The Land of Supercentenarians

Framed by high, craggy mountains, the town of Lerik in southern Azerbaijan sits 16 kilometres northeast of the Iranian border. The area is home to the Talysh people, an ethnic minority in both Azerbaijan and Iran. It’s also the heart of a region famed for its longevity. The people here apparently live long lives—some reportedly well past 100.

Shirali Muslimov, supposedly the oldest man to ever have lived, was born in a nearby village. He died in 1973—that much is certain. But Muslimov claimed to have been born in 1805, which would have made him 168, much older than the world’s verified oldest person (Jeanne Calment, from France, who died in 1997, at age 122).

During Muslimov’s youth, as he told it, the now-extinct Caspian tiger was relatively common in the Talysh mountains, as was bride kidnapping as a rite of courtship: Muslimov ‘stole’ his first wife in 1833, when he was 28 and she 12.“I rode into the next village on my horse and grabbed her,” he told photojournalist Calman Caspiyev in 1963. “I loved her very much.” Caspiyev’s articles and photographs made Muslimov famous and helped to connect Lerik to the wider world. After their publication, a road was built to the town, followed by electricity, television and radio.

Today, Lerik resembles many other Azerbaijani towns. A large central square has a statue of Heydar Aliyev, the Republic of Azerbaijan’s third president. Taxi drivers in black leather jackets and newsboy caps stand beside their Ladas waiting for fares, mostly to cover the 52 kilometres east to Lankaran, the nearest city of any size, at the Caspian seaside.

Bordering the square are two long boulevards against which rise great blocks of austere government offices. These monuments to authority seem ineffectual against the backdrop of snow-coated mountains and sloping green leas. Away from its hard, marbled centre, the streets narrow as asphalt turns to gravel and then to mud, and the tidiness of the square is lost to litter and crumbling houses.

These rough edges may be why Lerik isn’t officially recognised as one of the areas in which long life is endemic—the so-called ‘Blue Zones’, which include Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; and Loma Linda, California. Yet the Caucasus region is well known for its pockets of longevity. These locations share traits with the Blue Zones: plenty of exercise, good familial connections and a vegetable-heavy diet.

Shirali Muslimov claimed he was born in 1805, which would have made him 168 years old when he died. Photo credit: Keystone/Stringer/Getty Images

In 1973, Harvard physician Alexander Leaf visited the Caucuses for National Geographic in search of the secret to long life. He arrived too late to meet Muslimov but found plenty of others whose age was seemingly extraordinary. One 117-year-old farmer, who still worked in the fields, attributed his long life to “active physical work.” A 108-year-old shepherd told Leaf that he took long walks, “had no worries” and “never had a single enemy.”

Leaf later wrote that he believed the claims of extreme old age were exaggerated. Regardless, researchers have been intrigued for generations by what enables someone to live a long, healthy life. There’s no single answer. Genetics: yes. Diet: definitely. Exercise: possibly. Luck: certainly.

In Lerik, isolation may have had something to do with it—the quiet, the clean air, the tight, self-reliant community. The area has a wealth of healthy food: fruits, nuts, fresh herbs, meat, cheese and yogurt.But a connection with the outside has brought in modern tastes. Today, although the pavements outside Lerik’s shops are crowded with boxes of mandarins, pomegranates and apples, the interiors are mostly given over to vodka, chocolate bars and boiled sweets.

On his leaner diet, Muslimov and his aged shepherd kin tramped through the surrounding mountains, guiding their flocks from pasture to pasture and getting plenty of fresh air and exercise. Lerik now has fewer shepherds; the youth are drawn, like many across Azerbaijan, to the modern jobs of Baku.

Routine, too, seems to be key to enjoying a long life, whether it regards virtue or vice. Those who credit long life to smoking or drinking rarely fail to mention the regularity (and moderateness) of their indulgences. Muslimov’s particular vice seemed to have been lust. He reportedly fathered a son at 80, with his second wife, who was 36.

Local rumour has it that Muslimov’s 150th-birthday celebration was attended by a Russian colonel and his young wife. When the moment for presents arrived, Muslimov reportedly cried out, “I don’t want anything. Just give me that pretty woman!” During his lifetime, his supposed 330 descendants extended into the fifth generation.

To celebrate these marvels of long life, Lerik has a Museum of Longevity, a little V-shaped brick building tucked down an alley near the central square. The museum was closed when I arrived, so I went to the next best place to find the elderly: the cemetery. In the untidy rows, tombstones old and new were mixed seemingly at random.

Nobody there had died particularly old, mostly in their 50s, 60s and 70s. One woman, born in 1914, had died in 2019, just two weeks shy of her 105th birthday—impressive, but not the extraordinary age for which Lerik is known. As I came back into town, someone had set fire to a roadside rubbish tip. Acidic smoke settled over the town—yet another element that seemed incompatible with long life.

A display at the Museum of Longevity in Lerik, Azerbaijan. Photo credit: tom marsden

Upon my return, the museum was still locked, its dark interior illuminated by the glowing doorjamb of a lighted inner room. A knock summoned Elmur, the night watchman. He let me in, dug out a paper with details about the museum in English, then fell into step with me as I perused the two rooms. I had expected mustiness and mould, but the exhibits were well maintained and carried a feeling of regular, furious dusting. I later learnt that the museum is a regular stop for travelling dignitaries—days before me, a delegation of Swedes, and, shortly after, the Japanese ambassador.

