Due to its pseudo-Venetian style, this building on Istiqlal Street seems strange when you look at it from the nearby park. It is only about 110 years old and it has seen a turbulent history, which has been told in the other reviews. The man who had the palace built was an oil baron who sponsored a lot of institutions for the people of Baku, especially for the poor ones. Again, one can see that Baku is a very inhomogeneous mixture of architectonic styles.

The story of two buildings in Baku brought tears to my eyes. One was this building and the other one was The Palace of Happiness. When the son of Aga Musa Nagiev, the richest but stingiest Oil Baron in Azerbaijan, died of tuberculosis, he was advised by his friend to build a beautiful building in his memory. So Nagiev hired the top Polish architect to design a building in Venetian Gothic style which he donated to the Islamic Charity. The building was damaged and restored repeatedly. Eventually all Islamic inscriptions were removed from it and the building was made the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan.