Nothing feeds the fire at Yanar Dag and nobody tends it. Methane works up through a band of porous sandstone on a hillside near Baku and lights as soon as it reaches the air, so a line of flame stands along the foot of a low scarp. There is no crater and no pipe. Close up it is stranger than the photographs let you expect: not one sheet of fire but dozens of separate jets, each escaping through its own crack in the scorched rock. Some burn tall and steady, others sputter out and relight a second later, and when the wind comes off the Caspian the whole line leans together.
A paved walkway runs the whole front of it, near enough that the heat reaches your face, with a low crackle underneath and the smell of burnt stone. Under a high sun the jets wash out to a pale shimmer. Once the hillside falls into shadow they turn deep orange, and as the Caspian air cools the heat coming off the rock feels stronger against you, not weaker. A single vent goes from a faint flicker to the brightest thing on the hill while you watch. The peninsula was once dotted with fires like this. That is where the old name, the Land of Fire, comes from — centuries before oil made Baku rich, Zoroastrians held such flames sacred, and Marco Polo wrote them down in the thirteenth century. Almost all of them have gone out, starved by a hundred years of drilling that pulled the pressure away, and this is the prominent survivor. Nobody can prove when it caught. The local story has a shepherd dropping a cigarette on the slope in the 1950s; the seep under it is far older than that, and the date was simply never written down. Ateshgah, the fire temple most visitors pair with this hill, is the other half of the story. The wells took its gas, its flame went out in 1969, and what burns in its courtyard now comes down a pipe from Baku.