"I have doubts about a million of tourists visiting Azerbaijan each year"

This was the title of a rather depressing assessment of Azerbaijan's tourism prospects in the near future published this week. The main source of the problem is pollution in the Caspian, which is reported to be so bad (and so widely known to be bad) that tourism development on its shores is basically out of the question.

But beaches aren't everything...I had a very cultural day today in Baku after a meeting with Dr. Farid Alakbarli, one of Baku's most prominent historians with amazingly nuanced knowledge of Baku's various hidden treasures. We visited the Museum of History together, which ended with a tour of Zeynalabdin Taghiyev's mansion. Taghiyev (headshot above) was one of the most famous oil barons during Baku's first oil boom in the early 20th century and lived in a palazzo that really took my breath away.