How to ride the Baku Metro: fares, BakıKart, and the two halls worth a stop

An itinerary sold in Japan lists riding the Baku Metro among six numbered filming locations for a television drama. Putting a commuter railway on a sightseeing list is an odd move, and on its own terms a defensible one. The network opened in 1967, seven of its stations sit deep underground, and one hall is lined with eighteen mosaic panels of scenes from a 12th-century poem. This page covers what a ride costs, how you pay for it, which halls are worth stopping in, and the published rule about photography that most travel pages skip.

What the Baku Metro is

Bakı Metropoliteni is the underground railway of the Azerbaijani capital, run by a state joint-stock company of the same name. The operator publishes the network as three lines, 27 stations and 40.7 kilometres of route, with seven of those stations built at depth. It also describes itself as the first metro in the Turkic and Islamic countries and the Near East, which is the operator's own claim and is worth reading as one.

Trains started running on 6 November 1967, when five stations opened. Those five are still on the map, though not under all of the same names: the Old City station spent its first forty years as Bakı Soveti and was renamed İçərişəhər by a Cabinet of Ministers decision in April 2007.

Two things about the layout catch visitors out. The lines have no numbers. The operator names them red, green and purple, and route maps that hand out a Line 1 and a Line 2 are applying a convention the operator does not use. And the red and green lines meet on a single level at 28 May, so trains from that station continue along what looks on a map like the other line. Read the destination on the front of the train rather than trusting the platform.

The published working time for the network is 06:00 to 00:00.

What a ride costs and how you pay for it

One journey costs 0.60 AZN. There are no zones and no distance bands, so a morning of hopping between central stations costs about the same as a bottle of water. That figure is on Baku Metro's fare page and we checked it on 27 July 2026.

There are four ways to pay it. The BakıKart is the reloadable plastic card, bought from the sales and top-up machine in the station vestibule: press BakıKart on the screen, confirm, feed in cash. The card is 2 AZN and the machine does not give change, so anything you put in above 2 AZN goes onto the card as balance rather than back into your hand. Break a 20 somewhere else first. The turnstiles also read QR tickets, they take NFC payment from local bank cards, and they take Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Two rules published by the operator matter more than they look. The same card cannot pass the same turnstile twice within ten minutes, though it can use a different turnstile immediately, which is what you need to know if you are travelling as a couple on one card. And a bank card with no balance is let through once, then blocked until it is topped up, at which point the fare owed comes off and the card works again.

The operator does not say which foreign card schemes are accepted at which gates, and the contactless rollout has been extended line by line rather than switched on everywhere at once. Carry a BakıKart. It costs 2 AZN to be certain.

Which halls are worth going down for

Two, and they are worth stopping in on the way to something else rather than making a trip of their own.

Nizami, on the green line, opened on 31 December 1976. It is a deep-level station designed by the architect Mikayıl Huseynov, and its middle hall carries a portrait of Nizami Ganjavi in mosaic against a background of sun rays, with 18 panels along the pylon walls illustrating scenes from the poet's Khamsa. The panels are the work of Mikayıl Abdullayev. The operator lists the scenes by name, from the death of Dara through Leyli and Majnun to Farhad on Mount Bisitun. A fragment of Uzeyir Hajibeyli's setting of Nizami's ghazal "Sənsiz" plays as trains come in.

İçərişəhər, the western end of the red line, is the one you will use anyway. Its interest is above ground and after 2008 rather than Soviet: the reconstruction reopened on 29 December 2008 with an entrance built as a pyramid of metal and clear glass, and the upper hall stands 14 metres high, matched to the height of the Old City fortress walls next to it. Sixteen panoramic views of old Baku, made in France, are mounted in the middle hall and along both platform walls, and a sculpted fragment of the fortress wall carries the station name. The escalators have a lifting height of 45 metres, which is the only vertical figure the operator publishes for the station. That is escalator rise, not platform depth. We have found no published depth in metres for any station in Baku, so we are not printing one.

Why the metro is on the VIVANT itinerary

TBS began the second season of the drama VIVANT on 26 July 2026. Filming in Azerbaijan ran from August to the end of October 2025 in Baku, Sumgayit, Ganja, Nakhchivan, Shamakhi, Gabala, Sheki and Guba, with Baku Media Center handling permits, logistics and coordination, as reported by Report.az on 15 November 2025 and by the state news agency AZERTAC the same day. Baku is named. No station is. Separately, Sasaki Masaaki writing for Yahoo News Japan on 24 July 2026 reports eight locations inside the country and names Sheki; that column does not mention the metro at all.

The metro reaches the itinerary from a different direction. Hankyu Travel's Japanese trip page labels six sites as filming locations, numbered ロケ地1 to ロケ地6, and the fourth of those is riding the metro in Baku, described there as heavy Soviet-era stations. Those labels are Hankyu's own designation. Their page states a tie-up with the drama, names no licensor for the labels, and does not say what was filmed at any of the six. No source we have found names a station.

So the honest version is short. A tour company has put the metro on a list of filming locations on its own authority; nobody has said which platform, and we are not going to guess for you. What we can tell you is that a station hall which is genuinely worth seeing costs 0.60 AZN to stand in.

What the rules say about photographs

Item 5.20 of Baku Metro's published prohibitions bans taking photos, video or film without the permission of the Baku Metro administration. That is on the operator's own site, in both Azerbaijani and English, and it was live when we checked on 27 July 2026.

We are deliberately not telling you how that plays out in practice for a phone camera. Every account of enforcement we found sits in forum threads and blog comments, which is not a source we will put our name to on a page about somebody else's rules. Assume the rule applies to you. If photographs in the Nizami hall are the reason you are going down there, ask the staff at the vestibule or write to the operator first, and note that the same rule is why any film crew working in the network would have needed the administration's permission.

How a metro ride fits a day in Baku

İçərişəhər station puts you at the walls of the Old City, one stop from the seafront at Sahil. From the gate it is an uphill walk of a few minutes through the lanes to the Palace of the Shirvanshahs at the top of the quarter, so the metro is a reasonable way to arrive at both.

For the Nizami mosaics, the practical route is to change at 28 May, the station that also connects to the Central Railway Station and is the city end of the H1 Airport Express. If you are coming in from the airport, that bus and its BakıKart fare are covered in our Baku airport transfers guide.

For groups, the metro is a sightseeing stop rather than a transport plan. Twenty people with luggage on a turnstile at 08:30 is not a saving, and we route arrivals and day programmes by vehicle. Where we do put clients on the metro is a single deliberate leg, usually İçərişəhər to Nizami and back up, with a guide who has already dealt with the tickets.

Disclosure

Birtour is not affiliated with TBS, with the VIVANT production committee, or with the travel companies selling packaged VIVANT departures. We are a destination management company based in Baku. This page describes a public transport network and what it costs to use, and we have no commercial relationship with its operator.