Azerbaijan document photos online

Pull a 50-manat note from your wallet in Baku and you are holding a quiet piece of European design history: Azerbaijan's banknotes were drawn by Robert Kalina, the Austrian who designed the euro itself. The manat even borrows the euro's visual language, and its currency symbol — a stylised, rotated euro-like glyph — was added to Unicode in 2013 after an earlier rejection. It is a fitting emblem for a country that has spent its history bridging worlds: the place that drilled the planet's first mechanical oil well, that lit Marco Polo's imagination with fire, and that gave women the vote before Britain or the United States did.

• Currency design Azerbaijan's manat banknotes were designed by Robert Kalina, the same Austrian artist who created the euro, and deliberately echo the euro's look.
• Currency symbol The manat's symbol (₼), resembling a rotated euro sign, was admitted to the Unicode standard in 2013 after an earlier proposal had been rejected.
• Money reform In 2006 Azerbaijan slashed five thousand old manats to one new manat, reviving the qapik coin that had flickered briefly in 1992-1993 — a clean break after 1990s hyperinflation.
• Passport power The Azerbaijani passport sits at 67th on the Henley Passport Index, opening roughly 67 destinations visa-free or visa-on-arrival.
• One passport only Azerbaijan does not recognise dual citizenship: acquiring another country's nationality is itself grounds for losing your Azerbaijani citizenship, and holders must notify the state within one month.
• Voting first As the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in 1918, it became the first majority-Muslim state to grant women the right to vote — two years ahead of the United States and a decade before Britain.
• First oil well The world's first mechanically drilled oil well was sunk at Bibi-Heybat near Baku in 1846, more than a decade before the famous Pennsylvania well of 1859.
• Land of Fire At Yanar Dag a hillside has burned non-stop for centuries on seeping natural gas, one of the flames that earned Azerbaijan its ancient nickname, the Land of Fire.
• Largest lake Azerbaijan's eastern shore opens onto the Caspian Sea — not a sea at all but the largest lake on Earth, covering some 371,000 square kilometres.