Three days in Ganja: a poet's home town that nobody stops in
Two nights in Azerbaijan's second city: a mosque of 1606 with the last khan buried beside it, a house built out of forty eight thousand bottles, a German Lutheran church, and Nizami's tomb on the Baku road.
- Length
- 3 days, 2 nights
- Where you stay
- Ganja
- Places
- 8 across 3 days
Ganja has been sacked by Mongols, levelled by an earthquake, stormed by the Russian army, renamed Elizavetpol, renamed Kirovabad and finally given its own name back in 1991. It is Azerbaijan's second city, about three hundred thousand people on the plain between the Kura and the Lesser Caucasus, and it is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the region.
It is also where Nizami Ganjavi lived and died. He wrote in Persian in the twelfth century, produced the five long poems that shaped romantic narrative verse from Anatolia to India, and never left this city in his life. Azerbaijan takes him seriously enough to have put his mausoleum, his statue and his name on a good deal of the country.
Two nights is enough and is two more than most travellers give it. Almost nobody comes: the tour buses go Baku to Sheki and back, and Ganja sits off to the side with an old town, two centuries of odd colonial leftovers, empty museums and unusually determined hospitality.
Highlights
- The Shah Abbas mosque of 1606, with a medieval bathhouse and a khan's grave beside it
- A house whose walls are set with forty eight thousand bottles, plates and mirrors
- Nizami's mausoleum out on the plain, with the poems carved into the stone around it
- A Lutheran church of 1885 left behind by Swabian settlers, now a puppet theatre
- Khan Bagi, a garden of enormous trees that has been the city's living room since 1700
Where to stay
Ganja, two nights
The centre is compact: a pedestrianised street of restored houses, the mosque complex, the city hall square and the old khan's garden all within a few hundred metres of each other, with a grid of Soviet-era streets around them and the enormous memorial park out to the northeast.
Stay near Javad Khan street. There are only a handful of hotels worth the name, and from any of them everything except the mausoleum is a walk.
Ganja is a wine and fruit region as well as a city, so look for local wine on the list rather than Georgian, and eat the apricots and pomegranates in season.
Day by day
Day 1 in Ganja
The mosque, the bathhouse, and the khan the Russians shot
Javad Khan street is where to start: a pedestrian run of restored two storey houses, fountains, cafes and slightly earnest street sculpture, and the only part of Ganja that has been dressed up for visitors. Walk it in twenty minutes, then go one block to the reason the street is named as it is.
The Shah Abbas mosque was built in 1606, when this was a Persian province and the Safavid shah was putting mosques up across his territory, and it is still the Friday mosque. Red brick, twin minarets, a plain interior and a large courtyard of plane trees. Attached to the same complex are a seventeenth century bathhouse, restored and open, and the grave of Javad Khan, the last independent ruler of Ganja, who was killed on the walls when the Russian army stormed the city in 1804. His tomb is a modern rebuilding and it is the closest thing this city has to a national shrine.
Finish in Khan Bagi, the old khan's garden a few minutes away, planted around 1700 and one of the oldest in the Caucasus. Seven hectares of enormous trees, benches, a bandstand and every family in Ganja after six in the evening.
- 15:00
Cavadxan küçəsi
LandmarkThe restored pedestrian street through the old centre, with cafes, fountains and souvenir shops. Twenty minutes to walk, and the best coffee in the city is on it.
- 16:00
Complex of Shah Abbas mosque, with medieval baths and tomb of Javadkhan
VisitThe Friday mosque of 1606 with its twin minarets, a restored seventeenth century hamam alongside, and the tomb of the khan who died defending the city in 1804. An hour for all three.
- 18:00
Xan bağı
LeisureThe khan's garden of about 1700, seven hectares of old trees in the middle of the city. Free, and best in the hour before dinner when the whole town turns up.
With more time: The city hall square next to the mosque has kept its shape since the sixteenth century, whatever has been built on it since, and the philharmonic hall on the far side stands where the khan's fortress did until the Russians took it down.
Day 2 in Ganja
Nizami's tomb, a house of bottles, and a Byzantine cathedral
Take a taxi six kilometres out on the Baku road to 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 cylinder of dark stone standing on a bare 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 spent his whole life in the city, and the five poems he left are still recited from Turkey to India.
Back in town, go and 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 his brother who never came back from the war. It is a private house on an ordinary street, it is completely mad, 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 in a Byzantine style, and still working. Ganja had Russian, German, Armenian and Azerbaijani quarters within living memory, and the churches are what is left of that.
- 09:30
Tomb of Nizami Ganjavi
HistoricThe tomb of the twelfth century poet on the plain southeast of the city, rebuilt in 2013, with verses carved round it and bronzes from the poems outside. An hour including the taxi each way.
