About Akinchi

Akinchi

Akinchi, rendered in Azerbaijani as Əkinçi and also transliterated as Ekinchi, meaning "The Cultivator" or "The Ploughman," was the first newspaper published entirely in the Azerbaijani language. It was published in Baku, then part of the Russian Empire and now the capital of Azerbaijan, between 22 July 1875 and 29 September 1877. In a publishing life of just over two years it produced 56 issues, yet its historical weight far exceeded its size, its circulation, and its lifespan. It was regarded as the founding publication of the Azerbaijani national press, and the date of its first issue, 22 July, was later marked in Azerbaijan as National Press and Journalism Day. It was also described as the first private newspaper in the Russian Empire printed in a Turkic language, a distinction that placed a small Baku publication inside a much wider story about language, education, and public life across the Turkic-speaking world.

Origins in Baku

Akinchi was founded by Hasan bey Zardabi, an educator, naturalist, and Moscow University alumnus who had returned to the Caucasus committed to public enlightenment. Zardabi taught natural sciences at a Russian-language secondary school in Baku from 1869, and his work in education and in Azerbaijani theatre in the early 1870s formed part of the same broader project: creating modern cultural institutions through which Azerbaijani speakers could learn, debate, and recognise themselves as a public. Securing permission to publish a newspaper in Azerbaijani under the Tsarist colonial system required a prolonged effort. The Russian governor of the Caucasus, Dmitry Staroselsky, sympathised with Zardabi's endeavours and supported the establishment of the paper. Staroselsky was also credited with proposing the name Akinchi, on the reasoning that a title evoking cultivation would help convince the authorities that the publication was a non-political journal concerned with spreading agricultural technique rather than a vehicle for political argument.

A one-man newsroom

At first the editorial staff consisted in practice of one person. Zardabi was simultaneously publisher, editor, corrector, and typesetter, a concentration of roles that reflected both the novelty of the enterprise and the absence of an existing Azerbaijani-language publishing infrastructure in Baku. There was no ready pool of Azerbaijani compositors, proofreaders, or professional journalists to draw on, because the profession itself barely existed in that language. The paper therefore had to invent its own working methods as it went. That constraint also shaped its character: Akinchi was a personal project driven by one man's educational mission, sustained by collaborators and correspondents rather than by a large commercial organisation, and vulnerable to the loss of official goodwill or sponsorship in a way that a better-funded paper might not have been.

Language and the choice of plain speech

The most deliberate editorial decision was linguistic. Zardabi chose to write in simple, colloquial Azerbaijani, stripping away bulky expressions and the Persian and Arabic loanwords that dominated religious texts and classical poetry. The purpose was accessibility: the mainly uneducated rural readers whom the paper wanted to reach needed language they could grasp without formal literary training. The choice drew criticism from literati who found the style too colloquial, but it was central to the paper's mission. By using Azerbaijani officially and consistently as the language of a newspaper, Akinchi helped establish that the vernacular could carry science, practical advice, satire, and social commentary, not only religious or poetic subjects. In doing so it contributed to reforms in written Azerbaijani and to the idea that a national press should speak in the language ordinary people actually used.

What the paper published

In addition to agriculture-oriented articles, Zardabi published material on medicine and biology, drawing on his training as a naturalist, and editorials dealing with the social and cultural condition of Muslims in the Caucasus. Coverage of country life, farming, and irrigation was intended to help peasants overcome illiteracy in agricultural matters and to apply more effective methods. Satirical poems and articles formed part of the mix, and the use of satire and plain language also served a protective purpose under censorship, allowing criticism to be expressed indirectly. Zardabi set out his philosophy in the first issue, arguing that a newspaper should mirror the reality of the place it represented: that a province's newspaper should be its mirror, should reveal good and bad alike, and should print the people's troubles and wishes so that readers could see their community reflected in it. That mirror principle became a lasting reference point for Azerbaijani journalism.

