Neft Daşları: Azerbaijan's Soviet City Built Completely Isolated Over The Caspian Sea

40°17'14.49"N 50°43'13.65"E

 

(from Senses Atlas)

   Annecy is the "Venice of the Alps", Saint Petersburg is the "Venice of the North", Fort Lauderdale is the "Venice of America" and so on. Each town with canals has the nickname of Venice, doesn't matter where it is or how it looks like. Today in Weird Wonders, we're going to focus on the rather unknown "Soviet Venice", but which is far more interesting than the others as it is actually just a settlement made for the workers of an offshore oil platform. Welcome to Neft Daşları, the city of oil.

   As you probably know, oil is for the world powers like a bone for the dogs; once they find it, they go immediately for it and can't let it. Exactly this happened to the Soviets. In the late 1940s, after hard research, a group of geologists found a big deposit beneath the Caspian sea which could be reached by a well they were digging on a little island. In 1949, they made contact with the petroleum, and this was when the government decided to send more workers and create more infrastructures. The first step was to sink some ships and with the wrecks create a perimeter which would equal to the limits of the initially planned platform. Buildings and wells were attached to the floor with metal poles and were connected with numerous bridges. That way, Neft Daşları was born.

Neft Daslari's octopus arms (From Senses Atlas)

   Within years, its success turned out to be huge. Therefore, the town doubled and triplicated its population, as well as its size. On the bottom of this post, I have inserted an image that clearly shows how Neft Daşları's initial surface is now the city core, from which dozens of interconnecting bridges originate, as if they were octopus tentacles. In what concerns the workers, the authorities placed them inside narrow communist apartments blocks. At least they had a bit of sympathy left, and allowed them social life by building a theater and a park with a football pitch, which is actually not that bad. Other facilities included a popular bakery, some shops and a hospital (quite weird to work as a baker in an oil plant, though).

It looks like a normal neighborhood in this image, doesn't it (From CNN)

   In the 1970s, the city was experiencing its population peak with 5000 people residing in it. But after that, the population decreased and the city didn't grow that much, as oil started to be seen as a highly polluting form of energy. Later, with the independence of Azerbaijan, the company SOCAR took over and still does exploit oil, but in a lower quantity; leading to a clear decline in the day of tomorrow. Even so, it holds the Guinness World Record for the oldest offshore oil platform (not something I would really care about, but hey, it's something).

   Anyway, it is very probable that in a future Neft Daşları will just be a forgotten ghost town if it stops extracting this raw material. Or the other thing that could happen is a flooding (I mention this because in 2015, a building fell into the sea during a thunderstorm), so maybe it isn't that great to be a Venice in the end.

Neft Daşları's evolution. An image really is worth a 1000 words (From Senses Atlas)

  

Sources: CNN, Senses Atlas, Illuminem, Wikipedia