Experience Baku

All people have heard about the Nobel Prize. A lot fewer know that the Nobel brothers were active and worked with Oil in Baku. However, their story is not only about oil but a magnificent saga of entrepreneurship and innovation.  At Villa Petrolea you can learn more about the Nobels’ achievements in Baku. It’s really a unique and beautiful place. It has been restored to reflect its original state. The restored building was the residence of the company’s management and was built in 1881. There were also several other houses in the area built for the engineers and their families. The vision was to build a small paradise for northerners.  Ludwig realized that to have qualified engineers and workers from Sweden and Finland he needed to provide them with good housing, this mainly due to the harsh environment. Ludwig didn’t shun any effort or cost to build a pleasant place for his workers. The total sum for Villa Petrolea was 500 000 rubles.   Gustav Törnudd the manager of the Nobel company from 1882 writes in a letter home to his family. “We have achieved about 10 acres of land and are now busy constructing our “villa town” intended to become a residence for the company’s one hundred salaried employees. The houses are all built on a slope, so that the sea can be seen from all windows. All buildings are constructed of white, finely chopped sandstone in Byzantine style. Each house is surrounded in the east and south by wide and neat porches both in the upper and lower floors. He also wrote about their “air-condition system”. They brought ice from the Volga river and filled the basement “to reduce the heat in our rooms in the villa to the normal 15 to 20 degrees, which we northerners are accustomed to”. “A Hospital shall be built with a magnificent garden. Neat barracks for our guards, 40 people selected from the Imperial guard in St. Petersburg, some of them ridden soldiers and all fully armed. Doesn’t this sound like a fairy tale from “Thousand and One Night”? “