Sustainable Ecological Iconography of Peasant Landscapes and Vernacular Architecture in Absheron Culture: Examples From Azerbaijan Easel Paintings of the Second Half of the 20th Century
- DOI
- 10.2991/978-2-38476-468-6_16How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- Iconography; climate; ecology; painting of Azerbaijan
- Abstract
The uneven development of material and spiritual culture serves as fertile soil to stimulate many upheavals in today’s society. Spiritual culture, especially its moral and ethical components, has not been given sufficient priority by the world’s elites. Humanitarian thought in the 20th and 21st centuries has mainly taken the form of theoretical reflections on socio-economic crises or prophetic warnings of impending disasters. Ecological issues were not addressed in Western philosophy until the mid-20th century. Despite the achievements of socio-political and philosophical elites, today’s world is on the brink of a global crisis. A combination of advertising convenience, individualism and destructive waste is rapidly undermining the progress of the industrial and post-industrial revolutions. The mistaken idea that human factors are insignificant enough to harm the environment is refuted by the everyday realities of modern life. The concept of sustainable development arose as a response to the challenges posed by man and nature. Absheron’s peasant culture in the second half of the 20th century was fundamentally based on the principles of sustainable development. The reverent attitude towards the environment in the settlements of the Absheron Peninsula is expressed in the iconography of Azerbaijani painting. The iconography of painting consists of the representation of fixed actions, motifs, symbols, characters, images and figures, which may have real prototypes or may represent the semiotics of various ideas in the context of World or National Culture. The author of the article delves into the iconography of the dacha landscape and the folk dwellings found in Absheron, referencing the works of notable artists such as Tair Salakhov, Togrul Narimanbekov, Sattar Bahlulzade, Rasim Babaev, and Geyur Yunus, as well as others. The discussion focuses on the primary structures that contribute to sustainable development in the dacha landscape and their artistic representation in paintings from the latter part of the last century.
- Copyright
- © 2025 The Author(s)
- Open Access
- Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Aliyev Hikmet Najaf PY - 2025 DA - 2025/09/29 TI - Sustainable Ecological Iconography of Peasant Landscapes and Vernacular Architecture in Absheron Culture: Examples From Azerbaijan Easel Paintings of the Second Half of the 20th Century BT - Proceedings of the Contribution of Culture to Ecological Sustainability (CCES 2024) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 229 EP - 243 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-468-6_16 DO - 10.2991/978-2-38476-468-6_16 ID - Najaf2025 ER -