About IRS Heritage

IRS Heritage

IRS Heritage is the English-language edition of IRS, a Baku-based magazine devoted to Azerbaijani history, culture and art, published by the IRS Publishing House under editor-in-chief Musa Marjanli. The wider IRS project is one of the most multilingual magazine ventures to come out of Azerbaijan: its editor has described a magazine launched about twenty-five years ago and published in many languages — reported as twenty languages in 2025 and twenty-one with the addition of a Swahili edition — with the aim of presenting Azerbaijan's heritage to readers in their own languages. The English edition, styled IRS-Heritage, carries long, illustrated articles on history, ethnography, architecture, music and historic cities to an international audience, in print and in full on its website, irs-az.com.

The IRS Publishing House and Musa Marjanli

The magazine is led by Musa Marjanli, editor-in-chief of the IRS Publishing House, whose editorials open its issues and who represents the project at presentations abroad. At a presentation of IRS Publishing House books at the Cultural Centre of Azerbaijan's Embassy in Paris, organised with Azerbaijan's embassy in France and the France-Azerbaijan Dialogue Association with support from PASHA Life Insurance, Marjanli set out the history of the magazine and its expansion into books, and Ambassador Leyla Abdullayeva highlighted the publishing house's role in promoting Azerbaijan's history, culture and heritage to French audiences. The same reporting describes the magazine as backed by PASHA Holding, one of Azerbaijan's largest business groups. That backing helps explain the project's unusual scale: few heritage magazines anywhere are produced in so many language editions or supported by a parallel programme of large-format books.

Origins and the Meaning of a Heritage Magazine

Marjanli told the Paris audience that the magazine had been launched twenty-five years earlier, which places its founding at around the turn of the 2000s, roughly a decade after Azerbaijan restored its independence. The precise founding year is not stated in the sources consulted for this profile, and no exact date is asserted here. The timing that can be documented fits the magazine's purpose. A newly independent state with ancient and medieval heritage — Caucasian Albanian churches, Shirvanshah palaces, Karabakh khanates, oil-boom Baku — needed, in the view of its cultural publishers, a reliable and attractive way to explain that heritage abroad, countering both unfamiliarity and contested historical narratives. IRS was built for that task: heritage, in its title's English form, is not a decorative word but the entire editorial programme.

Editions in Many Languages

The defining feature of IRS is its language programme. The Paris presentation reported the magazine as published in twenty languages. With the launch of a first Swahili-language edition, Irs-Urithi, reported by Azerbaijan State News Agency and syndicated internationally, the editor-in-chief put the total at twenty-one languages worldwide, describing the Swahili edition as an important regional project for East Africa and its more than two hundred million Swahili speakers. The first Swahili issue led with material on Azerbaijan's geography, development and reconstruction of liberated territories, and on the World Urban Forum, WUF13, in Baku and the declared Year of Urban Planning and Architecture, and it included an article by Alice Wahome, Kenya's cabinet secretary for lands, public works, housing and urban development, on Kenya's participation in WUF13 and its experience of affordable housing and sustainable urban development.

Other documented editions include the Italian version, whose late-2023 issue marked the Year of Heydar Aliyev, the centenary of Heydar Aliyev's birth, with articles on Azerbaijan-Vatican relations by Ambassador Ilgar Mukhtarov, on Italy-Azerbaijan strategic partnership and the TAP pipeline by Senator Marco Scurria, on the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic and its fortresses, on the Chotari Albanian-Udi church in the Nij settlement of Gabala district, and on the musicologist, poet and artist Mir Mohsun Navvab. The pattern is consistent: a shared heritage core, adapted for each language market with contributions from that country's officials, parliamentarians and friends of Azerbaijan.

The English Edition: IRS-Heritage

IRS-Heritage is the edition most international readers will encounter. A new English edition reported in April by AJMedia, the Japan-based Azerbaijani media outlet, focused on Azerbaijan's cultural diversity, traditions of coexistence, scientific achievements and artistic heritage. It opened with an article by Musa Marjanli on preserving and presenting cultural heritage internationally, and included, among its highlighted contributions, Traditions of Coexistence in Azerbaijan by Agil Shirinov, rector of the Azerbaijan Institute of Theology, on the peaceful coexistence of ethnic and religious communities, and Khudavang Monastery: Historical Facts and Frauds by Sabuhi Ahmadov, on the ancient Albanian heritage of the Khudavang monastery and on scholarly responses to falsified historical narratives. Further content covered history, ethnography, visual arts and tourism, with the full edition available on the official IRS website.

