Azerbaijan is where fire worship began — a hillside at Yanar Dag that has burned for centuries, a Zoroastrian fire temple at Ateshgah, and 6,000-year-old petroglyphs at Gobustan carved above the Caspian. Baku itself is a walled medieval old city with three glass flames rising behind it. It is the easiest, most surprising door into the Caucasus.
Ancient Caucasus & Gobustan Petroglyphs » 7-Day Azerbaijan Deep Dive is a 7-day private tour of Azerbaijan, run on your own dates with a private guide and driver. You stay in 4-star Baku hotels with daily breakfast, a private vehicle and a licensed guide, with all site entrances included.
Prices are per person and drop as your group grows — from $1370 per person for two travellers down to $890 for a group of seven. Every departure is private: you never share the vehicle or the guide.
7-day Azerbaijan itinerary
Met at Baku airport and driven into a city on the Caspian that runs on oil and knows it. The world's first industrially drilled oil well went down here in 1846, and by 1900 half the planet's oil came out of this peninsula — which is why Baku has boulevards of Parisian mansions built by 19th-century oil barons, and why it now has three flame-shaped skyscrapers. Tonight, a walk in Icherisheher, the walled old city, which is UNESCO-listed and still lived in.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
The Maiden Tower is 29 metres of solid stone and nobody agrees what it was for — a fortress, a Zoroastrian fire temple, an observatory; its dating ranges over a thousand years. The Palace of the Shirvanshahs was the seat of the local dynasty and is the finest medieval building in Azerbaijan. Then the modern half: the Flame Towers, lit at night with rippling fire, and Zaha Hadid's Heydar Aliyev Centre, a building with no straight lines anywhere in it — arguably the best thing she ever built.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Twelve thousand years of rock carvings at Gobustan — six thousand of them, hunters and dancers and long boats — and the cold mud volcanoes bubbling in the plain beyond. Then the Absheron: Ateshgah, the fire temple built around a natural gas vent where Zoroastrians and Hindus both came to worship, and Yanar Dag, a hillside that has been burning without pause for as long as anyone can remember. This is the 'land of fire', and it is not a marketing line.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Inland to Shamakhi, once the capital of the Shirvan kingdom and repeatedly flattened by earthquakes. The Juma Mosque was first built in 743 AD, which makes it one of the oldest in the Caucasus. Diri Baba is a small mausoleum wedged into the face of a cliff and looks impossible. The Yeddi Gumbaz — 'seven domes' — are the ruined tombs of the Shirvan khans, standing on a hillside in the grass.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
North to Sheki, the prettiest town in the country, tiled and green on the flank of the Caucasus. The Khan's Palace of 1797 was built without nails, and its shebeke windows — thousands of pieces of coloured glass held in a wooden lattice, no glue, no nails — throw the whole room into colour. The frescoes inside are original. You eat Sheki halva, which is layered and syrupy and nothing like the Turkish kind.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
The little church at Kish is the oldest Christian building in the Caucasus — Caucasian Albanian, possibly 1st century, excavated by a Norwegian team that Thor Heyerdahl helped fund, and there are graves under the glass floor. Then the long drive back to Baku along the flank of the Greater Caucasus, with the mountains on one side and the plain on the other.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
A transfer to Baku airport for your onward flight. End of our services.