- 14:00
Bottle House
ArchitectureA private house whose walls hold about forty eight thousand bottles, built in 1967 in memory of a brother lost in the war. Fifteen minutes, seen from the street, and knock if somebody is in.
- 15:30
Aleksandr Nevski Rus Pravoslav Kilsəsi
ReligiousA working Orthodox cathedral of 1887 in red brick, five minutes from the centre. Twenty minutes, and cover your head if a service is on.
With more time: The Heydar Aliyev memorial park northeast of the centre is 450 hectares of avenues, fountains and a triumphal arch, built at a scale that has to be seen to be understood, and it is where Ganja goes at the weekend.
Day 3 in Ganja
The German church, and what the Swabians left behind
In 1819 a few hundred Swabian families walked and sailed from southwest Germany to the Caucasus, having been offered land by the Tsar, and founded a colony called Helenendorf ten kilometres south of Ganja. They planted vines, built a Lutheran church, made the first commercial wine in the region and stayed for a hundred and twenty years, until Stalin deported the whole community to Kazakhstan in 1941.
The church they built in Ganja itself in 1885 is still standing on a corner in the centre, red brick with a pointed gable, and has been the state puppet theatre since the deportations. It is a strange thing to come across in Azerbaijan and it takes ten minutes to look at properly.
Then walk back through the garden for the last hour before the train, and buy fruit at the central bazaar on the way.
- 10:00
German Lutheran Church
ReligiousThe Lutheran church of 1885 built by the German colonists, in use as the puppet theatre since 1941. Ten minutes from outside, longer if there is a performance on.
- 11:30
Mərkəzi Bazar
VisitThe central market: apricots, pomegranates, hazelnuts, cheese and pickles, and stallholders who will not let you leave without tasting something.
With more time: With a spare half day, Goygol is a short drive south: the old colony village with its German street plan and church, and above it a lake formed when an earthquake dammed the valley in 1139, now inside a national park of pine forest. Check whether the park is open before you go.
Before you go
Getting here
Ganja is on the main railway between Baku and Tbilisi, which makes the train the obvious way in. The overnight service from Baku arrives inconveniently early and the daytime express takes most of the day; the sleeper from Tbilisi is the more comfortable of the two directions. Buses from Baku take five to six hours, from Sheki about three.
There is also an airport with a handful of flights, mostly to Russia and Turkey, that shuts in the evening.
Getting around
The old town is small and made for walking. City buses cost a third of a manat and are useful for the memorial park and the bus stations, though the routes change with the roadworks. Taxis are metered by the kilometre and a cross-town trip costs three manat or so, which makes the mausoleum a cheap outing.
Very little English is spoken outside the tourist office, and menus and signs are almost all in Azerbaijani. Russian helps; a translation app helps more.
One local note
Ganja is more conservative than Baku and considerably more hospitable. Being invited for tea by a stranger is normal and is meant, and refusing outright is taken badly, so decline gently and with a reason. Dress a little more carefully than you would on the Baku boulevard.
Ganja rewards low expectations and a slow walk: one afternoon in the old quarter, one day split between the tomb and the oddities, one morning for the leftovers of the German colony.
It also breaks the drive between Baku and Georgia neatly in two, which is the best practical reason to give it a night.
Or make it a longer trip
These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- Is Ganja worth visiting?
- For two nights, if you want the version of Azerbaijan that is not being shown to anybody. There is no single unmissable sight, and there is an old mosque quarter, the poet's tomb, the strangest house in the Caucasus and a city that is genuinely surprised to see you.
- How do you get from Baku to Ganja?
- The train, which runs on the main Baku to Tbilisi line: an overnight sleeper or a slower daytime express. Buses take five to six hours from the international terminal in Baku. Flying is possible but the schedules are thin.
- Can you combine Ganja with Sheki?
- Yes, and it is the sensible loop. Sheki is about three hours north by road, which makes Baku, Sheki and Ganja a week that never doubles back on itself, ending with the train back to Baku or on to Tbilisi.
- Who was Nizami Ganjavi?
- A twelfth century poet who wrote in Persian and lived his whole life in Ganja. His five long narrative poems, the Khamsa, include the version of Layla and Majnun that everyone else afterwards copied, and they were illustrated by Persian, Ottoman and Mughal painters for the next five hundred years.
- What is the Bottle House?
- A private house on a residential street whose walls are set with about forty eight thousand glass bottles, plus mirrors, plates and pebbles. Ibrahim Jafarov built it in 1967 as a memorial to a brother who did not come back from the war. You look at it from the pavement.