the sea below. Lacking Muslim overlays to this legend allows it to be transported back to a respectable antiquity.

Built on the design principles for comparable monumental structures, its closer examination reveals an unusual wall thickness at its base of some 5 m; its altitude from its first storey to the upper roof area is gained by 117 steps.

According to the Assyrian reliefs from Dur-Sharrukin, this type of temple tower originated and was developed in Media (Iranian Azarbaijan) where the basic building material was sun-dried clay brick. The archeologist David B. Stronach has excavated a similar fire temple tower at Tepe Nush-e Jan in Median territory where the sacred fire was taken up to the temple roof whence its flame was made visible from afar. Moreover, to erect a mud-brick hollow high tower, it was necessary for a considerable wall thickness at its base both for building strength and the provision of a massive buttressing.

A fire temple tower of this type existed in Sasanian times at Ardashir-Khwarrah — today’s Firuzabad — in Pars province. Built by Ardashir I, the Sasanian founding dynast, it was described as 30 m in height, with a tapering rectangular cross-section, and located at the center of his city. This Sasanian original influenced the design of the Great Mosque at Samarra in Iraq.

It is noted that the castle located there was long called Ghal’eh Dokhtar or Qaleh-ye Dokhtar, meaning "maiden castle” (more correctly "daughter’s castle”), identical not only in name to the Baku temple tower, but also with its date of construction. From this, one could assume a twinship of the Ardashir-Khwarrah and the Baku edifices. (There are other constructions, not by any means similar, from Khorasan in the northeast to Khuzestan in the southwest, to all of which are given the Qaleh-ye Dokhtar name.)

The Baku tower has an internal height of some 28 m from the ground floor to the open area above. Its external dimensions from the entrance, allowing for the plinth and the parapet, are approximately 32 m. Due to the fall in sea level — the Caspian continues to shrink — the total height with the exposed rock reaches 35 m.

The vertical façade of the temple can be divided into three main levels: the base with its irregular shaped stones; the smooth face of the tower with horizontal rows of neatly hewn stones; and the upper portion with neat, interlaced masonry courses finished in flat roll forms, and smoothened parapet enclosing the topmost ritual site. Before its later restoration there had been seven thumb-burners.

In the tower are narrow window embrasures, badly worn stair runs at its base, and a well with drinkable water. The west side of the tower has decorative wall tiles, some partially preserved, others in good condition. On each floor such tiles were faced up to arched and corbelled niches.

The Maiden Tower has a ground floor vestibule and seven floors with niche fire altars where burned the "eternal” flame. Behind these niches, from the earliest times, were placed jointed fired clay sections of natural gas standpipes. Stone ledges with purpose drilled holes supported the standpipe that led the gas to each niche altar.

These niches on each floor were apparently central to the ritual. Dimly lit, circular plan rooms with squat domes and centered ventilation aperture, had vertically aligned altar niches. The gas-supplying standpipe sections were identical in shape and size, and led from the ground floor to the seven stone pipes installed on the top of the tower so that the constantly burning seven-headed flame formed a bright, fiery crown at its apex.

The prevailing northeast wind easily wraps around the circular form of the tower’s wall alignments. The openings of the narrow windows above each landing permitted free air circulation but the base of the tower was beyond their line of sight: they served only for ventilation and natural lighting. Those located on the leeward side were protected by protruding buttresses and faced southeast.

The temple was restored in later times, evidenced by a grave tomb of late origin carelessly let into the masonry, not above the main entrance, but somewhat to the side in the main part at a height of 14 m. A Kufic inscription is engraved on the tomb and reads "Gobbe (dome or vault) of Masud, son of Davud.” It is clearly a tomb epitaph that later patched up a damaged gap which had opened in the tower. Some researchers have erroneously identified the inscription as an architect’s plaque, and so formed the basis of an incorrect dating for the tower.

In the 19th century the Russian Defence Ministry restored the top of the tower, and once more in the 1960s. Several archeologists, disregarding the integrity of the temple’s three-dimensional design and its architectural plan, insist that the tower was constructed in two separate stages: the first four floors, they maintained, were of ancient origin, with the topmost four erected in the 12th century, but without offering any solid evidence for such claim.

Furthermore, in the late 1920s and early 1930s their incorrectly assessed tile designs even led some researchers to assert, without any physical inspection, that the gas-conducting pipe in the tower was for sewage, and that the ritual fire niches were rest rooms for each floor!

