Shaki

Shaki grew where the mulberry groves of the foothills met the caravan roads running between Persia, Georgia and the Russian lands to the north, and silk made it. Raw silk was reeled and traded here for centuries, and the town's wealth came from merchants passing along the mountain route rather than from farmland. The wider district was part of the old Caucasian Albanian and later Persian spheres, and its people converted to Islam over a long period while keeping a mixed population of Azerbaijanis and Caucasian mountain peoples.

In the 1740s, as Nader Shah's rule pressed on the region, a local leader, Haji Chalabi, led a revolt against his governors and made Shaki the seat of an independent khanate. The khans built the palace, the fortress and the caravanserais that still stand. A catastrophic flood in the 1770s destroyed the older town on lower ground, and the settlement was rebuilt higher up the valley, which is why the historic quarter climbs so steeply today.

The Russian Empire took the khanate early in the 19th century and abolished it a few years later. Under the name Nukha the town continued to reel and weave silk through the Russian and Soviet periods, with a large combine employing much of the population; it was renamed Shaki in 1968. The silk industry contracted sharply after independence. In 2019 UNESCO inscribed the historic centre of Shaki with the Khan's Palace as a World Heritage Site, and tourism has since become central to the town's economy.

Shaki is the craft town of the northwest. Its best-known skill is shebeke: windows made of small pieces of coloured glass held in a wooden lattice assembled without nails or glue, fitted in the palace and in old houses and still made in workshops in the upper town. The town is also a centre of kelaghayi, the patterned silk headscarf whose making and wearing is on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage, and copper, pottery and embroidery survive in small workshops.

The town has a reputation across Azerbaijan for humour. Shaki jokes, many of them built around a stock character, are told nationally, and the local dialect is recognisable enough to be a joke in itself. People are used to the reputation and play up to it with visitors.

Sunni Islam is more common here than in the Shia-majority south and east, and the wider region mixes Azerbaijanis with Avars, Tsakhurs, Georgian-speaking Ingiloys and the Christian Udi of Nij, so religious variety is ordinary rather than remarkable. Manners are those of a small provincial town: elders greeted first, guests fed at length, weddings that fill a street, and long afternoons in tea houses where men play backgammon and discuss the news. Novruz in March is the biggest communal celebration of the year.

About 68,000 people live in Shaki, which makes it one of the larger towns of the interior. The upper town of courtyard houses, mulberry trees and workshops sits above a lower town of Soviet-era blocks, offices, the bazaar and the bus station, and the two are linked by a steady climb that shapes daily movement.

Farming in the surrounding district underpins the economy. Tobacco and nuts are the cash crops of the region — the northwest grows most of Azerbaijan's tobacco, and hazelnuts are processed at Zaqatala — with fruit and livestock alongside them; silkworm rearing continues on a reduced scale, a remnant of the industry that once employed thousands at the town's silk combine. Tourism now provides much of the new work, in guesthouses, restaurants, craft workshops and driving, and public-sector jobs in schools, the hospital and local government account for many of the rest.

Mornings begin at the bazaar and the bakeries; afternoons slow into the tea houses; summer evenings fill the parks and the forest edge above town, where families from Baku take rooms to escape the heat. Wages are low and many households rely on money sent from relatives working in the capital or in Russia. Managing visitor numbers in the protected historic centre, and keeping old houses repaired rather than rebuilt, are the town's steady preoccupations.

Shaki is a serious food town. Its piti is cooked for several hours in a single-portion clay crock: mutton on the bone, chickpeas, chestnuts, onion and a piece of tail fat, coloured with saffron. It is eaten in two courses, the broth first poured over torn flatbread with sumac and dried mint, then the meat and chickpeas mashed together, and it is a midday dish rather than an evening one.

The town's other speciality is Shaki halva, unlike the halvas of the wider region: layers of fine rice-flour pastry piped into a lattice, filled with chopped hazelnuts and sugar, baked and soaked in syrup, then cut into diamonds and sold by weight. Sweet shops also sell nabat, crystallised sugar taken with tea, along with nut brittles and preserves. Hazelnuts, walnuts and chestnuts from the surrounding orchards go into sweets and stews alike.

Everyday cooking is that of the foothills: lamb and veal grilled as kebab, river trout, dolma of vine or cabbage leaves, qutab filled with greens, cheese or pumpkin, and khingal with garlic yoghurt. Persimmons, quinces and cornelian cherries are preserved as jam, and mountain honey and sheep's cheese are sold at the bazaar and along the roads out of town. Tea is black, strong and served in pear-shaped armudu glasses with jam rather than milk.