Eight days in Azerbaijan: leave the oil city and go up into the mountains

Go straight into the old city. The Maiden's Tower stands at the seaward corner: a squat stone cylinder about thirty metres high with a buttress on one side, and after a century of archaeology nobody agrees whether it was a fire beacon, a fort, an observatory or a Zoroastrian temple, or whether it went up in the seventh century or the twelfth. The roof gives you the whole bay.

Work uphill through the lanes to the Shirvanshahs' palace, the finest medieval building in the country. It is a compound rather than a building, stepped down the slope: the fifteenth century palace, a domed audience hall in its courtyard, a mosque and minaret, the family burial vault, a bathhouse cut into the rock and a covered reservoir.

Then walk without a plan. Icherisheher is twenty two hectares, listed by UNESCO in 2000, and still a residential quarter, so between the caravanserais and the carpet shops there are cats, washing lines and cars parked at impossible angles.

An hour south along the coast, on a hillside of tumbled limestone above the Caspian, are around six thousand petroglyphs cut into the rock over tens of thousands of years: cattle, boats full of rowers, hunters and rows of long-limbed figures that appear to be dancing. UNESCO listed the site in 2007 and the museum at the entrance is first rate. Take the guide, who will find the ones you would walk straight past.

One inscription is not prehistoric. Somebody from the Twelfth Legion cut his unit's name into a rock here in the first century AD, and it is the easternmost Roman inscription ever found.

A few kilometres on, a track leads to a field of mud volcanoes: low grey cones burping cold clay and gas, of which Azerbaijan has several hundred, something like a third of all of them on earth. Drivers at the site run people out in battered Ladas because ordinary cars cannot manage the track.

Stop at Bibi-Heybat on the way back. The thirteenth century shrine here was blown up by the Bolsheviks in 1936 and rebuilt in the 1990s to the old plans, striped domes standing above the oil derricks on a shore where the drilling started in 1846.

Start out at the Heydar Aliyev Center, which Zaha Hadid designed as one continuous surface peeling up off the plaza and folding over into a roof, with no sharp angle anywhere in it. It opened in 2012 and took the Design Museum's design of the year two years later. Inside are galleries, a hall of Azerbaijani craft and the state car collection, which is a strange thing to find in a Hadid building and worth it for the contrast.

Back in the centre, the carpet museum is a building deliberately shaped like a half-rolled rug, which should be dreadful and is not. Inside, several hundred Azerbaijani carpets are arranged by weaving region with the looms, the dyes and an explanation of what the motifs mean. It is the best introduction to the craft anywhere in the Caucasus.

Finish on the boulevard. The seafront park runs for kilometres along the bay under plane trees, with tea houses and a small canal system with boats on it, and by early evening the whole city is walking on it. As it gets dark, the three curved towers on the ridge behind light up their LED panels and spend the night pretending to be on fire, then waving a flag.

The bus takes about five hours: out across the dry Absheron scrub, then along the foot of the Greater Caucasus with the range building on your right the whole way, until the country turns green somewhere past Shamakhi.

Go straight to the Khansarai, the summer palace the Sheki khans built in the eighteenth century, because it closes earlier than you expect. It is small, two storeys, and the exterior gives nothing away. Inside, every surface is painted with hunting scenes, flowers and battles, and the windows are shabaka: lattices assembled from thousands of pieces of hand-cut coloured glass and wood fitted together without glue or a single nail. It went onto the World Heritage list in 2019 along with the historic centre around it.

Then down to the caravanserai, a huge eighteenth century courtyard building of brick with two galleried storeys, the biggest on the Caucasian stretch of the silk road, which now runs partly as a hotel. Walk into the courtyard whether you are staying or not, and have tea in it.

Take a car for the morning up to Ilisu, an hour northwest past Qax and then up a side valley. It was the capital of its own sultanate until the Russians ended that in the 1840s, and it is a village of stone houses at the foot of the high mountains with a defensive tower, an eighteenth century mosque and a gorge behind it. The people here are Tsakhur, one of several small Caucasian peoples in these valleys with their own language, and the drive up is half the point.

Back in town, the Juma mosque was built between 1745 and 1750 with a spire forty metres high, decorated in geometric brickwork, and the call to prayer off it reaches the whole valley.

Then walk fifteen minutes out to the silk factory. Sheki has been producing silk for four centuries and the plant is a Soviet-era survival of that; getting inside is not always possible, though the shops alongside sell scarves made on the premises and the neighbourhood is worth the walk on its own.

Three hours south and west, over the ridge and down onto the plain, and the temperature climbs as you go. Ganja is flat, hot and a good deal plainer than Sheki, and the point of it is that nothing has been arranged for you.

Start on Javad Khan street, a pedestrian run of restored two storey houses, fountains and cafes, and the only part of the city that has been dressed up. Twenty minutes to walk.

One block off it is the reason for the name. The Shah Abbas mosque was built in 1606, when this was a Safavid province, and is still the Friday mosque: red brick, twin minarets, a plain interior and a courtyard of plane trees. In the same complex are a seventeenth century bathhouse and the grave of Javad Khan, the last independent ruler of Ganja, killed on the walls when the Russian army stormed the city in 1804. It is the closest thing here to a national shrine.

Finish in Khan Bagi, the khan's garden, planted around 1700, seven hectares of enormous trees and every family in Ganja after six.

Six kilometres out on the Baku road stands the mausoleum of Nizami Ganjavi. The present tower went up in 1947 over the site of the old tomb and was rebuilt into its current form in 2013: a plain dark cylinder alone on the plain, with lines from the Khamsa carved around it and bronze figures from the poems set out in front. He died here in 1209 having never left the city, and his version of Layla and Majnun is the one everybody afterwards copied.

Back in town, find the Bottle House. In 1967 a man named Ibrahim Jafarov built himself a house using something like forty eight thousand glass bottles laid into the walls, along with pebbles, plates and mirrors, as a memorial to a brother who never came back from the war. It is a private house on an ordinary street and it is the thing you will remember about Ganja.

Finish at the Alexander Nevsky church, a red brick Orthodox cathedral of 1887 built on an old graveyard, still working. Ganja had Russian, German, Armenian and Azerbaijani quarters within living memory, and the churches are what is left of that.

In 1819 several hundred Swabian families walked and sailed from southwest Germany to the Caucasus on an offer of land from the Tsar, and founded a colony ten kilometres south of Ganja. They planted vines, made the first commercial wine in the region and stayed a hundred and twenty years, until Stalin deported the whole community to Kazakhstan in 1941. The church they built in Ganja itself in 1885 still stands on a corner in the centre, red brick with a pointed gable, and has been the state puppet theatre ever since.

Then the central bazaar for apricots, pomegranates, hazelnuts and pickles, and the station or the bus stand. Baku is a night on the sleeper; Tbilisi is about six hours west by road.