About Kaspi

Kaspi

Kaspi is a Baku newspaper whose name carries one of the longest histories in Azerbaijani journalism. The original Kaspi was a Russian-language newspaper published in Baku from 1881 to 1919, for much of that time the city's leading Russian daily, which passed in 1897 into the ownership of the Azerbaijani oil magnate and philanthropist Haji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev and became known in the community as Muslim Kaspi. The modern Kaspi, an Azerbaijani-language newspaper listed as a daily from 1999, consciously revives that historic title: it is owned by Sona Veliyeva, publishes in Baku at kaspi.az, and focuses on education, culture and the Turkic world, themes that connect it to the enlightenment mission of its nineteenth-century namesake. Any honest profile must keep the two incarnations distinct: between the closure of the historic paper in 1919 and the appearance of the modern one eighty years later there is a gap, not a continuous run, and the modern paper's claim is inheritance of a name and a tradition rather than unbroken publication. Told properly, both stories are rich, and together they make Kaspi unique in this directory.

The historic Kaspi, 1881 to 1919

The historic Kaspi began its activity in 1881 under the editorship of Viktor Vasiliyevich Kuzminin, at a moment when Baku's oil boom was transforming a provincial town into an industrial metropolis hungry for news. In its early years it appeared two or three times a week; after three years it became a daily. Its sections, as reconstructed by scholars of its education coverage, spanned state and local life, current events, scientific material in original and translation, energy news, fiction, correspondence and announcements, the full diet of a serious imperial provincial daily, and it was read beyond Azerbaijan's borders. Azerbaijani press histories record that between 1881 and 1919 a total of 10,065 issues of the newspaper were published, a figure that conveys its regularity and institutional weight. Among Baku's Russian papers, which included Bakinskie Izvestiya and Bakinskiy Listok, Kaspi had, in the standard history's judgement, the longest life and reflected the social life of the city in different periods from its own point of view. Hasan bey Zardabi, the founder of the Azerbaijani national press, was among the Azerbaijani intellectuals who published in its pages in the 1880s and 1890s.

Taghiyev, Topchubashov and Muslim Kaspi

The decisive turn in the historic paper's life came in 1897, when its third and last Russian editor, Sokolinski, died and Haji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev, the richest Azerbaijani businessman of the age and the great patron of Azerbaijani education, bought the newspaper and entrusted its editorship to Azerbaijanis. In the community the paper thereafter became known as Muslim Kaspi. Its longest-serving editor in this era was Alimardan bey Topchubashov, who edited it from 1898 to 1907 and would later chair the parliament of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic; Ali bey Huseynzade, one of the formative intellectuals of Azerbaijani and Turkic thought, also held its editorship. Under Azerbaijani ownership a Russian-language paper became a platform for the national enlightenment: debates on schools, language, women's education, theatre and reform filled its columns alongside oil and commercial news. Scholars of educational thought in Azerbaijan have studied Kaspi in detail precisely for this role, as a channel through which pedagogical ideas reached a broad public in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The paper ceased in 1919, amid the collapse of the Democratic Republic's world.

Kaspi and the enlightenment tradition

Kaspi belonged to the constellation of periodicals, Akinchi, Ziya, Kashkul, Sharqi-Rus, Molla Nasreddin, Hayat, Fuyuzat and Azərbaycan among them, through which Azerbaijani public opinion was created. Its contribution was distinctive: publishing in Russian, the empire's language of administration and science, it carried Azerbaijani questions to readers whom Azerbaijani-language papers could not reach, and carried world and scientific knowledge back to Baku. The education coverage examined in modern scholarship shows a paper that treated schooling, literacy and pedagogy as front-page concerns decades before they became state policy, publishing translated and original scientific content for general readers. That inheritance matters for understanding the modern paper's self-image: when the title was revived in independent Azerbaijan, it was revived as an education and culture paper, not as a general news daily, in conscious continuity with the Taghiyev era. The historic Kaspi is preserved in library collections and is cited throughout the historiography of the Caucasus press, from Azerbaijani national histories to international studies of the late imperial Russian media.

The modern revival from 1999

The modern Kaspi is recorded in Wikipedia's list of Azerbaijani newspapers as an Azerbaijani-language daily from 1999, based in Baku, and the Azerbaijan Media Development Agency's press history, as cited in the batch record for this profile, traces its name to the historic paper. Beyond that, the English-language public record of the revival is thin, and this profile states openly what can and cannot be verified: the modern paper exists, publishes in Azerbaijani in Baku, maintains the website kaspi.az, is associated with owner Sona Veliyeva and gives particular attention to education, culture and Turkic-world subjects. A United States diplomatic cable from 2007, later published by WikiLeaks, listed a Kaspiy newspaper among outlets that seemed to have been established with government support to compete with independent media, a contemporary perception that should be recorded as such, an American embassy assessment, not a proven fact about the paper's founding. The exact founding date within the late 1990s, the identity of its first modern editor and its early circulation are not established in the open sources consulted, and are not asserted here.

