Sheki

Apr 18-20

We really started to appreciate thepast couple months of mostly cooperative weather as we pulled into Sheki in a cold drizzle. Sheki is a small town in northern Azerbaijan nestled in the Caucusus mountains with red tiled roofs, cobblestone roads, and an old palace complex from a former khan. We only had two nights, so it was disappointing to wake up to the same cold drizzle, about 40F and dreary. We geared up and headed out, walking to the palace which was thankfully near our homestay.

The palace itself was small but with beautiful stained glass windows and doors called shebeki, vehicle is made with wood instead of solder and no fasteners are used. It is a unique style from the Sheki area. We weren’t sure about the $12 tickets after walking up to it, but the inside was a completely different story. We had to sneak a few pictures from inside to capture the light through the glass, views from outside don’t really show the story. We stopped by the glass workshop nearby, which looked empty and closed up except for some smoke coming out the stove pipe. After poking around outside we were about to give up when an old craftsman opened the door and offered to show us around. There were a number of large frames and interesting structures, including a glass globe that looked fantastic. Then a younger guy showed up and took us through the workshop, demonstrating the methods he used to construct the glass items. Everything was made by hand, with the glass fragments scored and snapped using fixtures designed to take a long rectangular piece of glass and quickly produce a series of cuts to produce the different shapes needed for the design. The woodworking seemed to mostly be done with table saws, but we didn’t see it in action.

After the workshop we wandered through a caravansery that had been converted to a hotel, then had some delicious coffee at the Art Cafe, notable for $.50 lattes, and read for a while. The drizzle never let up. We decided to walk to the other palace in town, but didn’t feel like paying another $12 for what was supposed to be a mostly plain interior, so we grabbed some hot soup for a late lunch. An Azeri specialty was called piti, which came out as a clay pot of pork dumplings in broth. The owner demonstrated draining the broth into a bowl with chunks of bread, then mashed all the dumplings together and plopped the mix onto a plate. It was reasonably tasty and we appreciated the demonstration, we’d have never guessed that was how to eat it.

We woke the next morning to snow! Our hosts told us this was unseasonably cold in mid April, just our bad luck. We waited outside in the cold for a local bus down to the station, then hopped on a marshrutka headed to Georgia.

He was much more excited to show me the workshop than this picture suggests. I swear.

Snow!

Mosaic tiles that are not blue. This is a new experience.