Goytepe was founded as a Russian military garrison settlement in the nineteenth century, and the wooden houses built by Russian settlers — in the log-cabin and clapboard style common to northern Russia and Siberia — are strikingly out of place in subtropical southern Azerbaijan. The contrast between these northern buildings and the local Azerbaijani architecture around them is genuinely odd and worth pausing over. Many of the wooden houses are decaying, which adds to the photogenic atmosphere but also means they will not be there indefinitely.
The settlement, then called Prishib or Prishibinsk, was established as part of Russia's southern frontier expansion along the Caspian coast. After the Soviet collapse, the Russian military and most Russian civilians left, and the Orthodox church that once served the garrison community fell into disuse. Walking the streets of the older part of town gives a tangible sense of the post-Soviet emptying of these southern Caucasian towns.