"Alexander Mantashiants Armenian King of Oil in Baku" by Carlo Coppola

In the complex and multifaceted geopolitical and cultural landscape of the South Caucasus, Azerbaijani state historiography has for years been conducting an operation of historical revisionism aimed at appropriating the intellectual, economic, and monumental legacy of the communities that built the modernity of that region. 

At the heart of this phenomenon lies the systematic erasure of the decisive role played by the Armenian community in late-imperial Baku, accompanied by the retroactive nationalization of events and figures that had nothing to do with an Azerbaijani state identity that, at the time, did not exist at all. Emblematic of this trend is the figure of Alexander Mantashiants, an oil industry magnate, banker, and one of the most enlightened Armenian patrons of his era. 

Born in Tiflis and active in Baku at the end of the nineteenth century, Mantashiants turned his extraordinary financial fortune into a tool for funding academies, building churches, safeguarding artistic heritage, and supporting the European studies of hundreds of talented young Armenians, including the composer Komitas. 

Official Baku historiography today attempts to downplay the historical significance of Armenian entrepreneurship, going so far as to relabel the architectural and industrial heritage left by Mantashiants as part of a generic, ethnically neutralized local legacy. Similarly, Azerbaijani authorities have placed the founding act of their national cinema in the year 1898 — that is, before their state even came into existence. However, the historical record categorically contradicts this narrative: in that year, at the Vasiliev-Vyatsky circus-theater in tsarist Baku, the Russian-born photographer Alexander Michon screened short documentary films and, on August 2nd, the comedy titled So, You Got Caught, centered on the misadventures of a thief. 

This was an initiative that developed entirely within the cultural enterprise of the Russian Empire, since in 1898 the Azerbaijani nation had not yet been established as a political-state entity — an event that would only occur twenty years later, with the Republic of 1918. Transforming that Russian screening into a "National Day of Azerbaijani Cinema" is part of the same strategy of memory engineering: an ideological attempt to erase the cosmopolitan character of early twentieth-century Baku and conceal the fundamental Armenian contribution to its industrial and cultural growth.

by Carlo Coppola