^{Image: Country Life Vlog/YouTube}

It’s a warm winter day in the village. A woman is bringing wood to start the fire while a man is filling the kettle with spring water. There are sheep, chickens, turkeys, dogs, and even rabbits sunbathing in the backyard as the woman starts cooking one of her recipes. It is not an advertisement or a fairytale movie but the beginning of one of the latest videos that millions of people in Azerbaijan and around the world are familiar with. Some even state that they know more about this YouTube channel than they do about Azerbaijan.

The Country Life Vlog, known to its Azerbaijani viewers as Kənd Həyatı, is a cinematic video diary of farm life in Azerbaijan. As of February 2024, The Country Life Vlog has 6.12 million subscribers on YouTube, with each video getting over a million views. 

^{Image: Stephanie Lazerte}

While the family leads a secluded life and doesn’t give many interviews, one of our colleagues, Stephanie Lazerte, had the opportunity to visit them at their home, where they were warm and welcoming. Also, thanks to a four-year-old interview given to an Azerbaijani news website, 1News, we know that the channel’s host is Aziza, and the person behind the camera is her son Amiraslan. In 2020, due to the pandemic, he lost his job in Baku and moved back to his native village in the Qusar District of Azerbaijan. That’s when, together with his mother, he decided to showcase the simple farm life in their country. 

Situated in the Greater Caucasus Mountain, Qusar District is known for its lush forests and mountainous terrain, which add unique, spectacular scenes to The Country Life Vlog’s videos. Besides the picturesque landscapes, the district is known for its multiethnic cultural heritage. Besides ethnic Azerbaijanis living in the district, Qusar is home to Lezgins and Tsakhurs, who are considered indigenous peoples of the region. This reflects the multiculturalism and ethnic diversity that characterizes Azerbaijan as a whole.

Although, as with anything on the internet today, it is hard not only to predict what might become popular but also to explain the reason why—when it comes to The Country Life Vlog, there might be a few answers. 

ASMR, Cottagecore, and Food

The Country Life Vlog videos are not only pleasant to watch but also—and for some YouTube viewers, that is rather an important reason—they are pleasant to listen to. The sounds that are so typical for life on a farm—from roosters crowing to dogs barking—are so crystal clear that they create an illusion of actually being on a farm. ‘The crystal clear sound’ can be explained by the rise in popularity of the ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) video phenomenon on the internet in recent years. 

^{Image: Country Life Vlog video screengrab}

The year 2020 saw the beginning of the “cottagecore aesthetic” on the internet. Simultaneously, that is the year when The Country Life Vlog started gaining popularity. “In the cottagecore universe, there are no phones pinging constantly with updates, no urgent work emails, no evenings spent responding to the onerous demands of a tyrannical boss,” the New York Times writes. Indeed, it is this slow and simple living that makes Aziza’s videos so different from other types of content we see on the internet today. 

Lastly, it is, of course, Aziza’s cooking. Her channel is full of different recipes for homecooked meals—from traditional Azerbaijani and Caucasian dishes to burgers, pizza, and cinnamon buns. 

The Rise of Azerbaijani Countryside YouTubers

This simple life of people in villages would rarely get any attention from the media or the public, but it seems like with the rise of cottagecore, there are now more content creators following Aziza’s example of showing Azerbaijani rural life and gaining popularity. A quick search on YouTube of “Azerbaijan village life” shows a variety of other family village channels from Azerbaijan—Faraway Village Family, Sweet Village, Relaxing Village, Grandma Village Vlog—the list goes on. 

Perhaps in the near future, Azerbaijan will be known not for being one of the Formula One road circuits, or for hosting Eurovision 2012, or for its oil and gas reserves, but for its most precious treasure, its people.