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The Fire Temple of Baku or Atashgah, is a castle-like temple complex in Baku, 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.
The temple is locally known as an Atashgah, the Azerbaijani term for a fire temple, and is not a reference to the Zoroastrian use of the term. Local legend associates the temple at Surakhany with the Fire temples of the Zoroastrian faith, but there is no conclusive evidence to indicate that the temple or its location may originally have been used as Zoroastrian Atashgah.
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.
According to Abraham Valentine Williams, 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 Jvalaji, the flame-faced goddess Jvala-mukhi, of the Kangra district in Himachal Pradesh, India.
Also according to Williams, the oldest reference to the temple is in Jonas Hanway's Caspian Sea (1753), a report 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." He refers to the worshippers as being 'Indians', 'Gaurs', or 'Gebrs', none of which is a specific reference to Zoroastrianism ('Gebr' is sometimes thought to refer to Zoroastrians, but it is a generic term for any non-Islamic person). Although Hanway referred to "the antient Persian religion" in the title of his account, he thereafter contradicts himself when referring to the temple at Baku.
Moreover, 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 auf dem Caspischen Meer (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.
In 1925, a Zoroastrian priest by the name of Jivanji Jamshedji Modi, an Indian Parsi 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 Parsee Atash Kadeh but is a Hindu Temple, whose Brahmins used to worship fire".
References
- Hanway, Jonas (1753). Historical Account of British Trade over the Caspian Sea. London.
- Chapter IV from: William, Abraham Valentine (1911). From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam. London: McMillan.
- Extract from: Modi, Jivanji Jamshedji (1926). My Travels Outside Bombay: Iran, Azerbaijan, Baku. Bombay: Royal Asiatic Society.
The extract is followed by present-day photographs.