Around the Black Sea / Asia Minor, Armenia, Caucasus, Circassia, Daghestan, the Crimea, Roumania

by William Eleroy Curtis

Zoroaster, founder of the fire worshippers, lived in Persia before the time of Cyrus the Great, and about six hundred years before Christ. He taught the existence of a Supreme Being who created two other mighty beings and imparted to them as much of his own nature as seemed good to him. One of them, Ormuzd, remained faithful and was regarded as the source of all good, while Ahriman rebelled, and became the author of all the evil upon the earth. The religious rites of the fire worshippers were exceedingly simple. They adored fire, light, and the sun as the emblems of Ormuzd, the source of all light and purity, and performed their worship on the tops of mountains, having neither temples, nor altars, nor images. Their priests were called Magi, whose learning was so celebrated that their name has been applied since to astrologers, prophets, necromancers, and all orders of magicians and enchanters.

The religion of Zoroaster continued to flourish after the introduction of Christianity and in the third century was the dominant faith in the East until the conquest of Persia by the Mohammedans in the seventh century compelled the greater number of the fire worshippers to renounce their faith. Those who refused fled to India, where they still exist under the name of Parsees, which is derived from Pars, an ancient name for Persia. At Bombay the Parsees are an enterprising, intelligent, and wealthy class of the population, and are distinguished for their integrity and business ability. They have numerous temples in which they worship fire as the symbol of divinity.

This temple stood at the village of Sourakhany, about ten miles from Baku. The site is now owned by the Kokovev Oil Company. It was abandoned about 1880. For a century or two before that date pilgrims came all the way from India, and the Parsee merchants of Bombay, famous for their riches and enterprise, furnished the money to maintain the fire and entertain the pilgrims.

Why the temple was abandoned and the lights were allowed to go out I have not been able to ascertain. The only reasonable explanation is that after that part of the world was wrested from Persia by the Russians something must have happened, or some regulation may have been introduced, which made it difficult or impossible to continue the ceremonials and maintain the pilgrimages. However that may have been, the form of worship and the nationality of the worshippers were gradually changed, until now Russians and Armenians adore the oil for the money it brings instead of for its symbolic significance.

The development of the petroleum industry was very slow and began late. The inhabitants of the old Persian city of Baku utilized the oil for light and fuel gas undisturbed until 1856, when a Russian named Kokreff and an Armenian named Mirsoeff obtained a concession from the Russian government to operate wells and refine the product. They had a monopoly for twenty years, but did a very small business, producing an insignificant quantity and a poor quality of burning fluid compared with the product of the present day.

In 1876 the concession was revoked and there was a rush of prospectors and speculators to this territory. Everybody who could raise enough money to drive a well did so, until to-day, within a radius of ten miles from the city of Baku, are 736 wells, producing more or less oil and belonging to almost as many people. The largest number are on a peninsula extending into the Caspian Sea, called Apocheron, between six and eight miles north of the city, with about one third as many at a place called Bibbi-Eybat, about three miles south.

There are over a hundred independent companies, but only twenty-five are doing a refining business, and of these only eight have sufficient capital to conduct their operations upon a paying basis. The large distribution of the interests is, however, very demoralizing. It has been a bad thing for the town and the industry and for everybody concerned, because whenever any large enterprise was undertaken, cut-throat competition has been used to interrupt and embarrass it. As one gentleman expressed it, it would have been to the advantage of everybody concerned if half the oil that has been produced at Baku had been allowed to run into the sea.

There are three large companies, the largest one belonging to the family of the late Alfred Nobel, the Swedish philanthropist, who founded the Nobel Institute at Stockholm and endowed it with funds from which the prizes for the promotion of peace, science, and literature are annually paid. Colonel Roosevelt, you will remember, went to Christiania in May, 1910, to receive the Nobel prize for peace which was awarded him because of his success in conciliating Russia and Japan and putting an end to the recent war.

Alfred Nobel, himself, was largely interested in the development of the Baku oil industry at the beginning, but, about the year 1877, he withdrew, and his brothers, Ludwig and Robert Nobel, continued the work. They turned their holdings over to a stock company many years ago, and Emmanuel Nobel, a son of Ludwig, now holds the controlling interest in the company. He is the Rockefeller of Russian petroleum and is estimated to be worth $60,000,000. Although a Swede by birth and ancestry, he is a Russian subject, maintains a splendid palace in St. Petersburg and has a villa with a large park in the Crimea, where he goes for the summer.

The next richest man is an Armenian named Mantashoff, who still lives in Baku and looks after his interests. There is also a Tartar gentleman who has made millions in the oil fields and is spending a part of his income in the erection of a splendid building for a college in the city of Baku. The institution will be provided with an endowment sufficient to maintain a competent faculty and pay for the free education of a certain number of young men of Tartar families forever. It will be altogether the most imposing building in Baku when it is finished, and it stands upon the principal street.