Baku's oil millionaires spent the decade before 1914 turning crude into carved stone. Murtuza Mukhtarov built the Palace of Happiness for his wife Liza Tuganova in 1911–12, hiring the Polish architect Józef Płoszko and importing French blueprints — French Gothic Revival cut into local badamdam limestone, an almond stone that reads pale olive-tan under Caspian sun.

This system works the way the building does. Outside: tracery, pinnacles, deep-cut ashlar where every panel sits recessed under a hard shadow. Inside: walnut joinery, wrought iron, bronze hairlines, and doorways where Cyrillic and Arabic-script Azerbaijani sit on the same lintel. Relief carries the hierarchy — not color, not weight.