About

In many ways the spirit of Stoke-on-Trent transcends its physical location and is found in all places, in all things, and indeed at all times. This is a well-known fact, and a thorn in the side of our organisation. Of course, we have been aware of this since Visit Stoke was first established, but what else were we to do? Still, when a half-dozen intrepid adventurers darken our doors, we find ourselves face-to-face again with that age-old conundrum—to where should we send six spirited Stoke soul seekers?

It's tempting to conclude that it doesn't matter—after all, if the spirit of Stoke is all around (and within) us, then surely any effortful search therefor is ultimately redundant? Oh, if only it were that simple... At the heart of humankind is an insatiable nomadic urge—an incorrigible desire to move from A to B, from here to there, and from present to future. How quaint it seems now, that German Romantics once thought this to be the exclusive enclave of their compatriots. We realise, then, that the so-called "spirit" of Stoke-on-Trent is of secondary importance to the voyage itself undertaken... to that perpetual, primal preoccupation with progress towards—.

Events/sights

Baku Nightlife

Baku by night. A little boy scurries ahead of two chador-clad, middle-aged women: impatient, gleeful. From behind a tangle of apartments and foliage in the middle-distance: the dizzying, insistent glow of the Flame Towers. A menace of candelabras hang ominously overhead, their jellyfish-like forms strewn from the rooftops. The various murmurs of tourists and locals coalesce as a gentle hum, punctuated only by the pleas of zealous touters, and a muffled bass drum from a nearby bar. You duck down a narrow lane and emerge on Lev Tolstoy street. It is quieter here. Perched at a small table outside a tiny café, that cold, slightly sweet, malty sip of Xirdalan is almost familiar: just for a moment, you forget how far away home is...

Azerbaijan Acousmatic Music Festival (AAMF)

Beginning in 1997, the AAMF has been held annually in Azerbaijan. Since the turn of the century, the festival has enjoyed a reputation as the "cultural, spiritual epicentre of acousmatic and electroacoustic performance art in the Caucasus". Since moving to its current, central Baku location in 2010, AAMF has amassed a diverse, new generation of devotees to this niche, sonic art form. AAMF occurs during the last weekend of August, and is a must for acousmatic die-hards and curious musicologists alike.

Harvest of Red Fruits

Rural, outer Khachmaz—a far cry from the bustle of Baku and its well-beaten tracks—is the setting for a humble harvest festival, remnant from an ancient civilisation. As your gleeful, berry-stained hands simultaneously fill baskets with fruit and bat aside insatiable insects, realise that their movements trace in air familiar trajectories—faint facsimiles of harvests stretching back to antiquity. It gives you tremendous comfort to know that, in spite of everything, some things are exactly as they have always been—that there are facets of experience as yet unreached by the incorrigible march of technology, and its preoccupation with progress.

Get here

Option 1

Option 1: the straightforward route. Safety. Conformity? A path well trodden, and indeed driven. Option 1 is the route that we usually recommend for either crows or anyone in a hurry. For the traveller too busy to gaze aimlessly out of the train of life's many windows... The laser-focused individual, for whom anywhere but the destination is a mere detail: a pit-stop en route to eventual salvation.

Option 2

Our most popular route. Option 2 strikes a pleasant balance: creating the illusion of aimless meandering, while ultimately winding up in Azerbaijan at the end of it all. With this route, the journey is equally as important as the destination, with a veritable roll-call of tourist hot-spots en route, from soap opera capital of the World, Marseille, to Kyiv. Curiously, most of the travellers that we meet are quite ambivalent about visiting Azerbaijan, and in some cases are even confused by the prospect. Option 2 offers a great way to still visit Azerbaijan, but via a convoluted path creating an impression of overall indifference thereto.

Option 3

This route is not for the faint-hearted. Is it harder to run a marathon, or to run 99% of a marathon only to reach the finish line and deliberately not cross it? The main thing to notice about this route is that it does not actually enter Azerbaijan. Moreover, the interim destinations are a curious hodgepodge of dead-end towns and tourist havens, chosen with greater deference to cartographic aesthetics than to trifling experiential concerns. At Visit Stoke, we consider this to be the quintessential mode of visiting Azerbaijan. If you can journey for thousands of hours, all across Europe, only to reach Azerbaijan, turn around and just go back home: yours is the Earth and everything within it.