Each bath uses about a barrel of crude, which is recycled into a communal tank for future bathers, given the cost of oil these days. Mirzeyev also uses paper towels to wipe bathers clean, a long, hard process that involves several showers.
He says he likes his job. Until Azerbaijan's economy ticked up over the last two years, Mirzeyev, 40 and a father of three, was a seasonal laborer in Ukraine, where wages were higher.
"If we have visitors, then we have work," Aslan said.
Unlike the oil from Azerbaijan's offshore deposits, sold internationally under the brand Azeri Light crude, Naftalan's oil is too heavy to have much commercial value. Luckily, because most of the bath attendants and patients seemed to smoke, it is not particularly flammable, either.
The resort has 80 rooms and 10 tubs, five for women, five for men. The tubs are not scoured between baths, and as might be expected, have perhaps the world's worst bathtub rings — greasy and greenish brown.
Oil has been Azerbaijan's ticket for a long time.
Oil seepages have been noted in Naftalan since at least the 13th century, when Marco Polo passed through and, even today, a reedy marsh, about the size of a football field, has a black patina of oil on the water. The site was a stopping place on the Silk Road to China.
Later, Azerbaijan's larger oil reserves on the Caspian coast were developed by the Swedish Nobel brothers, the rivals of the American oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller.
In a sign of the more recent past in Naftalan, a museum keeps a collection of wooden crutches left by Soviet-era visitors "cured" by oil at the peak of the Soviet oil spa boom in the 1970s and 1980s.
The museum also has a photograph of a sign that hung at the city limits back then, "He Who Has Naftalan Has Everything."
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