AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The Stone Chronicle Museum (Daş Salnamə Muzeyi) is a free-entry museum on Baku's National Flag Square dedicated to Azerbaijan's sculptural stone heritage — from prehistoric petroglyphs to intricately carved medieval tombstones — displayed across two floors of a beautifully restored early-twentieth-century power station.↗↗
Opened in 2015 by the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, it brings together over 48,000 artifacts spanning the full arc of stone carving traditions in the region, making it a compact yet surprisingly rich introduction to Azerbaijan's material history.↗↗
A Power Station Reborn in Stone
The museum occupies a building originally constructed in the early 1900s as a power station supplying energy to Baku's booming oil wells. After a complete restoration, it reopened on June 8, 2015, as a gallery devoted to something very different from electricity — the carved and shaped stones that tell the story of human life on the Absheron Peninsula across millennia. The imposing industrial architecture, with its tall windows and robust walls, gives the exhibition a dramatic backdrop worthy of the stones it houses.