The road into Sheki drops through walnut forests so dense the light goes green and cool, and by the time the city materializes in the valley below — terracotta rooftops pressed against the Caucasus foothills, minarets needling the sky — I had already forgotten that Azerbaijan existed on a map. We arrived in late afternoon, when the air smelled of dried herbs and something sweet from a halva stall near the bus station on Heydar Aliyev Street, and I knew we weren’t moving on quickly.
The Palace and Its Windows
The Khan’s Palace — Sheki Xan Sarayı — is what everyone comes for, and it earns every kilometer of the journey to reach it. Built in 1762 without a single nail, it is a single two-storey pavilion that seems too small for its reputation until you step inside and the light hits. The windows are shebeke: thousands of hand-cut fragments of colored glass fitted into intricate geometric frames without glue or metal, the entire structure held by the physics of tension and precision alone. On a clear morning, the interior wall becomes a projection of amber, blue, and rose that moves as the sun moves. I stood there for longer than I could account for. Lia had to come find me.
The frescoes covering every surface — hunting scenes, battle tableaux, vases of flowers in impossible colors — were restored in the Soviet era and look almost too vivid, but up close you can see the original brushwork beneath, the older, quieter layer.
The Old Town and What I Didn’t Expect
The Yukhari Caravanserai, a sixteenth-century merchants’ inn just outside the palace gates, now houses a hotel and a handful of carpet workshops where old men work looms in near silence. I had read about it but expected it to be decorative, a thing to photograph. What I didn’t expect was being invited in for tea by a weaver named Tural, who spread out three kilims on the stone floor and spent forty minutes explaining the regional patterns — the pomegranate motifs specific to Sheki, the border styles that place a carpet within a single village’s tradition. We bought nothing but left knowing more than we had any right to.
The bazaar streets near Karvansara Square sell the local specialties: piti, a lamb and chickpea soup cooked in individual clay pots that arrive at the table sealed, the fat pooled on top; and Sheki halva, not the sesame paste of the Middle East but a dense, layered pastry of rice flour, butter, saffron, and nuts that dissolves into something between shortbread and a dream.
Up Into the Foothills
A marshrutka runs from the city center toward Kish, six kilometers north, where a twelfth-century Albanian church sits on a hillside in astonishing quiet. The church predates Islam in the Caucasus and is small enough to feel human-scaled. The drive there passes through orchards of apple and pear, and the road smells of woodsmoke even in summer.
When to go: May through June, or September into October — the foothills are green in spring and gold in autumn, temperatures are mild, and the walnut harvest in October fills the markets with something almost ceremonial.