Between a supermarket and a hardwarestore on a busy street close to the centre of Baku, a poster high on an advertising hoarding provides a glimpse of what the emerging hub of the Caspian Sea oil industry might yet become: a country built in the image of one man.

The poster displays portraits of Heydar Aliyev, Azerbaijan's late president and, in the words of his son, "founder of an independent Azeri state", and of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who really did create the republic of Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.