National Museum of History of Azerbaijan

Taghiyev rose from illiterate stonemason to one of the wealthiest men in the Russian Empire after striking oil on land other prospectors had written off. He then spent much of that fortune on Baku: schools, a theatre, the city's water supply, and notably the first secular school for Muslim girls in the region.

His mansion, built in the 1890s, has been kept in period condition in several rooms. The oriental hall, the ballroom and his private quarters give a direct, unmediated sense of how the oil-boom elite lived — the scale of the rooms, the imported materials, the deliberate mixing of European and Islamic decorative traditions.

Walking these rooms does more to explain Baku's late-nineteenth-century transformation than any wall text could. The city went from a provincial port to the source of roughly half the world's oil in a single generation, and the money is visible in the plasterwork.

The archaeological collection is the museum's academic core, covering the Caucasus from the Stone Age through the Bronze and Iron Ages, the Caucasian Albanian period, and the succession of empires that governed the region.

The ethnographic galleries cover regional dress, domestic objects, tools, musical instruments and carpets from across the country. Because Azerbaijan's regions were relatively isolated from one another until the twentieth century, the variation between them is genuinely striking.

There is also substantial numismatic and weaponry material, including coins that trace which empire was collecting taxes here at any given point.

One section deserves particular attention: the material on the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic of 1918–1920. That state was the first secular parliamentary democracy in the Muslim world, and it enfranchised women in 1918 — ahead of Britain's full enfranchisement and ahead of the United States.

It lasted 23 months before Soviet forces ended it. The museum covers that period, the Soviet decades that followed, and the restoration of independence in 1991, including the events of Black January in 1990.