We had a full day in and around Sheki (Şəki).

The morning was reserved to shopping … first at Sheki Market and then on to a silk shop (or a small neighborhood grocery – for those not interested in silk scarfs).

A drive to Kiş got us to the last church of the trip (and an inactive one, which today houses a museum), the Caucasus Albanian Church. After a quick look at the museum, we crossed the street for some tea with rose water jelly and other local sweets in a local tea house.

By crossing the border from Georgia yesterday, we also clearly had entered a different cultural area – from Europe to Central Asia, from Occident to Orient, from Christianity to Islam. Both Armenia and Georgia had a certain European feeling around them – Azerbaijan now really felt more like somewhere in the Stans or in Turkey.

The next stop kind of confirmed that feeling, we were now entering the grounds of the Palace of Shaki Khans (Şəki Xan Sarayı). Of course we visited the palace from the late 18th century with its beautiful colored windows and the even more beautiful wall drawings. Photography was not allowed on the inside, hence nothing to share here – though if you are interested, google is your friend here (there are tons of photos on the internet).

We stayed in the palace grounds and made our way past Sheki Castle to the
very Soviet-style Sheki Museum. The museum covered a rather odd collection of everything – from taxidermy (including a stuffed specimen of the endemic  one-eared rabbit) to a room full of the local Soviet heroes. A visit of the local craft market afterwards gave us an opportunity to see, how the colorful windows, we had seen at the palace earlier on, were made.

At the South gate of palace grounds the bus was waiting for us, to get us back to the hotel. Though – before heading back to the hotel, we had a look around the old caravansary across the street.

The rest of the afternoon was free – and (in my case) was spent in a tea house in downtown Sheki (when in Rome …).