For many travellers Sheki is the most beautiful place in Azerbaijan, and it's no accident. It's perched on the green slopes of the Greater Caucasus, with pitched tile roofs, stone houses, caravanserais and the sound of mountain rivers. It feels more like an Alpine village or the old Silk Road than oil-rich Baku on the Caspian. The town grew rich on silk and trade and was the capital of a powerful khanate in the 18th century, and its greatest treasure dates from that time.
That treasure is the Khan's Palace (Xan Sarayı), an 18th-century architectural gem covered in frescoes and shebeke. Shebeke are handmade stained-glass windows made from thousands of pieces of coloured glass fitted into a wooden lattice without nails or glue. The art of shebeke, the silk, Sheki halva and the whole historic centre earned the town its World Heritage status. Around it you'll find the stone caravanserais (you can sleep in one), the market, the workshops and the neighbouring village of Kish with its ancient church.
This guide helps you get around Sheki in a practical way: how much it costs to visit the Khan's Palace, where to watch shebeke being made, where to taste and buy the famous halva, how to get there from Baku, where to stay (including the caravanserai) and which trips to take in the area. Sheki is a town to take slowly, breathe the mountain air and discover the country's oldest, most hand-crafted side.
Sheki is one of the oldest towns in the Caucasus. Its origins go back to Caucasian Albania, the Christian kingdom that ruled these lands in antiquity, and the church in nearby Kish survives from that time. The town was a Silk Road trading post and prospered on commerce and silk production. Its heyday came in the 18th century, when it became the capital of the Sheki Khanate. This was one of many khanates the Azerbaijani lands split into after the Persian Empire weakened. Khan Haji Chelebi made it powerful and independent, and his successors built the Khan's Palace, decorated with frescoes and shebeke stained glass, a symbol of that golden age. In the 19th century, like the rest of the country, it came under the Russian Empire, and it later became part of Soviet and then independent Azerbaijan. Its historic centre, including the Palace and the caravanserais, has been a World Heritage Site since 2019. That history, from Caucasian Albania to the khanates, is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Azerbaijan's mountainous north-west, among the forests of the Greater Caucasus and old Silk Road stops: Sheki, home to the World Heritage Khan's Palace; Gabala, capital of ancient Albania; and coppersmith villages such as Lahij.
Read the history of The north-west: Sheki and Zaqatala →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Sheki is one of the oldest towns in the Caucasus, and to understand its history you have to go back to a kingdom that is almost forgotten today: Caucasian Albania. It has nothing to do with Albania in the Balkans. It was a Christian kingdom that, between Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, ruled much of what is now Azerbaijan, between the Caucasus and the Caspian. The Caucasian Albanians adopted Christianity very early, around the 4th-5th centuries, and had their own Church, alphabet and culture, alongside their Armenian and Georgian neighbours.
The Sheki region was part of that Caucasian Albanian world, and the clearest evidence lies a few kilometres from town, in the village of Kish: a small stone church that ranks among the oldest Christian churches in the region and is linked to the early days of the Christianisation of Caucasian Albania. Excavations at the site, which involved Norwegian archaeologists (in a project connected to the famous explorer Thor Heyerdahl), uncovered very old tombs that show how long people have lived here.
Those centuries left a Christian layer in the area that came long before Islam. With the Arab invasions of the 7th and 8th centuries, Caucasian Albania gradually faded as a political entity, the region slowly became Muslim, and its people merged into the Turkic-Persian world that would give rise to the Azerbaijani people. But the Caucasian Albanian past is still there, in the stones of Kish and in Sheki's deep roots, a reminder that this land was Christian long before it was Muslim.
During the Middle Ages and the early modern period, Sheki grew thanks to its strategic position on the trade routes linking East and West, which we usually group under the name of the Silk Road. Set on the slopes of the Greater Caucasus, where the Caspian plains meet the mountains, Sheki became a trading hub and, above all, a major silk-producing centre, the activity that gave it its name and its fortune for centuries.
Silkworms were raised in the region on the local mulberry trees, and Sheki produced raw silk and yarn that were sold across the Caucasus, Persia, Russia and beyond. That silk wealth drew merchants and filled the town with caravanserais, the large stone inns where caravans stored their goods and animals and traders spent the night in safety. The two large caravanserais that still stand, with their courtyards and galleries, are the monumental record of that prosperous trading era.
The town had to be rebuilt more than once. Historic Sheki stood a little further down, but a devastating river flood in the mid-18th century swept away much of the settlement, and the town was rebuilt on its current site, higher up the slope and safer. That rebuilt Sheki, with its stone houses and distinctive pitched tiled roofs (designed for mountain rain, something rare in the rest of the country), is the one that has survived to this day and that makes up the beautiful World Heritage historic centre.
Sheki's great era, the one that left it its greatest treasure, was the 18th century, when it became the capital of an independent khanate. To understand this, look at the region's political map: for centuries, present-day Azerbaijan had been within the orbit of the Persian Empire. When that empire fell into crisis and weakened, around the mid-18th century (after the assassination of Nader Shah in 1747), Azerbaijani territory broke up into some twenty small states called khanates, each ruled by a khan. Sheki was one of the most important.
The key figure was Haji Chelebi Khan, who in the mid-18th century consolidated the Sheki Khanate, threw off Persian rule and even defeated Nader Shah himself, turning Sheki into a respected regional power. Under his dynasty the town enjoyed a golden age: the silk trade flourished, notable buildings went up and the khans' court surrounded itself with artists and craftsmen. The most dazzling result of that era is the Khan's Palace (Xan Sarayı), built around 1797 as a summer residence, with its frescoes, its decorated walls and, above all, its shebeke stained-glass windows, the high point of Azerbaijani art.
The khanates, however, were small and surrounded by powerful, ambitious neighbours: the Persian Empire, which wanted them back, and the growing Russian Empire, advancing from the north. In that game of alliances and wars, the khans of Sheki manoeuvred as best they could. In the early 19th century, the fate of all the khanates north of the Aras was sealed in Russia's favour, and Sheki's independent golden age came to an end, leaving as its lasting legacy the palace the world admires today.
In the early 19th century, after the wars between the Russian Empire and Persia, the khanates of present-day Azerbaijan, including Sheki, gradually came under Russian control. The treaties of Gulistan (1813) and Turkmenchay (1828) confirmed that rule: Persia ceded to Russia all the territory north of the Aras River. The Sheki Khanate was abolished as an independent entity and absorbed into the Russian imperial administration, first as a supervised 'khanate' and then directly as a province. The town lost its sovereignty but remained a regional centre for silk and trade.
Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, Sheki kept producing silk and living from its crafts, as part of the imperial economy. After the Russian Revolution and the brief interlude of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (1918-1920), the town, like the whole country, became part of the Soviet Union. In Soviet times Sheki kept its silk industry (with large textile factories), its craft traditions and its architectural heritage, which was protected and studied, although the town stayed somewhat off the main circuits.
With Azerbaijan's independence in 1991 and the growth of tourism in recent decades, Sheki has been reborn as one of the country's best-loved destinations. Recognition came in 2019, when UNESCO inscribed the 'Historic Centre of Sheki with the Khan's Palace' on the World Heritage List, highlighting its traditional architecture, its caravanserais, its palace and the art of shebeke. Today Sheki combines that age-old heritage, from Caucasian Albania to the khans, from the Silk Road to halva, with the quiet life of a mountain town, and for many travellers it is the most beautiful corner of Azerbaijan.
