The Caspian-Black Sea Oil-Industrial and Trading Society, the Baku vehicle of the Paris Rothschild bank, commissioned a new central office (a "kontura") at the corner of Gubernskaya and Persidskaya streets in Baku's oil-boom civic core. Construction is dated 1898-99 by both the architectural historian Shamil Fatullayev, whose Градостроительство Баку XIX – начала XX веков (Institute of Architecture and Art, Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijan SSR, 1978) remains the standard scholarly survey of the period's building activity, and by the Baku local-history site OurBaku's profile of the Society; a derivative biographical note on the architect at polonia-baku.org instead gives 1897-99. The difference is small, and the weight of the better sources favours 1898-99. The architect was Kazimir (Casimir) Brunonovich Skurevich (1866-1950), a Polish-born engineer who trained at the St. Petersburg Institute of Civil Engineers (graduating 1894), arrived in Baku in 1895 at the invitation of city architect Józef Gosławski, and succeeded Gosławski as Baku's city architect from 1904 to 1906; His dates are given as 1866-1950 in the fuller biographical accounts; a death date of 1960 that circulates in some shorter notes has no evident source. The kontura was a three-story building, faced in white Absheron limestone rather than the dark stone conventionally used in Gothic Revival work elsewhere in Europe — a choice that Baku local-history writer O. Bulanova, in "Тайны Баку: Контора Ротшильдов – жемчужина бакинской архитектуры" (azerhistory.com; identical text also appears at news.day.az), attributes to a deliberate softening of the style. The design is described as blending "French Gothic and Gothic Art Nouveau," while OurBaku's separate biographical page on Skurevich instead labels the building's idiom "Romano-Gothic" and credits the architect's "confident treatment of local stone" (уверенной обработкой местного камня). The two labels describe the same building from different vantage points, and the sources do not allow a choice between them. Distinguishing features include a corner tower with a rotunda-like profile and an arcaded loggia or balcony over the building's main entrance on Persidskaya Street. No period floor plan or room-by-room account of the building's internal functions has been located; the surviving descriptions are exterior-focused.
No period description of a specific sculptural or decorative program for the kontura's interior has been located. OurBaku's entry on Skurevich states generally that the architect studied and incorporated Azerbaijani stone-carving traditions into his Baku commissions and singles out his "confident treatment of local stone" on this building, but stops short of describing individual carved motifs, coats of arms, or figural sculpture. The best-located photograph, probably of the Soviet period rather than the 1890s, shows round-arched arcading at the corner loggia and a steeply pointed corner tower, consistent with the sources' general Gothic Revival characterization, but no interior photograph, description of the ironwork, or attribution of decorative work to anyone but the architect himself has come to light.
The building stood on Gubernskaya Street (a name applied to Baku's former Torgovaya/"Merchant" street from 1879, per the English Wikipedia article on Nizami Street, and renamed Fizuli in 1925, then merged into today's Nizami Street in 1962), at its corner with Persidskaya Street (later, in the Soviet period, Polukhina Street, and today Murtuza Mukhtarov Street). This stretch of central Baku was the heart of the city's oil-boom "European quarter," rebuilt from the 1870s through the 1910s with revenue from the petroleum industry; Nizami/Gubernskaya Street in particular is documented (English Wikipedia's Nizami Street article, and the CNN travel feature "See Azerbaijan's oil boom reflected in Baku's architecture") as lined with residences and office buildings of oil magnates including Musa Naghiyev, Shamsi Asadullayev, and Murtuza Mukhtarov, in an eclectic mix of Neo-Gothic, Neo-Renaissance, Neo-Moorish, and Art Nouveau styles. Per O. Bulanova's azerhistory.com account, the Rothschild kontura stood opposite the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, a large gold-domed Russian Orthodox cathedral completed in 1898 (per Russian Wikipedia's article on the cathedral) that was the largest church in the Caucasus before its demolition by Soviet authorities in 1936; the cathedral's prominence on a raised site made the Rothschild building's corner, by this account, one of the visual "dominants" of its square.
