WHEN the Irish journalist, Edmond O’Donovan, arrived in the Azerbaijan capital, Baku in 1879, he noted the smell of petroleum that pervaded the whole place.
It’s probably the same smell that would have greeted Jedward when they arrived in advance of tonight’s Eurovision Song Contest semi-final, travelling from the airport and see the nodding oil derricks in the Caspian Sea, very close to the coast.Whether O’Donovan was the first Irishman to arrive at Baku is not known, but he was the first to write about it. His aim was not necessarily to record the smells of what he called naphtha, but to get to Central Asia, to report for the London Daily News what was called, the Great Game, a sort of cold war that was taking place between Russia and Britain, where Russia was occupying Central Asia and Britain feared it might take Afghanistan and then India.
O’Donovan spent three years travelling from Georgia, to Baku, to Persia and across the desert to the oasis of Merv in present day Turkmenistan. He witnessed Russia’s advance into Central Asia. He was held prisoner by Turkoman tribesman in Merv, and then was made a member of the ruling triumvirate when it was thought his presence might protect the oasis from the Russians. On his return to London he wrote The Merv Oasis, Travels and Adventures East of the Caspian During the Years 1879-80-81. The two-volume work became a best-seller and O’Donovan a celebrity journalist and explorer. The £1,000 he was given by his newspaper, the Daily News, was given to the Fenians, of which O’Donovan had been a member since a student at Trinity College. He died the following year covering events in Sudan.
But back to Baku. The city he describes is very different today. The bars in central Baku host oil workers from the US or Britain. There are shops selling luxury good for the same oil workers, but elsewhere there is poverty.
The city O’Donovan described was a lively, diverse place. People had been attracted by the oil wealth: “There is the Jew with his black cloth cap, somber robe, and long staff; the Armenian, with sleek black silk tunic, flat-peaked cap of the same colour, and belt of massive pieces of carved enamelled silver; the Georgian, vested almost like the Circassian, with silver-mounted cartridge tubes in horizontal rows on either breast, and guardless Caucasian sabre, the richly-mounted hilt entering with the blade up to the pommel in the leather sheath...”
O’Donovan, sometimes as much an anthropologist as a journalist, goes on to describe the clothing worn by the Russians, Germans, Swedes, Persians, Poles and Tatars, along with the costumes worn by the different religious sects found in Baku at the time.
O’Donovan visited Baku just as oil was contributing to the development of the city. A national theatre had been built, the first newspaper was published and a national library established.
O’Donovan describes the oil drilling close to Baku, which, of course, is still carried on. The surrounding area was “almost entirely destitute of vegetation ...The odour of petroleum pervades the entire locality, and the ground is black with waste liquid and natural infiltration.”
O’Donovan, who was proficient in languages, he spoke Arabic and Tatar, was also interested in science and engineering, spent three pages describing how oil was extracted. However, in the middle of the “black naphtha mud” he stumbles on the ruins of a pre-Muslim fire temple, where he met the last priest, “the last of his race, who still lingers beside his unfrequented altars”. The fire temple was probably Ateshgah, now in a suburb of Baku, and a UNESCO world heritage site. The temple was abandoned soon after O’Donovan’s visit, but it must have been already in sharp decline, squeezed out by the growing number of oil drills. It was that same oil oozing to the surface and then catching fire that attracted Hindu and Zoroastrian fire worshippers.
Donovan did not stay long in Baku and continued his long journey. He was away for more than three years, which included nearly six months in Merv. Even though his book somewhat underplays it, he was often ill and near death. He lived with disease, insects, huge danger and the fear of the unknown. As he said himself in a letter to the Daily News: “When one has fallen among barbarians one must abide by the consequences”. He never forgot why he was in Central Asia, and continued to take notes, map the area, talk to the people and generally act as a good reporter throughout the entire time.
In 1882 he was off again to report on the uprising in Sudan by followers of the religious leader, the Mahdi, while the British and Egyptian army led by Colonel Hicks Pasha moved to put it down. O’Donovan sent back reports of the war, which showed that the ragged army of the Mahdi might have been the underdog, but were brave and better armed that had been thought. His death was a mystery, which led some Irish nationalists to suggest he had actually crossed the lines and joined the Mahdi as a fellow anti- imperialist.
He was given an unusual honour for a member of the Fenians, to be commemorated with a plaque in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, in the heart of the empire. That plaque is still in place.