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.
Azerbaijan Mountains & Old Silk Road Cities » 7-Day Baku to Sheki 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.
Up into the Caucasus to Lahic, a cobbled village on a mountain shelf where the coppersmiths still hammer in workshops open to the street and the whole place rings with it. They speak Tat here, a Persian language, not Azerbaijani. The village has its own medieval sewerage system underneath the cobbles, which the locals will point out with justified pride, and the Girdimanchay canyon drops away below.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
On to Gabala, which is 2,500 years old and was the capital of Caucasian Albania — a Christian kingdom that existed here for a thousand years and has almost entirely vanished from popular memory. Nohur Lake sits under forested mountains; the Tufandag cable car lifts you to 1,900 metres for the view across the Greater Caucasus.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Sheki is the loveliest town in Azerbaijan: red-tiled roofs on a green mountainside, and the Khan's Palace at the top of it. The palace was built in 1797 without a single nail, and its windows are shebeke — stained glass held in a wooden lattice assembled from thousands of pieces, again with no nails and no glue. Sheki halva is a different thing from the halva you know, and the caravanserai you sleep in has been taking travellers for centuries.
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.
