Handpicked experience · Baku
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Windows of several thousand hand-cut pieces held together by nothing but geometry, and a village church whose date archaeologists still argue about.
A craft where the joinery is the whole achievement
A workshop where the work happens by eye and by hand
Interiors painted continuously across generations
A church older than the certainty about it
Caucasus foothill country on the drive each way
A full day from Baku north-west into the foothills to Sheki: the khans' palace, a workshop making the coloured lattice windows the town is known for, the old caravanserai quarter, and the church at Kish village.
The palace is famous for its shebeke: latticed windows of coloured glass held in wooden frames, filling entire walls with light.
What makes them remarkable is the joinery. A single window can contain several thousand separate pieces of hand-cut wood and glass, and not one of them is nailed, screwed or glued. The wood is cut so that every piece locks against its neighbours, and the whole panel holds together by geometry alone. The reason is practical as well as beautiful: wood moves with heat and damp, and a rigidly fixed panel of that complexity would crack itself apart within a few seasons. A panel that is only interlocked can flex.
At the workshop you will watch somebody cutting and fitting the pieces by hand, without measuring instruments, and it becomes obvious why a large window takes months.
The palace was completed in the eighteenth century as a summer residence, and it is small — two storeys, a handful of rooms — which surprises people expecting something on the scale of the name.
The exterior is covered in painted and tiled decoration, and the interior walls are painted floor to ceiling with hunting scenes, battles, flowers and geometry, layered over each other by different hands across generations. Two enormous plane trees stand in front of it, planted around the time it was built and now considerably taller than the building.
Kish, a village above the town, holds a small stone church that is among the older Christian structures in the Caucasus.
It is associated with the arrival of Christianity in Caucasian Albania, the kingdom that occupied this region long before the modern country, and excavation beneath the floor has turned up burials substantially older than the building itself. Quite how old the church is, and which phase belongs to which century, is not settled — the site was reconstructed with Norwegian involvement in the early 2000s, and the dating remains a live archaeological argument rather than a plaque you can read and be done with.
This is thirteen to fourteen hours with something like six on the road, so it is a long day and it starts early.
The palace admits visitors in timed groups and photography inside is restricted; ask before raising a camera. The caravanserai streets are cobbled and steep in places. Lunch is a scheduled stop in Sheki, and drinks with the meal are separate. Take a layer: the town sits considerably higher than Baku and is cooler for it.
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Latticed windows of coloured glass in wooden frames. A single window can hold several thousand separately cut pieces.
By shape alone. Each piece locks against its neighbours, with no nails, screws or glue anywhere in the panel.
Coloured through, and traditionally imported rather than made locally, which was part of what made these windows so costly to commission.
Yes, in family workshops in the town, and the skill passes down within those families rather than through formal training.
Small — two storeys and a handful of rooms. It was built as a summer residence, and visitors expecting something grander are often surprised.
The khans who ruled Sheki as a semi-independent state before the region came under Russian control in the nineteenth century.
Genuinely disputed. It is among the older Christian structures in the Caucasus, and burials beneath the floor are older still than the building.
It operates as a museum today. The village around it is worth the short walk on its own.