Sona Veliyeva and the Kaspi education world

The modern paper's proprietor, Sona Veliyeva, is documented principally as an education entrepreneur and philologist: she is the founder of the Kaspi Education Company, which runs Kaspi lyceums in Baku, including campuses at Bakikhanov and Khatai, and she appears in that capacity at the company's public events, speaking on national memory, culture and values. She also co-founded, with the journalist and parliamentarian Ganira Pashayeva's circle of interlocutors recorded in business-press interviews, an association of journalists from Islamic countries intended to encourage dialogue and objective reporting across the Muslim world. The newspaper and the education company share the Kaspi brand and its enlightenment associations, an arrangement that gives the paper a defined institutional home unusual among Azerbaijani titles. Its editorial focus follows from that home: schooling and universities, examinations and curricula, literature and language, science popularisation and the culture of the Turkic peoples receive sustained attention, alongside general news. For a directory reader, the practical point is that Kaspi should be classified as a general daily with a pronounced education and culture specialism, not as a narrow trade paper.

Content and character of the modern paper

The modern Kaspi publishes news and features in Azerbaijani on domestic politics and society, but its distinguishing content is cultural and educational: interviews with writers, scholars and teachers; coverage of universities and schools; essays on Azerbaijani language and literature; material on Turkey and the wider Turkic world, whose cultural politics have grown in importance in Azerbaijan since the 2020 Karabakh war and the deepening of the Organisation of Turkic States. Its website, kaspi.az, carries this content online together with material drawn from Azerbaijani press history, including features marking the heritage of the Democratic Republic-era press as the successor of the modern national media. That historical self-consciousness is itself a Kaspi trait in both incarnations: the historic paper published retrospectives on Akinchi as early as 1913, and the modern paper similarly treats press history as part of its beat. In tone the modern title is broadly aligned with official cultural policy and presents no opposition profile; international monitors of the Azerbaijani media do not list it among independent outlets.

Two incarnations, one name: getting the record right

Directory users should be alert to the confusion the shared name can cause. The historic Kaspi of 1881 to 1919 was Russian-language, commercially owned, first by Russian editors and then by Taghiyev, and edited by Topchubashov and Huseynzade; the modern Kaspi is Azerbaijani-language, owned by Sona Veliyeva, and belongs to the post-Soviet media order. Statements that Kaspi has published since 1881, which circulate in promotional material, compress an eighty-year silence and should not be repeated as fact. Equally, the modern paper should not be dismissed as a mere namesake: the revival of historic titles, Azərbaycan itself among them, is a deliberate feature of Azerbaijani state and cultural life after 1991, a way of asserting continuity with the pre-Soviet national past, and Kaspi's revival by an education company is a coherent expression of that impulse. The scholarly literature, notably the detailed studies of the historic paper's education thought published in Turkish academic journals, concerns the first Kaspi alone, and citations from it must not be transferred to the modern title. This profile has kept the two records separate throughout for exactly that reason.

Place in today's Baku press

In today's contracted print market, where Media Landscapes counts a small and shrinking set of regularly published newspapers, distribution largely confined to Baku and readership migrated online, Kaspi survives as a niche institutionally-backed title. It does not compete with the state dailies for official record status, nor with the popular online portals for speed; its niche is the educated, culture-oriented reader, the teacher, the parent and the student, served in print and at kaspi.az. Its survival strategy, attachment to an education business rather than to advertising or newsstand sales, mirrors the wider pattern in which Azerbaijani print titles endure only when an institution, the state, a party or a company, carries their costs. The paper's historic name gives it a recognition that newer titles cannot buy, in Azerbaijan and in Turkey, where its nineteenth-century predecessor is studied as part of the shared Turkic press heritage. For researchers, the modern paper is a useful source on Azerbaijani education debates and official cultural discourse since the 2000s.

Current status

Kaspi remains an active Baku newspaper in Azerbaijani, published under Sona Veliyeva's ownership with its website at kaspi.az, covering education, culture and Turkic-world topics within a general news frame. The verifiable core of its record is: historic Russian-language Kaspi, Baku, 1881 to 1919, 10,065 issues, bought by Haji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev in 1897, edited by Alimardan bey Topchubashov from 1898 to 1907; modern Azerbaijani-language Kaspi, listed as a daily from 1999, owner Sona Veliyeva, founder of the Kaspi Education Company. Details beyond that core, particularly concerning the modern paper's founding circumstances, staffing and circulation, are thin in open sources and have been flagged as such rather than embellished. For a title whose first incarnation helped educate a nation into print, that restraint is appropriate: Kaspi's own tradition is that facts, patiently published, do the work.