Facts about Azerbaijan
About 67 percent of the species growing in the whole Caucasus can be found in Azerbaijan.
International pressure has been exerted on Azerbaijan to release its number of political prisoners.
The classical music of Azerbaijan is called mugam, and is usually a suite with poetry and instrumental interludes.
The education system of Azerbaijan reflects its Soviet past, but was reformed in the early 1990s.
The Nagorno-Karabakh region in the southwest of Azerbaijan proper declared itself independent from Azerbaijan in 1991, but it is not recognized by any nation and is considered a legal part of Azerbaijan.
Jews have revered the Torah through the ages, as have Samaritans and Christians.
Azerbaijan contains numerous smaller groups of Georgians, Kurds, Talysh, Tatars, and Ukrainians.
Special administrative subdivisions are the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic, which is separated from the rest of Azerbaijan by a strip of Armenian territory, and the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region, entirely within Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan (Azerbaijani: Az?rbaycan), officially the Republic of Azerbaijan (Azerbaijani: Az?rbaycan Respublikas?), is situated in the Caucasus region of Eurasia, north of Iran and east of the Caspian Sea.
The nation is 93.4 percent Muslim and most Azerbaijanis are Twelver Shia Muslim, representing about 60 percent of the Muslim population.
Corruption is ubiquitous, and the promise of widespread wealth from Azerbaijan's undeveloped petroleum resources remains largely unfulfilled.
Except for its eastern Caspian shoreline and some areas bordering Georgia and Iran, Azerbaijan is ringed by mountains.
The capital of Azerbaijan is the ancient city of Baku, which has the largest and best harbor on the Caspian Sea and has long been the center of the republic's oil industry.
The site of numerous invasions over the centuries, Azerbaijan was briefly independent from 1918 to 1920, and regained its independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Ashkenazim settled in Azerbaijan in the nineteenth century during a Tsarist Russian attempt to infuse Russian culture into the region.
Azerbaijan has lost 16 percent of its territory and must support some 528,000 internally displaced persons as a result of the conflict.
Azerbaijan had population of 8.5 million in 2005, 90.6 percent of whom are ethnic Azerbaijani (also called Azeris).
Located in the region of the southern Caucasus Mountains, Azerbaijan borders the Caspian Sea to the east, Georgia and Russia to the north, Iran to the south, and Armenia to the southwest and west.
The republic dissolved in May 1918, and Azerbaijan became independent as the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic.
When Azerbaijan declared its independence from the former Soviet Union on August 30, 1991, Ayaz Mutalibov, the former first secretary of the Azerbaijani Communist Party, became the country's first president.
The culture of Azerbaijan has been influenced by its Turkic peoples, its Persian, Islamic, and Central Asian heritage, as well as Russian influences due to its former status as a Soviet republic.
In 1936, the TSFSR was dissolved and Azerbaijan became constituent republic of the USSR as the Azerbaijan SSR.
An influential piece of post-World War II Azerbaijani poetry, Heydar Babaya Salam (Greetings to Heydar Baba), was written by Iranian poet Mohammad Hossein Shahriar.
The cave of Azykh in the Fizuli district in Azerbaijan is the site of one of the most ancient proto-human habitations in Eurasia.
Azerbaijan is a presidential republic, in which the legislative and judicial branches have only limited independence.
Azerbaijan's oil production declined through 1997, but has registered an increase every year since.
Three physical features dominate Azerbaijan: the Caspian Sea, whose shoreline forms a natural boundary to the east; the Greater Caucasus mountain range to the north; and the extensive flatlands at the country's center.
The Azerbaijan armed forces consist of four military branches: the army, navy, air force, air defense forces; and two independent branches: the Coast Guard and Border Guard.
The location of human and pre-human habitation dating back two million years, remnants of Azerbaijan's history include Bronze Age petroglyphs and medieval minarets and mosques.
The satrapies of Atropatene and Caucasian Albania were established in the fourth century B.C.E., and included the approximate territories of the present-day Azerbaijan nation-state and southern parts of Dagestan.
Oil production under the first of these agreements, with the Azerbaijan International Operating Company, began in November 1997.
Adolf Hitler sought to capture Azerbaijan's oil-rich capital of Baku.
The Persian Jews, also known as Caucasian Mountain Jews, can be traced to Azerbaijan from before the fifth century B.C.E.
The country’s large Armenian population has mostly emigrated to Armenia and to other countries at the beginning of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, while there was a large influx of Azerbaijanis.
Azerbaijan shares the problems of the former Soviet republics in making the transition from a command to a market economy, but its considerable energy resources brighten its long-term prospects.
Until June 2005, the Azerbaijani people did not enjoy freedom of assembly.
The Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic (an exclave of Azerbaijan) borders Armenia to the north and east, Iran to the south and west, and Turkey to the northwest.
Virtually all of Azerbaijan’s Armenians now live in the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Institutes of higher education include the Baku State University and the Azerbaijan Technical University.
Azerbaijan has a rich flora, with more than 4,500 species of higher plants, and 240 endemic species, mainly as a result of the unique climate.
Stringed instruments in Azerbaijan include the tar (skin-faced lute), the kamancha (skin-faced spike fiddle), the oud (originally barbat), and the saz (long necked lute).
Azerbaijan is divided into 59 “rayons,” 11 cities, and one autonomous republic, Nakhichevan.
Their ancestors inhabited southern Azerbaijan, now the northwestern part of Iran, where they adopted the Muslim Tat language, but remained Jewish.
Painted miniatures were an important part of Azerbaijan art in the nineteenth century, while the twentieth century was marked by examples of Soviet social realism and Azeri folklore.
Islam spread rapidly in Azerbaijan following the Arab conquests during the seventh and eighth centuries.
Zoroastrianism in Azerbaijan dates back to the first millennium B.C.E., and for at least a thousand years remained the predominant religion in Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan has put in a bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics, with Baku as the host city.
In 1991, however, Azerbaijan reestablished its independence upon the collapse of the Soviet Union.
After the collapse of the Russian Empire during World War I, Azerbaijan together with Armenia and Georgia became part of the short-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic.
Growing discontent culminated in June 1993 in an armed insurrection in Ganja, Azerbaijan's second-largest city.
Their history is more than 2,000 years long and Azerbaijan has historically been very welcoming toward them.
Long-term prospects will depend on world oil prices, the location of new pipelines in the region, and Azerbaijan's ability to manage its oil wealth.
settlements have been discovered in Azerbaijan, and carbon-dated artifacts show that during this period, people built homes, made copper weapons, and were familiar with irrigated agriculture.
Despite a 1994 cease-fire, Azerbaijan in 2007 had yet to resolve its conflict with Armenia over the Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh enclave (largely Armenian populated).
Azerbaijan underwent a period of feudal fragmentation in the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, and consisted of independent khanates.
The minimum incubation period reported is as short as a few weeks, based on the very occasional occurrence of leprosy among young infants (Montestruc et al.
Following a massacre of Azerbaijanis at Khojali in Nagorno-Karabakh in March 1992, Mutalibov resigned, to be returned to power in May 1992.