I’m afraid that I shall have to tell my great-grandchildren that the Caspian is very little to look at, at least from Baku. It has no color, and it smells outrageously of kerosene, writes H. G. Dwight, in the Century.

Baku, however, is something to look at. (Baku is the Russian trans-Caucasian seaport on the Caspian Sea.) it is a kind of Pittsburgh dipped in Asia, and it tickled me beyond measure. Not so long ago it was a wretched fishing village inhabited chiefly by Persians and Tartars who were too stupid to sell their land to prowling oil prospectors. So those same Persians and Tartars now roll in gold. And they don’t know what on earth to do with it. The consequence is that nobody but a millionaire can afford to live in Baku.

But what a fantastic hodgepodge of civilization and barbarism! What types! What costumes! What morals!

Above all, what motor cars, satinlined, emblazoned, gilded, jewelled, skitchering there on the edge of Asia!

It’s too good to be true, but I shan’t tell you about it. What I want to tell you about is a park the Russians have made there on the shore of their Caspian. They always do those things well, you know. No green thing will grow for miles around Baku, but those Russians have coaxed a few trees to sprout in tubs in that tidy little park and bands far better than I ever heard in Central Park play you Tschaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakof, not to say Wagner and Verdi and Bizet. And you should see the extraordinary crowds that listen – the Russians, the Persians, the Armenians, the Georgians, the Lezghians, the Tartars, the wild, the swarthy, the fiery, the rainbow colored!             

My son, when in doubt, go to Baku.       

Publication date 11/02/1916