The Caspian-Black Sea Oil-Industrial and Trading Society was registered in Baku on 16 May 1883 under the sponsorship of Baron Alphonse de Rothschild (1827-1905), head of the Paris house of Rothschild, and was built around the Rothschilds' 1886 acquisition of the earlier Batumi Oil-Industrial and Trading Society (BNITO), founded by Bunge and Palashkovsky, according to the OurBaku entry on the Society and the Ohio State University Mershon Center research project description by historian Jennifer Siegel, "The Transnational Origins of the Russian Oil Industry: The Rothschilds, BNITO and Baku Naphtha." The company's board comprised three directors: Maurice (Moritz) Iokhimovich Efrussi (1849-1916), Rothschild's son-in-law and official representative; Prince Georgy Alexandrovich Gruzinsky, a figurehead director retained for social prestige; and Arnold Mikhailovich Feigl, the operational manager, who is separately described — consistently across OurBaku's entry on the Society, ru.echo.az's "Ротшильды и Баку," and jewish.ru's "Банкирский дом Ротшильда в Баку" — as having chaired the Council of the Congress of Baku Oil Industrialists and served concurrently as deputy chairman of Baku's stock exchange committee, and as having been elected to the Baku City Duma. The agreement of these three accounts makes it likely that the Feigl who ran the Rothschilds' Baku operations and the Feigl who sat as deputy chairman of the Baku Exchange Committee were the same man. If so, Rothschild capital's operational hub and the city's official exchange leadership met in one person, though the identification has not been confirmed in the archives. The Exchange Committee's own premises, placed by an 1891 city directory in Akhundov's building on Parapet Square, are not otherwise documented architecturally. After the sale of the company's Russian holdings to Royal Dutch Shell in 1912, the building is reported to have housed the consulate of the Netherlands, at least in 1918 and into the 1920s (Russian Wikipedia's article on Nizami Street; the English Wikipedia article on Nizami Street corroborates a 1920s Netherlands consulate use). In the Soviet 1930s it became the "Central House of the Peasant" (Дом крестьянина), during which period, per azerhistory.com, decorative elements were removed as "bourgeois and incompatible with worker-peasant style." The building subsequently served as the seat of the Supreme Court of the Azerbaijan SSR and later of the Baku City Prosecution Office, and today is the administrative building of the Prosecutor General's Office of the Republic of Azerbaijan, per that office's own institutional history page (genprosecutor.gov.az), which also states it is officially designated an architectural monument of state importance.
The Caspian-Black Sea Oil-Industrial and Trading Society was the commercial and financial instrument through which the Paris Rothschild bank moved into Russian oil: financed from Paris and built on the 1886 acquisition of BNITO, the company extended credit to smaller Baku producers at roughly 6% annual interest — far below Russia's prevailing 15-20% commercial rates, per ru.echo.az's account — in exchange for exclusive rights to market their output, binding upstream oil production to Rothschild-controlled export and refining capacity (a refinery complex in Bely Gorod, storage parks at the Black Sea port of Batumi, and financing for the Baku-Batumi railway and, later, pipeline, completed 1907). By the late 1880s and 1890s the company is credited with controlling on the order of 42% of Baku's oil exports at its peak (a figure repeated across ru.echo.az, OurBaku, and general secondary accounts), though one of the same local-history sources also cites a lower, apparently year- or product-specific figure of 26% of total Baku exports (27.6 million poods of kerosene). The two figures almost certainly measure different things, or different years, and should not be read as competing estimates of the same quantity. The Society's chief Russian-market rival was the Nobel Brothers Petroleum Company (Branobel), whose shares traded on the St. Petersburg Bourse and are covered elsewhere on this site; historian Robert W. Tolf's The Russian Rockefellers: The Saga of the Nobel Family and the Russian Oil Industry (1976) documents this Nobel-Rothschild rivalry, in which Nobel's 1890 output of 17.9 million poods of lighting oils dwarfed the Rothschild company's 4.7 million poods, even as the two firms moved toward a production and marketing cartel from 1903 that, per the same sources, controlled up to 90% of Baku's gross oil sales by 1909. Internationally, the company's kerosene exports competed directly with Standard Oil for European and Asian markets, a rivalry documented by John P. McKay's "Baku Oil and Transcaucasian Pipelines," Slavic Review 43:4 (1984), and by Daniel Yergin's The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (1991; rev. ed. 2012). In 1912 the Rothschilds sold their Russian oil holdings, including the Caspian-Black Sea Society, to the Anglo-Dutch Royal Dutch Shell combine — a transaction that, per Jennifer Siegel's Mershon Center project description, was driven in part by diplomatic tension ahead of the First World War and by local political instability in the Caucasus, and that made the Rothschilds significant Shell shareholders.
Images will be added as the project develops. Photographs by Larry Ng and from research sources.