Pirallahi literally means "the shrine of Allah", from the word pir - a shrine / holy place. In ancient times, there was a place of worship and pilgrimage on the island, but there is no exact data on which religion it belongs to. According to one version, it was a shrine of the
Zoroastrians, and according to others,
Muslims. The
Catalans in 1375 are entered Baku to the map as center city of whole Caspian Sea and next to it Priala.
Stenka Razin in the Caspian Sea (
Vasily Surikov) During
Russian Imperial times the island's name was
Svyatoy (from
Russian: Святой - "The holy one"). It is said that undersea booty from a 1660 sea battle between
Persians and
Cossack leader
Stepan Razin lies off the northern tip of the island. Pirallahi Island is said to be among the first places where oil was extracted in
Azerbaijan, and in the 1820s it was divided into two separate areas, one residential, and another where oil was refined into paraffin. In 1934, oil explorers dropped metal drills off piers from the island, which at the time was considered an advancement in offshore
oil exploration.
Artyom Island While Azerbaijan was part of the
Soviet Union, the island was renamed as
Artyom Island in the 1936 () after the
pioneer revolutionary Comrade Artyom (
Fyodor Sergeyev). Pirallahi Island still has a settlement called
Artyom. The old Artyom village was evacuated due to rising water levels of the Caspian Sea and residents moved to a series of apartment towers built by German prisoners in 1948 .On 5 October 1999, the current name was returned. In the early 1950s, by the construction of a dam, the island was connected to the mainland and thus transformed from an island into a peninsula. In 2016, a road bridge was built on the site of the dam, under which ships can pass ==Infrastructure==