The magazine's numbering shows a sustained run. Material from issue 60, dated Spring 2025, is published on its website, including a substantial ethnographic study of felt clothing in Azerbaijan and the Caucasus — the yapinji cloak and related garments — and a historical feature on Shusha, founded in 1752 by Panah Ali Javanshir of the Karabakh Khanate, and on the poetess Khurshidbanu Natavan, born in Shusha on 15 August 1832. A heritage magazine reaching its sixtieth numbered English edition has, by any standard, established continuity well beyond a one-off promotional publication.

Subjects: History, Ethnography and Historic Places

Across the editions sampled on its website, IRS returns to a recognisable set of subjects. History articles treat institutions such as Baku State University, founded by resolution of the parliament of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in 1919 as the first European-type higher education institution in the Muslim East, and figures connected with Azerbaijan's development, such as the chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev, who repeatedly visited Baku in the second half of the nineteenth century in connection with its oil industry. Ethnographic articles document material culture in scholarly detail, from felt-making and traditional dress to museum collections of coins, stamps, weapons, manuscripts and household objects in Baku's history museum, including Safavid-period coinage minted in Ganja, Nakhchivan and Barda.

Historic places receive the same detailed treatment. Articles have examined the palace of the Iravan Khan, known as the Palace of Sardar, built by the khans of Iravan; the Kalbajar district and its ancient history, madrasas, churches, monasteries and shrines; and the cities and fortresses of Nakhchivan. Coverage of Karabakh and of territories affected by occupation and subsequent liberation is a recurring strand, reflecting the magazine's position within Azerbaijan's national narrative. Readers should approach IRS as its publishers present it — an Azerbaijani national heritage magazine — and value it accordingly: its strength is detailed, illustrated, Azerbaijani-sourced material on places and objects that receive little coverage in English elsewhere, presented from an explicitly Azerbaijani scholarly and editorial standpoint.

Books and Presentations Abroad

The publishing house has expanded from the magazine into books, described at the Paris presentation as visually rich publications presenting Azerbaijan's history, culture and heritage to global readers, and already showcased across Europe. Among the titles introduced in Paris was It's Time to Gather Stones, a book documenting Western Azerbaijan, in the publisher's framing, as an ancestral Azerbaijani homeland, with photographic and documentary evidence concerning cultural, religious and architectural monuments, including those in Yerevan. Book presentations at embassies and cultural centres form part of the same distribution strategy as the language editions: placing physical, well-produced volumes in front of diplomatic, academic and diaspora audiences in European capitals, and directing readers to the IRS online portal for more.

Contributors and Editorial Character

IRS draws its contributors from Azerbaijani academic and public life: university rectors, historians with doctorates in their fields, museum and agency officials, ambassadors and foreign parliamentarians writing on bilateral relations. Articles carry academic references, as the Kalbajar and felt-clothing features on its website show, with bibliographies citing Azerbaijani and Russian scholarly literature. The editorial character is therefore closer to an illustrated academic and cultural review than to a commercial lifestyle magazine. Its pages mix scholarship with commemoration — anniversaries of independence, of universities and of national figures — and with contemporary state themes such as mine clearance, where a contribution by the chairman of the Mine Action Agency of Azerbaijan reported more than 83,236 hectares cleared of landmines and explosive remnants, and COP29, hosted in Baku for two weeks in November 2024. Heritage, in IRS, is explicitly connected to the present-day state.

Distribution and the Website

The magazine's website, irs-az.com, is its international shop window, publishing articles and complete issue PDFs in its languages, including the English IRS-Heritage editions. That open availability is significant for researchers: unlike many heritage titles that exist only in print in embassy reading rooms, IRS can be read and cited directly online, issue by issue. Print distribution, as presented by the publishers, works through presentations, embassies and cultural events in the countries covered by each language edition, alongside the book programme. The sources consulted do not provide audited circulation figures for any edition, and none are claimed here.

Place in Azerbaijani Publishing

Among Azerbaijani magazines, IRS Heritage and its sister editions occupy a unique niche: a heritage review produced at multilingual scale, over more than two decades, with corporate backing and diplomatic distribution. Where Azerbaijan International built an English archive from Los Angeles and Baku, and Visions of Azerbaijan addressed Europe from within a promotional society, IRS built a translation programme — twenty or more languages — around a single editorial idea, that Azerbaijan's history and culture should be readable, in depth and in colour, almost anywhere in the world. For readers who want Azerbaijani accounts of Azerbaijani monuments, ethnography and history in English, IRS-Heritage is one of the fullest sources available, provided it is read, as all national heritage publishing should be, with an awareness of the national perspective it proudly represents.