Travel deep dive
Sheki: What Silk Money Built on the Silk Road
Plenty of towns sat on the Silk Road. Sheki, on the forested southern slope of the Greater Caucasus in Azerbaijan's north-west, is unusual in how much of what the trade paid for is still standing and still in use — a walled citadel, a khans' palace with windows assembled from thousands of pieces of glass and no adhesive at all, and caravanserais that never stopped being places to sleep.
Updated 2026-09-19
The silk that paid for the streets
Sheki's wealth came from silk, and the connection is not a historical footnote here: the raising of silkworms and the traditional production of silk for weaving is one of the practices Azerbaijan has on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage, and the town's craft workshops still sit among the cobbled lanes rather than in a museum quarter set aside for them. The historic centre is both a state historical and architectural reserve and, since 2019, a UNESCO World Heritage Site — the country's newest cultural inscription until the mountain villages joined it.
Two smaller facts say a lot about how the town sees itself. Until 1968 it was not called Sheki at all, but Nukha, after a nearby village. And in 2008 it joined the League of Historical Cities, a Japan-based organisation whose membership includes Rome, Paris, Athens and Jerusalem — a company Sheki takes seriously, and a fair indication of the weight the town gives its own centre.
Shebeke: thousands of pieces of glass, no glue and no nails
The most impressive structure in the centre is Sheki Fortress, the former citadel of the Sheki khanate, and inside its crenellated walls stands the building almost everyone comes for: the Khan's Palace, built in the eighteenth century as the khans' administrative seat and shaded by plane trees five centuries old. Its façade and interior carry dense painted decoration, but the technique that makes it singular is the glazing. Shebeke windows are assembled from small hand-cut wooden pieces holding thousands of fragments of coloured glass, fitted together without glue and without a single nail — a lattice held by nothing but its own geometry.
It is worth understanding shebeke as a living craft rather than a preserved curiosity, because the fortress grounds include a shebeke workshop alongside a House of Craftsmen, a ceramics and applied-arts centre and the Museum of Folk and Applied Arts. Seeing a frame being cut a few minutes' walk from windows made the same way three hundred years ago is the part of Sheki that tends to stay with people.
Caravanserais you can sleep in, and a sweet shop worth the stop
Outside the fortress walls the eighteenth-century Upper Caravanserai still functions as a hotel, so a night in Sheki can be spent in a merchant's lodging with tea served in the courtyard — the single clearest way to feel what the trade route actually was. Nearby sit the Shakikhanovs' House, the house museums of the writers Mirza Fatali Akhundzadeh and Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh, and a miniature museum whose scale models of Azerbaijani monuments make an unexpectedly good primer before heading further into the mountains.
Sheki's other reputation is for sweets. Its halva is a local take on pakhlava built from layers of rice-dough lattice packed with ground nuts, syrup, spices and saffron, and the town's sweet shops sell it by the box; several run halva-making masterclasses with pastry chefs working from family recipes generations old. It belongs to a cooking tradition that shifts from valley to valley, and Sheki's own version of dolma, cooked in a clay pot called a dopu, is another example of the same pattern. The dopu's best-known dish, though, is piti: lamb and chickpeas assembled raw in individual clay pots and simmered for hours, then eaten in two stages — the broth first with bread, the meat and chickpeas after.