In 1873, an ‘accidental discovery’ of oil mines at the Absheron Peninsula by Robert Nobel gave a start to the dramatic metamorphose of its natural, economic, and cultural landscapes, inasmuch as it laid the grounds for the industrial transformation of the whole Russian Empire, setting it on an ‘oily path’ of modernization and preparing for the evolution of a new world order that is still rooted in fossil fuels. This essay traces the history of the transformation of the natural landscapes of Baku initiated by the Nobel brothers and the Branobel corporation to adjust ‘the wild’ local environment to their ‘Westernized’ vision of an ideal living through the construction of the Villa Petrolea: ‘a little paradise in Baku.’ The Nobels’ activities and the concept of ‘fair capitalism’ practiced to the mutual benefit of all stakeholders proved efficient for the construction of their industrial empire that developed within the modernist aesthetics of resistance to and improvement of nature that was seen as the only progressive way to civilize and modernize the barbaric and outdated territories of the Russian Empire. The article reflects on the cultural origins of the traditional European ‘desire’ to improve the wild nature, which is seen as imperfect and ‘naked’ and to re-create the lost gardens of Eden, a metaphor for an image of an ideal society that still proves viable in the contemporary politics.

This article analyses strategies for revitalisation of Tallinn’s industrial heritage and reflects on the reuses of history from the late Russian Empire to the Soviet period, referring to the case of the Noblessner district, one of the country's most vibrant and rapidly developing seafront quarters. Contemporary Noblessner advertising promises a European dream city with hipster cafes, galleries, and loft-style art studios located in former shipyards; a promenade along the Baltic Sea coast, trendy business spaces, and residential blocks offered for those who appreciate nature, art, and style (Noblessner.ee, 2024).The Noblessner quarter gives an example of successful transformation of a neglected industrial site into a modern public space with high potential for further development. By referring exclusively to the most attractive moments of its history and by recycling them into attractions, Noblessner creates new narratives of its own urban biography that can be safely projected into the future, and which leave no room for ambiguous interpretations. Therefore, the revitalisation project of the Noblessner district avoids citing controversial episodes from its history, developing a space, in which the past is presented selectively. Noblessner's biography is not introduced as a continuous historical narrative, it is fragmentated and recycled into an appealing wrapping that can attract investors, visitors, and residents. In recent years, Noblessner has become the site of numerous contacts: commercial, artistic, public, and private, which create a space that is representative of the whole Estonia. However, Noblessner's history is still unknown to most of its visitors and residents. It was muted during the Soviet regime, and has not yet been visibly integrated into the revived space.

This article analyses mechanisms of heri tagisation that transformed oil from a natural to a cultural resource through the case study of the Branobel corporation, which operated in Azerbaijan from the late nineteenth century, and by reflecting on the role of the Branobel corporate narrative in heritagisation of oil and in justification of the world order based on fossil fuels. The narratives developed by the Branobel corporation introduced their business legacy as a part of global heritage. In the article I refer to the ‘The Thirty Years of Activity of the Oil Production Association of the Brothers Nobel. 1879–1909’ published in 1909, that not only reports on Branobel’s industrial achievements, but promotes the history of oil, propagating its civilisational importance, while describing the company as an evolutionary part of this history. In their branding strategy, Branobel referred to the ancient religious cults and mythologies of Azerbaijan, for example in the case of the world’s first oil-tanker ‘Zoroaster’, designed by Ludvig Nobel. The images of Ateshgah, ‘The Fire Temple of Baku’, were used on the company’s emblems to connect symbolically the industrial oil mining with the ‘eternal fires’ worshipped at the Absheron Peninsula as ‘the lights of life’.

The history of oil in Russia is a well-established narrative that was initiated by the Nobel brothers, who in 1879 founded the Branobel company, soon to become the Russian largest oil-industry. This article suggests reflecting on the anniversary books that the Branobel published to celebrate their 25- and 30-year jubilees in 1904 and 1909, not long before their oil Empire was washed away by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. I analyze the narrative that the Nobels produced while forming grounds for the new world order that still floats today on the sticky waters of the ‘black gold,’ and that caused the crucial change in human-nature relations.

These relations have been recently challenged in search of a new means of sustainable existence that allow to drain the dependency on oil and establish a new world order for the sake of protecting nature from its own dangerous resources. Yet these efforts are far not limited to the development of the green renewable natural resources and require political, ideological, and cultural reconstruction of contemporary social and natural landscapes. Hence, the study of the origins of the oil history is essential to the analysis of the mechanisms behind oil’s rise from being merely a natural resource to a political and cultural legacy that identifies the world’s ‘superpowers,’ outlines their political ambitions, and conditions their ideologies.

The essay addresses the aspects of heritagization of St. Petersburg history, analyzing the myth of the city’s foundation from the perspective of the role of emotions and mind in the production of its urban space. I turn to the guidebooks published in St. Petersburg in the eighteenth- to early twentieth centuries to explore the paths that the heritagization took in order to construct the narrative and the image of the former Russian capital.

In this essay, I reflect on a strategy of the renaming of urban spaces and of their architectural objects, which was widely used by the young Soviet state after the 1917 Revolution. On one side, renaming was an old tradition used around the world to commemorate the appropriation of new lands. On the other, Bolsheviks applied an innovative approach to the use of this tradition in order to introduce the heritage of the defeated past as an achievement of their succeeded present. I focus specifically on the destiny of St. Petersburg, the former capital of the Russian Empire, which name had been changed several times throughout the twentieth century. St. Petersburg was founded by Peter the Great in 1703 as a “window to the West,” taking the course to the Europeanization of Russia. From the start, St. Petersburg claimed its hospitality to international entrepreneurs who, since the city’s early years, had been settling on the banks of the Neva River, building factories and plants, boosting the technological development of the Russian Empire. After the Bolshevik Revolution, all private industries in Russia were nationalized, and previous owners were deprived of their rights to ownership. The state re-named each and every inherited industrial object to erase any records of their origins and their history to re-introduce them as the products of the new regime.

The present article aims at giving a brief introduction to the Nobel family’s living in Russia and to the generally unknown architectural heritage in St. Petersburg that Nobels had left before fleeing the country after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and that still exists in a rather neglected state. This heritage resembles and symbolises many Nobel’s technological and social inventions that were complexly applied to the overall improvement of the average peoples’ everyday life through the development of the new type of housing for the workers – the so-called Nobel’s worker’s town.

I touch upon the themes of creativity and intelligence, fantasies and materialisation of utopian dreams that were defining features of several generations of the Nobels through the case of the family’s Russian period. To think on where fantasies of the seemingly pragmatic entrepreneurs and serious scientists had brought them and how their heritage had become a subject to oblivion on one side and an object of universal appreciation on the other, I trace the destiny of Nobels’ architectural heritage formed in St. Petersburg by Swedish and German architects. This urban heritage is a part of the creative outcome of intellectual work ongoing within the family and a bitter symbol of efforts to materialise their “fantasy” of developing the system of “social responsibility”, which, as they believed, could sustain and revitalise another fantasy – the successful existence of the so-called “fair capitalism.