Baku Old City

In ancient times, Baku was one of the most densely populated cities not only in the Southern Caucasus, but in the whole of the Middle East! Icherisheher – the old town at the heart of the city – now acts as something of an open-air museum, preserving ancient history, cultural heritage and architecture to present day. Centuries ago, crowded market squares, streets and large estates emerged in Icherisheher; the Old City’s Maiden Tower and the Palace of Shirvanshahs are even included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Icherisheher is a home to a wide variety of handicrafts, such as pottery, metal and glassware. With its triple row of fortress walls and Maiden Tower, the city was built to defend with the help of its labyrinth of lanes. Enemy troops who stormed Icherisheher did not survive long before getting lost in this real-life stone trap. There’s a certain poetry to breathing new life into the Old City’s narrow alleyways have survived and evolved over all these years. Within these walls we can catch a glimpse of what life was like through the eyes of our ancestors.

Palace of the Shirvanshahs

The palace was the former residence of the rulers of the Shirvanshahs. It is a complex where, in addition to the palace itself, can also be found a courtyard of the Diwankhana, the courthouse, the Shirvanshahs’ burial vault, the palace mosque of 1441 with its minaret, the bathhouse and the mausoleum of the court scholar, Sayid Yahya Bakuvi. The palace complex was built in the period from the XIII to the XVI century. On the palace itself, no inscriptions have survived. Therefore, the time of its construction is determined by the dates on the inscriptions on various architectural monuments, which relate to the palace complex. In 1964, the palace complex was declared a museum-preserve. In 2000, a unique architectural and cultural ensemble, along with the fortified walls enclosed by the historic part of the city and the Maiden Tower, was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. The Shirvanshahs Palace is considered one of the pearls of the architecture of Azerbaijan.