A week has passed since the tragic fire accident that took place at the Azerbaijan's Guneshli offshore field. The fire started after the storm damaged a natural gas pipeline, causing the platform's partial collapse. Oil workers are confirmed damaged and dead.

"Aydın yol" newspaper published the material about the history of Oil Rock, about the lives of the first oil workers in the open sea. The writer's theme is based on the conversation held with Aghagurban Aliyev, head of a special geological expedition of the USSR's Academy of Sciences and Michail Kaverochkin, master chief of offshore well 1.  

"Aghagurban Aliyev remembered his first day in a small island on the Caspian Sea. The expedition led by him had carried out huge work since 1945. They started the expedition work at 110 kilometres' distance from Baku in small rocky islands; they gathered rock samples and made analyses. A. Aliyev scientifically proved that the seabed of the Caspian Sea is rich in hydrocarbon. Too few people believed in these scientifically grounded arguments.  

Malevolent people called this idea absurd and considered the expedition's work squandering and made demands to include the scientist's name in the list of public enemies. The issue reached the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan. As soon as  Mirjafar Baghirov, the first secretary of the  Communist Party of Azerbaijan, had investigated the case he greenlighted the continuation of the  project.

A small ship 'Pobeda' with difficulties tied up one of the islands on the Caspian Sea on November 14, 1948. Despite the waterspout, the workers discharged cargo from the ship. Due to works undertaken urgently, the cabin of a 14 square meters became the first shelter for tired workers in the stormy sea. Drilling operations in the oil well 1 on the Caspian Sea started on June 24, 1949.     

The article deals with selfless labour of the first offshore oil workers, such as Nicolay Duplikhin, Ibrahim Sadigov, Mammad Muradov, Bala Mirzayev and others.

The first offshore oil spring happened on November 7, 1949 on oil well 1. M. Kaverochkin's team didn't even imagine that the offshore oil well that they had drilled would open a bright page in the history of Azerbaijan. They didn't know that in the nearest future the legendary city of Oil Rocks would appear on the Caspian Sea, and the labour and heroism  would be relayed from generation to generation.

Farhad Sabiroglu