There’s a mind-bending Soviet-era oil rig city ‘floating’ on the planet’s largest lake kraken market

When filmmaker Marc Wolfensberger first found out about Neft Daşları, he thought it was a myth. He kept hearing about this secretive city, sprawled like floating, rusting tentacles across the Caspian Sea, far from the nearest shoreline. But very few had ever seen it, he said. “The degree of mystery was enormously high.”

It wasn’t until he saw it with his own eyes, when he managed to travel there on a water delivery ship in the late 1990s, that he knew it was real. It “was beyond anything I had seen before,” he told CNN. Guarded by military vessels, it was like “a motorway in the middle of the sea,” he said, stretching out “like an octopus.”

Desperate to document this mind-boggling city, he spent eight years convincing Azerbaijan’s government to let him return, which he finally did in 2008, spending two weeks there to make his film, “Oil Rocks: City Above the Sea.”
Neft Daşları, which translates to “Oil Rocks,” is a tangle of oil wells and production sites connected by miles of bridges in the vastness of the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest lake. It’s around 60 miles off the coast of Azerbaijan’s capital city of Baku and a six-hour boat ride from the mainland.

It is the world’s oldest offshore oil platform, according to the Guinness Book of records, and at its peak, bustled with more than 5,000 inhabitants.