Other researchers still categorized this tower type of building as a fortification or citadel. For a religious building without defensive arrangements to be classified as a military installation is incomprehensible, as were the tiled altar niches with adjoining natural gas standpipe as sanitation facilities for some 200 women and children sheltering there, during sieges!

Visual inspection of the inner walls of the pipeline showed these to be clean of any stains, smudges and salt deposits. The bases of the niches have no bias towards the vertical gas transport pipe with its smooth pinkish walls clear of any residual traces of filth. The impossibility of these niches having served as toilets or having sewage outlets is therefore equally certain.

For the raising of the tower, the architects of the Sasanian epoch used good engineering logic in its construction. The building of medieval defensive towers, however, would require a wall base thickness of 1.2 to 2.11 m for the citadel’s strength and stability to adequately withstand the ramming by enemy siege engines during attacks. Assuming therefore that the original tower was extended in the 12th century with four new storeys, it would then be difficult to see why the architects continued the extra building upwards with similarly thick walls of 4.5 m — which the actual tower has throughout — and not constructed them instead with thicknesses of between 1.2 and 2 m.

The tower walls in fact uniformly thin out from the base level of 5-4 m at its summit. Once again, this confirms the Maiden Tower’s integral design, built at a stretch from start to completion — there was no later addition! Study of the strict regularity of the fire temple and interrelatedness of its constituent materials and dimensions precludes any suggestion that the Baku tower was constructed in two stages at different times.

The unusual design and alignment of the tower can only be explained by reference to the imperatives of proper venting and expelling by the prevailing marine air currents of the combusted natural gases ignited within. Its actual construction had made full allowance for these aerodynamic considerations.

There were also suggestions that the tower may have been a dakhma. Such hypotheses would be totally groundless, for they have no underlying argument in support. The architecture of the Maiden Tower is not at all consistent with any principles of dakhma construction. The design for a dakhma requires only an open-topped circular plan building of some 3-4 m height, without multiple windows, exhaust ducts or fairings. [The dakhmas in Iran, by far older than those in India, followed a simplified plan, some having neither an entrance door nor a central pit (bhandar). The low circular wall height caused much consternation to Manekji Hataria who urged the Zara-thushti authorities to increase it in line with Indian specifications.] 

The fact that the tower survives to this day, and was not destroyed as a temple of the Zoroastrians by the invading Arabs, is because by the time of their conquest it had ceased to function as a place of pilgrimage and worship due to the exhaustion of the natural gas source that had made it possible for that purpose.

In 1925 the Azarbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic invited, through its "Community for the Survey and Study of Azarbaijan,” the famous Bombay Zoroastrian scholar and professor Jivanji Jamshedji Modi who visited that ancient land. Modi claimed that some medieval texts indicated Parsi fire temples on the shores of the Khazar (Caspian) Sea. He visited the Maiden Tower which he pronounced to be an "ancient atash kadeh,” and suggested its architectural similarity with the tower discovered during excavations of the ancient city of Taxila near Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan. It should be noted that Modi’s identification remains unconfirmed.

There is, however, confirmation from the remains of another nearby ritual structure that the Maiden Tower was indeed formerly part of a religious complex.

In 1964, some 50 m west of the Maiden Tower, the archeologists Ismizade and Jiddi unearthed, from a depth of some 4 m below present ground level, an almost intact fire altar which, unfortunately, was quickly destroyed. That altar had a three-tiered octagonal base, each riser being 22-25 cm. At its center had been erected an octagonal miniature tower of some 110 cm supporting a stone fire urn of some 45 cm where clear traces of fire and oil burn were noted. This fire altar column had no ducting for gas, and oil burned in its bowl which also was not preserved. That shallow bowl was placed within a hemispherical cavity on the top of the column. The total height of the destroyed altar was some 225-235 cm. 

Altars of this type had been widely distributed in Media and Sasanian Iran, most of which were less than average human height. Their images were struck on the imperial coinage, an example of which is on a coin of Ardashir I.

Born in Baku, Azerbaijan as Akper Aliev, at the age of 27 years he accepted Zoroastrianism with the help of Anjoman Bozorg Bazgasht and Mobed Kamran Jamshidi, and adopted the name Farroukh Jorat. Presently living on his father’s ancestral settlement on the outskirts of Baku he is busy studying the history of Zoroastrianism in the Transcaucasus. One of Jorat’s goals is to spread Zoroastrianism in Azarbaijan and to organize the Zoroastrian community in the country.

This article was edited and revised for Parsiana by scholar Farrokh Vajifdar.