Azerbaijani answer to oil glut: Bathe in it

Inside, Ramil Mutukhov, a lanky 25- year-old, prepares to be pampered and preened, scrubbed and peeled in a bath of pure crude oil. He undresses, hangs his trousers and sweatshirt on a peg, pulls off socks and underwear and folds up a wad of brown paper towels. He will need those later.

Then he steps into a mess of what looks, smells and flows like used engine oil. "It's wonderful," he said, up to his neck in oil in a sort of human lube job.

The petroleum spas of Naftalan in central Azerbaijan, one of the little- known but once wildly popular vacation spots of the Soviet Union, are having an unlikely revival in a country so awash in oil that people are literally swimming in it.

Here in Naftalan, visitors bathe once a day in the local crude. They say, and doctors here support them in the claim, that it relieves joint pain, cures psoriasis, calms nerves and beautifies the skin - never mind that Western experts say the practice may be carcinogenic.

Hoping to tap into the worldwide spa boom, Health Center, where Mutukhov took a dip in crude recently, opened a year ago. Another spa is under construction and two more are planned.

"Two years ago, all this was ruins," said Ilgar Guseynov, owner and director of Health Center. "Every day, every month, Azerbaijan is growing richer."

At their peak in the 1980s, Naftalan spas drew 75,000 visitors a year. That flow became a trickle after war broke out between Azerbaijan and ethnic Armenians in nearby Karabakh, in 1988, and with trips to the spas no longer free under the Soviet vacation bureaucracy.

Five of the six Soviet-era resorts were converted into glum housing for refugees, for example.

But this summer, 350 or so people visited the Health Center, according to Guseynov. That was up from 250 last summer. A 15-day course costs $450, including meals.

"Azerbaijan is standing on its own feet now," Amir Aslan, deputy mayor of Naftalan, said in an interview. The town is banking on growth in oil-spa demand, which he said would pull this dusty place out of poverty. Aslan has his own project for a $3 million, 20-bath spread and is looking for investors.

In her office overlooking the oil field that supplies Health Center, Gyultikin Suleymanova, the head doctor, said that the local crude is unusual because it contains little natural gasoline or other lighter fractions of petroleum and is thus safe.

Naftalan crude is about 50 percent naphthalene, an ingredient best known as the stuff of mothballs. It is also an active ingredient in coal-tar soaps, which are used by dermatologists to treat psoriasis, though in lower concentrations.

Authorities like the U.S. National Institutes of Health classify coal tar as a possible carcinogenic. Suleymanova says it is not a carcinogen when you bathe in it. The baths are lukewarm and last 10 minutes.

The therapeutic benefits come from natural antibiotic agents that seep into the skin, Suleymanova said.

Arzu Mirzeyev is the bath master. With a green frock, jeans stained with oil spots and a mustache, he looks for all the world like a gasoline station attendant and he has a job to match. He changes the oil.

Each bath uses about a barrel of crude, which is recycled back into a communal tank for future bathers. Mirzeyev also uses paper towels to wipe bathers clean, a long, hard process that involves several showers.

Mirzeyev said he liked his job.

Until Azerbaijan's economy picked up in the past two years, the 40-year-old father of three worked seasonally as a laborer in Ukraine, where wages were higher. At the spa, he said, "If we have visitors, then we have work."

Unlike the oil from Azerbaijan's offshore deposits, which is sold internationally under the brand Azeri Light crude, Naftalan oil is too heavy to have much commercial value. Luckily, as most of the bath attendants and patients seemed to smoke, it does not catch fire easily.

The resort has 10 tubs, 5 for women, 5 for men. The tubs are not scoured between baths. As might be expected, they have perhaps the world's worst bathtub rings - greasy and greenish-brown.

Oil has been Azerbaijan's ticket for a long time. Oil seepages have been here since at least the 13th century, when Marco Polo passed through and took note of the place. A reedy marsh, about the size of a football field, has a black film of oil on the water. The site was a caravansary on the Silk Road to China.

Later, Azerbaijan's larger oil reserves on the Caspian coast were developed by the Nobel brothers of Sweden.

By Andrew E. Kramer, International Herald Tribune