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Ilham Aliyev
© AFP/File Daniel Mihailescu

They are putting up a portrait of this country's leader and though the veneration with which they speak about him -- like the town itself -- seems medieval, the billboard is one of the few signs of modernity here.

The portrait of Azerbaijan's leader Ilham Aliyev is only the first innovation this remote mountain-top village is expecting as builders construct a new road that will link it to the outside world by summer's end.

"For thousands of years no ruler ever built a road to this place, but Ilham is doing that, and that's why we're showing our respect by putting up the portrait," said Seleyman Aslanov, a regional education official originally from Khinaliq who said he volunteered to fund the billboard.

Khinaliq has changed little over the four millennia of its existence, retaining its own language and traditional way of life thanks to its high altitude of 2,100 meters and the difficult trek needed to reach it.

The village's population can speak their language only to each other because inhabitants of the nearest settlement 15 miles away speak a separate language, as different from Khinaliqi as English is from Urdu.

Khinaliq has always been a symbol of remoteness in Azerbaijan. A major mobile phone company used it in a commercial boasting of the extent of its coverage, though it never actually brought its network here.

But to the delight of the locals and the dismay of ethnographers, that may all soon change after Aliyev ordered the construction of the first paved road linking Khinaliq to the rest of the country.

Villagers, who mainly earn a living herding sheep, hope the road will bring more tourists and jobs and ease travel to winter pastures and bazaars where they can sell off their herds.

Energy-rich Azerbaijan has received windfall oil revenues over the past few years but this wealth has been slow to spread outside the capital Baku, not to mention Khinaliq.

Now, in the shape of a new road, the oil boom's shockwaves appear to have made it as far as these mountains.

"Many people will be able to come and visit us, the president will come," enthused a resident, 72-year-old Aladdin Hamidov, adding that workers had already begun sprucing up the town in preparation for the official visit.

Aside from the single telephone line patched through to the post office, a few television sets and some ageing jeeps, Khinaliq has few modern comforts to boast of apart from its rugged beauty.

The town's residents are nominally Sunni Muslims in contrast to the majority Shiite population of Azerbaijan but retain many of the animistic beliefs of their ancestors.

They venerate the natural gas fires that spring from the rocks in this treeless mountainous terrain that also attest to Azerbaijan's oil wealth.

In the village, smoke still rises from the holes in the roofs of the stone houses that once served as the only source of natural light in these homesteads until windows began to be introduced in the 20th century.

Those who study the culture of this remote outpost and other surrounding villages that lie in the shadow of the Shahdag mountain just south of Russia's border worry that the new road will overwhelm the area with change.

"The place is like an open air museum, it would be a crime to change it," said Emil Kerimov, head of the department of ethnography in Azerbaijan's Academy of Sciences.

"Their geographic location made it possible for them to retain their language, and the road is a danger to this," Kerimov said adding that however "many minorities survive that do not live at the top of a mountain."

Other experts studying the rare peoples of the area warn that the irreversible process of the decline of local languages has already begun with the introduction of television.

"It has been changing since they got electricity and television," said Gilles Authier, a researcher for Paris' Inalco university and perhaps the foreigner best versed in the languages of this area.

But the locals said they had more immediate concerns than worrying about the influence that outsiders will have on Khinaliq.

"Its not an issue whether Khinaliq loses its language. We need to rebuild our town," said Saleh Gasymov, a member of the local administration.

Authier, who has spent the better part of the last seven years traveling in and out of this valley to study the Kryz language of Khinaliq's closest neighbors said the road project is meant to impress Western tourists who visit the area.

Hundreds of foreigners, mostly employees of Western oil companies and their families, visit Khinaliq every year.

One of the local drivers who earns a living by ferrying these tourists on his hardy Russian-built jeep said he was worried the new road would lessen the appeal of the trip.

"Everyone likes the adventure of getting here. It won't be the same once everything is asphalted," Agali said.

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