Khan's Palace

Sheki sits in a forested mountain valley at the foot of the Greater Caucasus in far northwestern Azerbaijan, a city that was once the capital of the Sheki Khanate and that preserves its historic character in a compact old district of multi-storey houses built from wooden frames filled with river stones and sealed with lime plaster, a building tradition that has survived for centuries in this seismically active mountain region and that gives the city a visual coherence quite different from the lowland Azerbaijani cities to the east.

The Khan's Palace, a compact two-storey summer residence built in 1762 for the last Sheki khan, sits above the city on the site of an older palace destroyed by a flood, and its interior walls are covered from floor to ceiling in multicoloured stained glass windows whose geometric patterns were created by combining thousands of individual pieces of coloured glass without the use of mortar in the traditional panels known as shebeke, a craft technique unique to this region of the Caucasus that has been passed down through generations of Sheki craftsmen.

Each shebeke panel is a self-supporting lattice of wooden slats holding shaped glass pieces in compression, a structural system that allows the panels to flex slightly in the mountain winds without cracking, and the colours of the glass were chosen to create specific optical effects when sunlight passes through at different times of day, transforming the interior into a jewel-like space that changes its character from hour to hour as the sun moves across the sky. The palace was built without nails, using wooden joinery throughout, and the craftsmanship is so precise that after more than two and a half centuries the buildings structural elements still fit together without measurable gap or movement. The exterior walls are plain whitewashed stone with no external ornamentation, so the full visual impact of the shebeke work is reserved for visitors who enter the building and see the interior light transformed by the coloured glass.

UNESCO inscribed Sheki's historic centre as Azerbaijan's second World Heritage Site, and the entire old city functions partly as a living museum where traditional crafts including shebeke-making, silk weaving and copper working are still practised in workshops open to visitors. The palace garden contains a small pool that originally served as a reflecting surface to enhance the interior light effects and as a cooling element for the buildings passive ventilation system, a simple water feature whose double function illustrates the sophistication of the Sheki builders approach to climate response and environmental design. The surrounding mountains are part of the Greater Caucasus Biosphere Reserve, a protected area that shelters rare Caucasian leopard habitat and endemic plant species found nowhere else on earth, making Sheki a base for both cultural and ecological tourism. Traditional Sheki sweets made with dried fruit and nuts are sold in the old city market, and local tea houses offer glasses of tea with views over the tiled rooftops of the historic quarter toward the forested mountain slopes beyond.

The shebeke stained glass panels are a unique Azerbaijani craft tradition that has no parallel elsewhere in the world and the Khan's Palace contains the finest surviving examples.

The palace is the most complete surviving example of 18th-century Azerbaijani aristocratic residential architecture.

Sheki's mountain location at the foot of the Greater Caucasus provides dramatic natural scenery alongside the cultural heritage of the old city.