Sheki Khanate Palace: visitor guide

What to expect at the Sheki Khanate Palace

Sheki Khan's Palace (Şəki Xanlarının Sarayı) is the best surviving example of 18th-century Azerbaijani court architecture and one of the most exquisite small buildings in the entire Caucasus, a summer palace built between 1761 and 1762 for Husein Khan Mushtad of the Sheki Khanate, whose elaborate painted interiors, unusual stained glass windows (shebeke) and geometric exterior tilework represent the highest achievement of the traditional arts of the Azerbaijani court in the period immediately before Russian conquest. The UNESCO designation (2019) recognises the palace as part of the Sheki Historic Centre, acknowledging both its architectural significance and its remarkable state of preservation.

In general, the palace's defining feature is the shebeke, an Azerbaijani technique of geometric lattice woodwork in which small pieces of wood and coloured glass are fitted together without nails or glue to create windows of unusual visual complexity. Each window is a mosaic of hundreds or thousands of individual pieces of tinted glass held in wooden frames carved to the exact angles required by the geometric pattern, a technique requiring years of specialist training and a level of material precision that makes each window a remarkable engineering achievement as well as a work of art.

When sunlight passes through the shebeke panels, the interior fills with coloured patterns that shift as the sun moves. The palace at midday in summer is one of the most beautiful interior spaces in Azerbaijan.

Interior murals

Besides, the interior murals covering the walls and ceilings of both main rooms are painted in the Tabriz tradition, a style combining Persian miniature painting technique with Azerbaijani decorative vocabulary to create wall-height compositions of hunting scenes, garden imagery, mythological figures and geometric borders. The paintings in the main reception room (the first floor) are among the top surviving examples of 18th-century Azerbaijani court painting anywhere, their colours (now slightly faded but still vivid) including the distinctive Sheki blue derived from lapis lazuli and the warm gold and red of the hunting scene panels.

The palace stands within a caravanserai complex (the Upper Caravanserai, also UNESCO-listed) that was the commercial heart of Sheki's silk trade. The city was the most important silk production centre in the Caucasus and the palace compound was built within the caravanserai district precisely because the Sheki Khans derived much of their revenue from the silk trade. Also, the caravanserai buildings (now functioning as a hotel, the most atmospheric place to stay in Sheki) surround a courtyard of two-storey arcaded stone construction whose solidity and scale communicate the wealth of the Sheki silk merchants who used it.

Sheki itself

Sheki itself is worth at least one overnight stay beyond the palace visit, the historic core of the city, set on a hillside above the Kish River gorge with views across the Greater Caucasus foothills, contains medieval mosques, traditional Azerbaijani wooden architecture with characteristic deep-carved window frames, and the top local cuisine in Azerbaijan. The Sheki Pitisi (a lamb and chickpea stew cooked and served in individual clay pots, eaten by breaking the bread into the pot and mashing the contents) is the city's defining dish, available at every local restaurant, and the local walnut-filled pastries (paxlava and shekerbura) are the best in the country.

Sheki is 350km northwest of Baku, accessible by train (about 5 hours, comfortable overnight option) or by marshrutka (shared minibus, 4–5 hours) from Baku's Avtovağzal bus terminal. The palace entry fee is about 5–8 AZN and includes a guided tour (Azerbaijani and Russian. English-language guides are available on request with advance notice from the palace administration). Photography inside the palace is permitted without additional charge.