On the walls were intimate photographs of centenarians and supercentenarians. They hung over glass cases that contained ‘evidence’ of their ages alongside clippings from Azerbaijani newspapers. The majority were pictured holding some form of ID displaying their birth date.

Below Shirali Muslimov’s photo were objects from his life: his woolly papaq hat, a silk shirt and a letter from Ho Chi Minh (“Dear Grandpa,” it began). Elmur pointed to a piece of official-looking paperwork. “Passport,” he said. That word wasn’t actually evident on the document itself, but whatever it was, scrawled beside “year of birth” was the number 1805. A yellowed newspaper clipping had an interview with Muslimov in which he claimed to have fought in the Crimean War. Beside Muslimov was Mahmud Eyvazov, age 150 years, and Gizil Guliyeva, 120.

In the middle of each room were items pertinent to the subjects’ lives: hand-operated sheep shears, carpet-weaving paraphernalia, rusting hoes and pitchforks—the trappings of a difficult life of manual labour. As the subjects approached the modern era, the museum—perhaps to pad the whole thing out—played looser with the term centenarian. Several displays were of people who died in their late 80s or early 90s. There were colour photographs of their families, group shots with smiling grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

A few days after my visit, exhibit subject Azizova Tamam Ali, from the nearby village of Rvarud, appeared on the Azeri TV, thanking God for her 131 years. Of course, Ali, like all the others, could be mistaken—or lying. Once the story of old age had lifted the area into international renown, it couldn’t be given up. The modern world, with its modern birth records, might have caught up to Lerik, but the myth remains intact.

Even as its parameters have been lowered, and the bar for being long-lived got younger (a 90-year-old can now receive the same adulation as someone who’d once been assumed to be into their 15th decade), the respect for the myth only increased; suddenly there really were long-livers around every corner. It isn’t just age—that cognitive dissonance dividing belief and fact is present in other parts of Lerik life.

Thinking of the local shop, I asked Elmur if any of the centenarians drank vodka as part of the secret to long life. He shook his head vehemently. “No Talysh drink vodka.” This seemed like pious talk reserved for strangers. In any case, I already knew it wasn’t true.

Earlier that day, I’d been stopped in the streets by a tottering man. His clothes were dirty and ill-fitting, and he didn’t look like he’d live much beyond the day, let alone to 100.

“Russki?” he asked.

“Canada,” I said.

“Canada!” He thumped his chest. “Talysh,” he said, then jabbed four fingers into his throat, the local sign for “Bottoms up!”

“Napitok?” (“Drink?”) he added. “Vodka?”

It was two in the afternoon and I didn’t fancy seeing the day destroyed down a bottle. Perhaps that’s how Muslimov and the rest had felt.

The English writer J. B. Priestley had rather the opposite thought after meeting a local senior while touring the area in 1945. “For my part I do not believe that the old chap was 150 or so, but … anybody who can digest that food and survive the terrifying local vodka … is tough enough to live almost for ever,” he wrote in Russian Journey.

The old, of course, are only one half of the story of longevity. Herein lies the luck element in ageing. To have access to good air and food, and to take your walks, is one thing. To avoid a war is another. Lerik bestows an equal measure of honour upon those whose luck ran out. 

Lerik’s graveyard is filled with both people who supposedly lived extremely long lives and those who died young—during fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh. Photo credit: tom marsden

Dozens of 19- and 20-year-olds from Lerik died fighting in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, where combatants from Azerbaijan on one side (with support from Turkey and foreign mercenary groups) and the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh and Armenia (with support from Russia) on the other, clashed over the long-disputed piece of land. Casualties in the 2020 conflict reached into the thousands; a second offensive in 2023 claimed the lives of hundreds more.At the graveyard, it’s easy to find their tombstones: black marble etched with likenesses of the dead’s young faces. As often as not, these graves are adorned with wreaths and ersatz flowers coloured red, green and blue (the national colours of Azerbaijan), whose plastic immortality belies the human frailty buried beneath. Despite all signs to the contrary, these flowers seem to me not so much a sign of undying affection as the final proof that honouring the beauty of life can never be properly visited upon the dead.

The Museum of Longevity has its own memorial to these youths: portraits of those lost local boys, as well as those from a generation before, killed in the first Karabakh war of 1988–94. “These are our martyrs,” Elmur says.

Just as the old and alive are a mythological tradition, so too are the young and dead. After spending an hour looking at pictures of gnarled, wizened shepherds, the faces of the three dozen young men look too smooth—waxy, unreal. The Museum of Longevity celebrates both the stayed-too-long and the gone-too-soon, the clash of a harmless fairytale with the painful truth.

When I finished at the museum, Elmur invited me to sit with him. In a bare backroom he served me a coffee so sweet it probably took a year off my life. He laid out a spread of sweets and sugar cubes, popping one after another into his mouth, crunching them with his shining gold teeth.

I told him about my grandmother, who lived to 105, and asked if he had any relatives in the museum. He shook his head; his grandmother died at 80, but his grandfather had died young. I told him that, if possible, I would come back in 100 years, and look for his photo. He shrugged. He’s more concerned about his four sons. “With no war,” he said, “they live a long time.” 

© 2022, J.R. Patterson. From Geographical, 18 May 2022, geographical.co.uk.