Rafał Milach "Museum" (LTA)

AZE. Azerbaijan. Guba. 2016.

Inside the Quba Heydar Aliyev Centre. In 2013, to mark the tenth anniversary of Heydar Aliyev’s death, his son and successor as president, Ilham Aliyev, issued an order that the country’s seventy district capitals should all build a monumental centre named after his father. The centres are intended to uphold the cult of the dead leader. Almost all of them house a museum devoted to the life and work of Aliyev Senior, a chess school and the local folk song and dance ensemble. The local communities are not stirred into action by the buildings, but use them only occasionally, such as in April 2016, for instance, when academies marking the ‘victories’ won during four days of heavy fighting on the border with Nagorno-Karabakh were held in them.