Yanar Dag

A hillside on the Absheron Peninsula where a continuous natural gas seep ignites and burns along a ten-meter section of rocky slope, a phenomenon documented in medieval travel accounts including those of Marco Polo. The flames burn at low intensity and consistently regardless of weather, visible from some distance after dark and producing a shimmering heat distortion above the scorched earth. The site illustrates the same subsurface gas geology that made the Absheron Peninsula the center of the global petroleum industry in the late nineteenth century.