Sheki, Gabala & the Northwest

The foothills of the northwest were the heartland of Caucasian Albania, the ancient Christian kingdom that ruled much of today's Azerbaijan before the Arab conquests. Its capital stood at Gabala, whose earthworks and walls survive outside the modern town. Arab, Seljuk, Mongol and Persian rulers followed, while the local Christian communities slowly converted to Islam — all except the Udi of Nij, who still keep their church.

Sheki rose on silk. The mulberry groves of the foothills and the caravan roads between Persia, Russia and Georgia made it a trading town, and in the 1740s, in a revolt against Nader Shah's governors, a local ruler, Haji Chalabi, made it the seat of an independent khanate. After a catastrophic flood destroyed the old town in the 1770s, the khans moved to the present site higher up the valley, where the palace and the fortress walls were built.

Russia took the khanate in the early 19th century and abolished it a few years later. Under the Russian and Soviet name of Nukha the town kept its silk industry; it was renamed Sheki in 1968. Since independence Gabala has become a resort, a Soviet-era radar station there leased by Russia closed in 2012, and in 2019 UNESCO listed Sheki's historic centre with the Khan's Palace as a World Heritage Site.

The northwest has the most varied population in Azerbaijan after the northeast. Azerbaijanis are the majority, but Avars and Tsakhurs, Dagestani peoples, live in Zagatala and Balakan; the Ingiloys of Gakh are Georgian-speaking, mostly Sunni Muslim with an Orthodox Christian minority; and the Udi of Nij speak one of the languages descended from ancient Caucasian Albania and worship in their own church. Sunni Islam is more common here than in the Shia-majority south and east.

Sheki is the craft capital of the region. Its masters make shebeke, windows of coloured glass set in wooden lattice held together without nails or glue, and the town is one of the centres of kelaghayi, the patterned silk headscarf whose making and wearing is inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list. Pottery, embroidery and copper also survive in small workshops.

Sheki is known for its comic tales, above all the jokes about Hacı dayı, and has its own dialect of Azerbaijani. Hospitality follows the national pattern — tea first, food pressed on guests — and village weddings and Novruz celebrations are big communal events. Gabala has hosted an international classical music festival each summer since 2009.

Sheki, with around 65,000 people, is the region's main town: an old upper town of walled courtyard houses and mulberry trees climbing the valley, and a lower Soviet-era town with the market and bus station. Zagatala, Gabala, Gakh, Oghuz and Balakan are smaller district centres, and much of the population lives in large villages strung along the foothill road.

Farming dominates. Hazelnuts are the region's great cash crop, grown in orchards from Gabala to Balakan and exported widely; chestnuts, walnuts, tobacco and livestock follow. Sheki's old silk trade lives on in sericulture, and tourism — Sheki's old town, Gabala's hotels and resort — is now the growth business.

The rhythm is rural: early markets, men in the tea houses through the afternoon, families in the orchards at the late-summer nut harvest. In summer Gabala fills with visitors from Baku and the Gulf, while in the upland villages the young leave for Baku or Russia and the old stay behind.

Sheki is one of Azerbaijan's great food towns. Its piti is cooked for hours in individual clay crocks — mutton, chickpeas, chestnuts and a piece of tail fat, coloured with saffron — and is eaten in two stages: the broth first, poured over torn bread, then the meat and chickpeas. Sheki halva is the other speciality: a lattice of rice-flour pastry filled with chopped hazelnuts and soaked in syrup, sold by weight in the town's shops. Sheki's sweet shops also sell nabat, crystallised sugar that is taken with tea.

The foothills supply the rest. Hazelnuts, walnuts and chestnuts go into sweets and stews, persimmons and quinces into preserves, and lamb, veal and river trout come to the table grilled as kebab. Qutab stuffed with herbs and lavash baked on a curved iron sheet are everyday fare, and mountain honey and sheep's cheese are sold along the Gabala road.

Tea is served, as everywhere, strong and black in armudu glasses with jam, and the region's hazelnuts often come with it.

Sheki is the reason most visitors come. The Khan's Palace, set inside the old fortress walls, is small but covered in painted battle scenes, flowers and hunting motifs, with shebeke windows that throw coloured light across its rooms. Below it, the Upper and Lower Caravanserais preserve the courtyards and arched galleries of the silk-trade era, and the upper town's lanes of courtyard houses are part of the UNESCO-listed historic centre. A short drive above the town, the village of Kish has its restored medieval church.

Gabala, to the east, is the base for the forested foothills of the Greater Caucasus: the Tufandag mountain resort with its cable cars, Nohur lake, the ruins of ancient Gabala outside town, and the Udi village of Nij, with its church, to the southwest.

West of Sheki, the foothill road runs through Gakh — where the stone village of Ilisu sits in a mountain valley near the Ilisu nature reserve — to Zagatala, with its 19th-century Russian fortress and giant plane trees, and on to Balakan and the Georgian border; the Zagatala nature reserve protects the high forests and meadows behind.