Wordpress permalinks do not work. No errors

问题:

I'm running a blog on subdomain. "blog.ourcompanyname.com".

Wordpress folder is located under "/var/www/wordpress"

Apache instance is running on 8081 port (manually configured) and being proxy passed by Nginx (which runs on 80 port). The reason we need NGINX is because we are running a second application on the same server (VPS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS), and it is not a "PHP" application.

Now, everything is working smooth: you can access different pages, static content (pictures, etc) are working.

BUT, here comes the tough part:

If I enable permalinks (because default links are horrible) - regardless of what I put in the URL, I end up on the first (front) page!

It can be anything: e.g, blog.ourcompanyname.com/2013/11/hello-world/ or blog.ourcompanyname.com/bla-bla-bla-bla/

I don't get 500 or 404 error. And that is creepy.

This is our APACHE2 virtual host config file:

<VirtualHost *:8081>
        ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

        DocumentRoot /var/www/wordpress
        <Directory />
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride All
        </Directory>
        <Directory /var/www/wordpress/>
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride All
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
        </Directory>

        ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
        <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
                AllowOverride None
                Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        </Directory>

        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log

        # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
        # alert, emerg.
        LogLevel warn

        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

    Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
    <Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
        Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
        Order deny,allow
        Deny from all
        Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
    </Directory>

</VirtualHost>

And this is our NGINX config file:

server {
   server_name blog.ourcompanyname.com;

   access_log /var/log/nginx/blog.ourcompanyname.com.access.log main;
   error_log /var/log/nginx/blog.ourcompanyname.com.error.log;

   root /var/www/wordpress; # Wordpress blog

   location / {
      index index.php;
      try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args;
   }

   location ~ \.php$ {
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
      proxy_set_header Host $http_host;

      proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8081;
   }

   location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
      expires max;
      log_not_found off;
   }
}

The .htaccess file is being generated by means of wordpress, so we don't touch it at all. But for sake of testing I've also tried to change the RewriteBase from "/" to "/wordpress/" and other stuff that has something to do with directories, but no avail.

Please, HELP!