The synagogues of Azerbaijan: Baku, Quba, and the two in Oghuz nobody visits

Most pages listing Azerbaijan's synagogues get at least one thing wrong, and the errors travel: a date copied from a tour listing into a blog into a guidebook and back. Our own hub page carried two of them until August 2026.

So this is the corrected list, sourced from the state's own register rather than from other people's pages, with a note wherever the sources genuinely disagree.

Baku: three congregations, two buildings

The Ashkenazi and Georgian synagogue

171 Dilara Aliyeva street. Opened 9 March 2003.

The present building was funded by donations from Azerbaijani Jews and is counted among the largest synagogues in Europe. Two congregations use it, Ashkenazi and Georgian, and the Chabad house of Baku operates from the same address under Rabbi Shneur Segal.

That single address holding prayer, the rabbi and the kosher supply is the most useful operational fact about Jewish Baku, and it is why almost every visiting group's Friday runs through this street.

It is frequently miscalled the Choir Synagogue. It is not. Baku's first choir synagogue opened in 1910 and belongs to a different chapter.

The Mountain Jews synagogue

72 Ali Mardan Topchubashov street, Nasimi district. Congregation from 1945, present building opened 2011.

The state register says this one "differs from other Jewish temples not only in Azerbaijan, but in the entire region", and it is right. This is the urban face of the same community that lives in Krasnaya Sloboda, and the liturgy in the room is not the liturgy in the Dilara Aliyeva building.

A group that visits only the 2003 synagogue has seen the larger half of Jewish Baku and missed the older one.

The 1910 choir synagogue

Historic, not a stop. Worth naming because the confusion around it is the reason so many pages date the 2003 building wrong.

Baku's Jewish building history runs deeper than either current building suggests: a religious meeting-house in 1832, reorganised as a synagogue in 1896, and more built across the city and its suburbs through the late 19th century as oil money pulled people in from across the empire. Almost none of that survives in use. A walking programme with a community historian is how you reach it, because the buildings will not tell you themselves.

Krasnaya Sloboda: three buildings, one town

The Six-Dome Synagogue, Altı Günbəz

Isaac Khanukov street. Built 1888. Seats about sixty.

The Aron Kodesh stands roughly seven metres, which the state register calls the tallest in Europe. Closed under Soviet rule, reopened as a synagogue in 1991, and restored in stages since. Published sources put the main works at 1995, 2000 and 2005 respectively, so we give the range.

It runs mainly through the warm months. That is not a scheduling preference, it is arithmetic: the town holds roughly 500 people through the winter and over 3,000 in summer.

Sixty seats is the number that matters for planning. Above it, a group visit stops being a visit.

The Gilaki Synagogue

Built 1896, though a plaque on the building reads 1857 and both dates circulate.

Named for the Gileki quarter, settled by families who came north from Gilan. Smaller than the Six-Dome, renovated in the 2010s, and the right room for a bar or bat mitzvah, where the Six-Dome is the wrong scale.

Bet Knesset

A newer building, put up with money sent by residents' relatives in Israel. It says something about how this community works that its most recent synagogue was funded from the country its children moved to.

Oghuz: the two nobody includes

Lower Quarter synagogue, Gudrat Agakishiyev street, 1849. Upper Quarter synagogue, Arzu Aliyeva street, 1897.

Oghuz sits in the north-west, on the road that also carries Sheki, and it had a Mountain Jewish community long before the Soviet period. Two synagogues, one of them older than anything standing in Krasnaya Sloboda.

We have not found an English-language heritage itinerary that includes them. That is an opportunity and also a warning: there is no visitor infrastructure, the community is smaller than Quba's, and access needs more notice rather than less.

For an operator building a differentiated product, this is where the differentiation is. For a first trip, Baku and Quba are the right two stops and Oghuz is the third visit, not the first.

What "access" actually means

None of these buildings is a museum. None keeps posted visitor hours. None has a ticket window.

What that means in practice:

• The gabbai is the gate, in Krasnaya Sloboda and in Baku both. Arrangements are made before you travel, not on the morning.
• Photography inside is a permission, granted case by case and much more readily to somebody who asked first.
• Dress and conduct follow the congregation's practice, not the visitor's. Mountain Jewish custom is neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi, and where a group's own practice differs, the community's answer is the one that applies in their building.
• Winter changes everything in Quba and nothing in Baku. The Baku congregations run year-round.
• A service is not a performance. Groups arriving during one are guests at it.

None of this is difficult. It is just arranged rather than turned up to, which is the whole reason a relationship on the ground is worth anything.

The corrections, collected

If you are updating your own material, these are the four errors most likely to be in it:

For how the kosher and Shabbat side works around these buildings, see the kosher and Shabbat guide. For what we can arrange inside them, the Jewish heritage programmes page.