Private Sheki Tour from Baku – Palace of Sheki Khans & Kish Albanian Church

Your driver meets you at your hotel at a time that suits you. The drive to Sheki covers around 300 km and takes 4–5 hours, running west through the Shirvan plains before the landscape turns green and the Caucasus range comes into view. Comfort stops are made along the way whenever you like.

The Palace of Sheki Khans was completed in 1797 as the summer residence of the ruling khans, and it remains the single most photographed building in the region. Its façade is covered in painted floral and geometric motifs, while inside, tall shebeke windows filter daylight into colour across the walls. Each window is a lattice of thousands of hand-cut wooden pieces and small panes of Venetian glass, fitted together without a single nail. The Sheki Khan Palace is widely regarded as the finest surviving example of 18th-century Azerbaijani architecture and forms part of the city's UNESCO World Heritage listing.

A short walk downhill brings you to the Sheki Caravanserai, built in the 18th century to shelter the merchants, camels and goods moving along the Silk Road. Its thick stone walls, vaulted cellars and quiet inner courtyard were designed as much for security as for rest — traders stored their merchandise below and slept in the rooms above. The caravanserai in Sheki, Azerbaijan is one of the very few in the Caucasus still standing largely intact, and stepping into the courtyard is the clearest sense you will get of what the town felt like at its commercial peak.

A few kilometres north of the city, in the village of Kish, stands the Kish Albanian Church — a small round-domed stone church associated with the earliest spread of Christianity in the region. Excavations beneath the floor, carried out with Norwegian archaeologists and now displayed under glass, revealed burials and foundations far older than the building itself. The Church of Kish now works as a museum, and the village setting beneath the mountains is worth the short drive on its own.

The rest of the afternoon is yours to spend in Old Town Sheki. The lanes around the palace are lined with craft workshops, hat-makers and sweet shops, and this is the place to try Sheki halva — a layered, saffron-tinted pastry made only here. If you would like to stop for lunch, your driver can recommend a Sheki restaurant serving piti, the region's slow-cooked mutton and chickpea stew baked in a clay pot.

You set off back in the late afternoon and are dropped off directly at your hotel in Baku in the evening.