Virtual Tour: Natural Wonder Flaming Mountain "Yanardagh"

Let`s explore the mysterious hillside with a continuously burning natural fire! In the 13th century, when Marco Polo visited the Baku city, he mentioned numerous mysterious flames that could be found all over the region at various places of the Abşeron Peninsula.

These fires gave Azerbaijan the moniker “Land of Fire.” Even five centuries after Marco Polo, French writer Alexandre Dumas witnessed natural flames in a mysterious fire temple. If you imagine the mountains of the North Caucasus in the guise of warriors lined up from the Black Sea to the Caspian, then YANARDAG (Azerbaijan. BURNING MOUNTAIN) is the closing, carrying a burning torch.

The Great North Caucasian Ridge ends with a mountain, from the foot of which a pure flame bursts out, which is symbolized by God himself. There were dozens of such burning plots of land on Absheron at one time. In the place of the largest accumulation of these natural fires, a Temple of Fire Worshippers was founded before our era. 

The fact is that under the ground of the peninsula everything is oversaturated with hydrocarbons. Oil and gas are in a state of incessant chemical reactions, they pump up pressure, which asks for outside and breaks out to the surface of the earth through volcanic activity – mud, or in the form of a pure flame.

However, at the dawn of the oil boom in the country, in the middle of the nineteenth century, almost all these lights went out. This happened because the former wastelands turned into fields under development, wells were drilled everywhere, and the underground pressure was relieved. There is only one burning place left, the surroundings of which have not become an oil field – Yanardag Mountain. There is a gas sinus under the mountain.

Below it is the oil sinus, from which oil vapors constantly seep into the gas. This filling creates high pressure in the gas sinus, and methane gas is pushed to the surface of the earth through cracks in the rocky ground. The rocks periodically shift due to the seismically active feature of Absheron. Once upon a time, the impact of rock on rock closer to the surface struck a spark and a flame ignited. And it has not been extinguished for four thousand years, according to historians and ethnographers.