Yanar Dag, the burning mountain, is a hillside on the Absheron peninsula near Baku, in Azerbaijan, where natural gas seeping through the sandstone has burned in a line of flames along a scarp ten metres long for as long as anyone remembers, and it is walked along on a paved path close enough for the heat to reach the face, best at the end of the day when the flames burn orange against the dark. Azerbaijan's nickname, the Land of Fire, is far older than tourism and comes from seeps like this one, since the peninsula sits over the oil and gas fields that made Baku, and the fires that burned out of the ground drew the Zoroastrians and the fire worshippers of India; nobody can prove when this fire started, the story being that a shepherd dropped a cigarette in the 1950s, though the ancient travellers wrote of fires on this coast, and the flames resolve on a close look into dozens of individual jets each rising from its own crack in the rock, low and blue at the base and orange above, with a crackle under them. The fire never goes out, in rain or snow, and the ground around it is warm.
The temple most visitors pair with it, Ateshgah at Surakhani, no longer burns on its own gas, since the wells around it drew the pressure down in the nineteenth century and its eternal flame is piped from the mains, while Yanar Dag is the seep that still burns by itself. In winter the sun goes down near five, so full night falls while the gate is still open and the flames stand vivid against a black sky, and in summer the fire is seen in daylight, faint against the hillside. The site has a small museum and an amphitheatre facing the flames, and it is half an hour from the city on the way to the mud volcanoes of Gobustan. Yanar Dag is a hill that has been on fire for centuries, and the country is named for it.