Khan’s Palace

Khan’s Palace

Without the alarm, I woke at 0745, suggesting that I’m somewhat on local time now.  I did wake up maybe around 0300 once but continued sleeping very well, obviously!  A breakfast of egg, bread, jam and cheeses was served in the garden at 0800.

My old guidebook suggests that the Khan’s Palace opened at 1000 and the Winter Palace an hour before.  So, I headed out by foot around 0900 to the Winter Palace first.

It was a small two-storey rectangular building.  It was only once I was inside I could see the intricate painted decorations on the walls of the main hall and the stained glass windows letting light in.  The former, for me, reflects on the country’s Persian culture and the same style seems to be seen in North India and Pakistan.  Unfortunately photos were not permitted inside.  The bedrooms were undecorated.

Continuing my walk, I found the Caravanserai.  No longer accommodating traders of the Old Silk Road, it provides pricey but basic accommodation to tourists.  The outside has touristy shops but I saved the look inside for later.

The Khan’s Palace is within the palace walls, inside which were a number of lesser buildings.  I found the workshop where the art of stained glass window-making was still being practiced.  The coloured glass pieces and the wooden frames are carefully hand-made and assembled like a jigsaw.  The assembly is pretty strong and the man demonstrating it bashed his hand in with no consequence.

The actual palace is, like the Winter Palace, a two-storey rectangular block but bigger.  The interior was decorated in the same handpainted style as the Winter Palace but no room here was left bare.  It is such a shame that photography was again not permitted.

I spent less than an hour in the complex and was ready to go back down about 1100.

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Caucasian Albanian Church

I skipped lunch in favour of fruit and nuts back in my room.  It wasn’t quite enough and I had some unhealthy cream biscuits in addition.

I headed out to Kis around 1430, ordering a car using the Bolt app rather than walking down to the town to catch a mashrutka.  Just as well, because the Caucasian Albanian Church was located on top of a hill, accessible by windy narrow cobblestone road.

Caucasian Albania wasn’t a term I had heard before my visit to the area.  It has nothing to do with present day Albania and the name was given by the Greeks, but the Caucasian part was added in modern times to distinguish it from the Balkan nation.

Her people Christianised people have been absorbed into the people of Armenia or Georgia whereas the Islamised, into Azerbaijan or Iran.

To my untrained eye, the church looked somewhat Armenian (or maybe Georgian) with its angled conical steeple roof.  There were three crypts in the compound.  The church itself is not set up as a functioning church anymore and holds a few exhibits (but is quite bare otherwise).  The building is estimated to be from the 12^th Century.

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I walked back down the hill to the road back to Sheki.  Having just missed a mashrutka, I had a short wait for the cheap ride back.  I wandered Sheki a little to work up an appetite for an early dinner, and realised there’s not much to the town’s commercial centre beyond the area I already knew from last night.

I had a beef kebab sandwich and a mango drink (poured from a tetrapak), costing AZN2.20 and AZN0.60.  It just shows how cheap this country can be when one isn’t ripped off.  I returned uphill to the Panorama before sunset for an early night in.  I had been cool and cloudy all day and it was nice to finally have sunshine.