The museum that is not there

The last full day of a trip is the day for the museum you have been putting off, except that the museum I wanted does not appear to exist. I spent the morning looking for a collection of radio and communications equipment in this city: in Azerbaijani, in English, in the tourist listings, in the academy pages. There is a television tower on the hill, finished in 1996 after seventeen years of building. There is an entry for a railway museum whose own page would not open for me.

So I paid for the other thing. The Taghiyev palace on Taghiyev Street was built between 1895 and 1901 by a Polish architect for a man who made his money in oil, and it has held the national history collection since 1920. Three hundred thousand objects in six departments. Coins in long trays, the Russo-Japanese war, the first war, the civil war, the second war, furniture. Nothing about receivers. Nothing about the buzzer. I went room by room anyway, which is a habit and not a method.

This is the honest ending for the Azerbaijan chapter. The antenna I care about stands near Qabala, it stopped in 2012, and the equipment was taken away to Russia the year after. No cabinet, no label, no room. A chapter can be a road, a burning hill and a dead asphalt plant. I wrote down that the museum does not exist. That sentence cost a morning.