Yanar Dag is the fire the gas industry could not switch off. Methane seeps up through a thin band of porous sandstone on this Absheron hillside and catches where it meets the air, burning in flames up to three metres tall along the foot of a low scarp — no crater, no mud, no pipe feeding it. Fires like this were once scattered across the peninsula, and they are the reason Azerbaijan was called a land of fire long before oil made it rich: Zoroastrians treated such flames as sacred, and Marco Polo wrote about them in the thirteenth century. Almost all of them are dead now, starved by a century of drilling that drew down the underground pressure that fed them. Yanar Dag is the prominent survivor. Even its age is disputed — villagers say a shepherd's cigarette lit it in the 1950s, while others hold that the slope has burned for thousands of years. The gas is certainly ancient; nobody wrote down the day this particular flame caught.
Up close it is stranger, and smaller, than the photographs suggest. What burns is not one sheet of fire but dozens of separate jets, each escaping through its own crack in scorched rock, some standing tall and steady, others guttering in the wind off the Caspian. From behind the railing you feel real heat on your face, hear a low crackle under it, and smell burnt stone. The flames look washed out under a high sun and turn vivid as the light drops. The hillside became a State Historical-Cultural and Natural Reserve in 2007, and a rebuild completed in 2019 added a paved walkway the length of the fire, a museum on Absheron's long relationship with flame, and an open-air display of cromlech stones. The fire itself is tended by nobody. It burns on through rain, wind and snow.