National Museum of History of Azerbaijan, National history museum in Baku, Azerbaijan

The National Museum of History of Azerbaijan occupies the former Taghiyev mansion, a pale-yellow stone building on a corner with a rusticated ground floor and a rounded corner bay topped by a dark dome. Designed by Józef Gosławski in Italian Renaissance style, it was built between 1895 and 1901 and rises three stories on all four sides, with some parts reaching four floors.

The mansion was built between 1895 and 1901 for oil magnate Haji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev, designed by Polish architect Józef Gosławski in an Italian Renaissance style. After the Red Army entered Baku in April 1920, the residence was confiscated and became the State Historical Museum in June 1920, opening to visitors in 1921. From 1941 to 1954 the museum moved to the Palace of the Shirvanshahs while the Council of People's Commissars used the mansion; it returned in 1954 and received the whole building in 2000.

The museum's name changed with the political order: founded in 1920 as the State Museum of Azerbaijan, it became the Museum of History of Azerbaijan in 1936. Its six scientific departments cover ancient and medieval history, modern and contemporary history, ethnography, and numismatics and epigraphy.

The museum occupies Taghiyev's former mansion, with exhibition halls across several floors and two marble staircases at the west front. The Oriental and Occidental ballrooms are on the second floor, and the Memorial Museum of H.Z. Taghiyev is part of the same complex. Allow time to move between floors and courtyards.

Four layers of white paint covered the floral decoration of Sona Khanum's mirrored boudoir during the Soviet period, when it was judged a bourgeois remnant. Renovations in 2000 uncovered the design, and only the ornate mirrored mosaic ceiling survives of the room's original furnishings.