Readers, circulation, and distribution

The paper appeared twice a month, and its circulation ranged from about 300 to 400 copies. For the 26 months that it existed, it attracted only about 300 constant readers, despite copies being given away free in an effort to arouse the interest of wider masses. Those modest figures need to be read against the conditions of the time: literacy among Azerbaijani-speaking peasants was low, distribution beyond Baku was difficult, and reactionary clergy were reported to have misled potential readers into believing in the sinful nature of non-religious texts. A free newspaper still required readers who could read, couriers who could carry it, and a community willing to accept a secular publication in their own language — all of which were in short supply in the 1870s. The small circulation therefore measured the starting point of a national press, not the eventual reach of the idea it planted.

Censorship and closure

The situation of the newspaper deteriorated sharply with the beginning of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878. Tsarist censorship prohibited the paper from touching on political issues, removing much of the space in which even its indirect commentary had operated. Staroselsky's departure removed its most important official protector. Lack of sponsorship and the low number of readers compounded the pressure. In 1877 a decree on the liquidation of the newspaper was issued, and publication ceased on 29 September 1877 after 56 issues. The closure was presented in Azerbaijani press histories as a direct consequence of the wartime political climate and official suspicion, rather than as a simple commercial failure, although the financial and readership weaknesses were real and documented alongside the censorship.

The generation it trained

Akinchi's importance lay less in its own longevity than in what it started. A whole generation of Azerbaijani public figures, publicists, and leading thinkers was trained and formed in connection with the press that Akinchi inaugurated. Its existence contributed profoundly to the development of journalism in Azerbaijan and to the establishment of further Azerbaijani-language newspapers and magazines, including Ziya in 1879, Ziya Gafgaziya in 1880, Keshkul in 1883, Sharg-i Rus in 1903, Irshad and Hayat in 1905, and Fiyuzat, Takammul, and Molla Nasreddin in 1906, after which the Azerbaijani press entered a new stage of development. Zardabi himself continued the mission after Akinchi closed, publishing popular science articles in Azerbaijani and Russian in newspapers such as Ziya, Kashkul, and Kaspi during the 1880s and 1890s, and playing a key role in the establishment of the first school for Azerbaijani girls in Baku, which opened in 1901.

Enlightenment as an editorial programme

Histories of the paper consistently identified enlightenment as its main goal. Publishing articles about country life, agriculture, and irrigation was a means to help readers overcome illiteracy and backwardness in practical affairs, while the creation of national unity was treated as a guiding principle. The paper approached the press as a means of mass communication, a basis for educational reform, and an instrument through which social and public conscience was formed. Those claims were made retrospectively by historians of the Azerbaijani press, but they were grounded in Zardabi's own stated aims and in the paper's actual contents — practical science, health, farming, and social observation written for ordinary readers in their own language, at a time when no comparable Azerbaijani publication existed.

Commemoration and National Press Day

The first issue's date acquired official commemorative status. The day of the first publication, 22 July, was declared in 2010 as National Press Day in Azerbaijan, and it is observed as National Press and Journalism Day, with exhibitions and events at institutions such as the Azerbaijan National Library marking anniversaries of the national press and displaying works by Zardabi and materials on the history of Azerbaijani media. The 150th and 151st anniversaries of the first issue in 2025 and 2026 were marked with such exhibitions, featuring photographs and archival materials from periodicals documenting the evolution of journalism in the country. That a two-year, 56-issue newspaper anchored a national professional holiday illustrated how completely Akinchi's symbolic role had outgrown its original scale.

Place in Azerbaijani press history

Akinchi held a secure place at the opening of every standard history of the Azerbaijani press, which treated the story of the press in Azerbaijan as beginning with Zardabi's Baku newspaper of 1875. Its contributions were summarised as creating a journalism system and a generation of journalists for the first time, establishing professional principles, making official use of the Azerbaijani language the basis of a publication's functioning, and gathering educated people together in a way that paved the way for later generations of thinkers. The documentation for Akinchi is unusually good by the standards of nineteenth-century Caucasus publishing, because its founder became a canonical figure and its anniversary a national observance. Even so, readers should note that many surviving accounts are commemorative in tone, written to honour a founding moment, and circulation and readership figures vary slightly between sources within the 300 to 400 range recorded here.