The Silk Road's jewel box — Khan's Palace, walnut halva and mountain mist
Sheki is Azerbaijan's most beautiful historic city, draped across forested foothills of the Greater Caucasus where the old Silk Road caravans stopped to rest. The Khan's Palace (1762) is a miniature wonder: its entire facade is composed of 5,000 hand-cut stained-glass pieces called shebeke, assembled without glue or nails, filtering light into the fresco-covered interior like a kaleidoscope. The city is also the home of piti — a single-serving lamb and chickpea stew cooked in a clay pot — and pakhlava made with mountain walnuts that no other Azerbaijani city can match.
Sheki was one of the great entrepôts of the Silk Road, a city where camel caravans from China, India and Persia converged to trade silk, spices and metals under the protection of the Sheki Khanate. The Khan's Palace was built in 1762 by Huseyn Khan using master craftsmen from Tabriz and Tbilisi; the shebeke window technique they used requires no adhesive of any kind — each piece of coloured glass is held in a wooden lattice frame carved to a tolerance of fractions of a millimetre. The caravanserai at the city's centre, now a hotel, once housed merchants from across Eurasia.