Sheki Silk Road Town

About this pack

A 6-day mid-range trip to Sheki, Azerbaijan, taking in Palace of Sheki Khans, Church of Kish, Sheki Caravanserai and Galarsan-Gorarsan fortress.

Inside the Sheki Silk Road Town trip

Sheki Silk Road Town begins at the Palace of Shaki Khans, built in 1797 under Muhammad Husayn Khan Mushtaq as the summer residence of the Shaki khans in northwestern Azerbaijan. The palace and the historic centre of Sheki around it were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site on 7 July 2019, recognising the town as an outstanding example of a traditional settlement and a site of cultural exchange along the Silk Roads — a nomination first put forward in 1998 by Gulnara Mehmandarova, then president of the Azerbaijan Committee of ICOMOS. The building has been restored repeatedly since the 1830s, with a full restoration carried out between 1955 and 1965 under Niyazi Rzaev and a further renovation from 2002 to 2004 supported by the World Bank and led by a German restoration team, work that preserved the palace's painted interiors well enough that visiting poet Nikolai Tikhonov, on seeing them in 1947, wrote that they proved poetry and philosophy had once been highly valued in the old town of Nukha.

From the palace the route runs to the Church of Kish, a Georgian Orthodox church probably dating to the early 12th century in the village of Kiş, about 5 kilometres north of Shaki. Archaeological research carried out between 2000 and 2003, a joint project between Azerbaijan's Architecture and Construction University and the Norwegian Humanitarian Enterprise, radiocarbon-dated a cultic site beneath the church's altar to around 3000 BC, while the standing church building itself dates to roughly 990–1160 AD; the excavation concluded the church was first built as a diophysite Georgian church before later becoming Chalcedonian, though earlier research had proposed it may also have served at different times as a Caucasian Albanian Apostolic church and an Armenian Apostolic church. Armenian tradition attributes an earlier structure on the site to St. Elishe, a disciple of Thaddeus of Edessa said to have built a church here in the 1st century AD before being killed nearby, though later historians have questioned whether the location matches the one he described.

The itinerary continues to Sheki Caravanserai, formed of two adjoining complexes known as the Upper and Lower Caravanserai, both dated to the 18th and 19th centuries as trade along Azerbaijan's Silk Road routes drove the construction of fortified coaching inns with a single defensible gate. The Lower Caravanserai covers 8,000 square metres around a central courtyard pool, with four entrances and 242 rooms that once combined merchant shops, storage and guest quarters connected by floor hatches so traders could keep watch over their goods from below; it has served as a hotel complex since 1988. The Upper Caravanserai, set on more uneven ground beside the Gurjan River, covers 6,000 square metres with a trapezoidal plan and around 300 rooms, its street-facing façade rising 14 metres, and remains a sightseeing stop rather than a working hotel.

The route closes at Galarsan-Gorarsan, a medieval fortress whose ruins stand on the summit of Garatepe Mountain above the Kish River, about 4 kilometres from Shaki. Built in the 8th or 9th century and thoroughly fortified for defence, the fortress takes its name — meaning "you will come, you will see" in Azerbaijani — from an 18th-century episode in which Haji Chalabi Khan, ruler of the Shaki Khanate, took refuge inside as the Persian ruler Nader Shah's army approached; when Nader Shah demanded his surrender, Chalabi is said to have answered only with the phrase that gave the fortress its name. Nader Shah brought a large army to the walls in 1744 but failed to take the fortress and withdrew, leaving Galarsan-Gorarsan's reputation, and its name, intact — a defiant final stop after a palace, a disputed medieval church and a Silk Road caravanserai turned working hotel.

• Palace of Shaki Khans — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Church of Kish — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Upper Caravanserai (Shaki) — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Galarsan-Gorarsan — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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