Caucasus Day 3: Lahji > Sheki

/ alliwanders

A fairly easy day today, we got to our hotel by 5pm!

We started with a walk around Lahji – this mountain town that we drove in the dark to get to last night. It’s a summer retreat for Bakuvians when the heat in the city gets too extreme as well as being famed for its copper work. This, of course, is a dying art form, but there’s still one or two artisans left.

Might be heaving in summer but dead quiet today
At least 4 generations of coppersmiths in the family, the man in background has worked in this shop 55 years. The black bellows (mid-rear by wheel rim) is made from 300-year old buffalo skin
His Covid lockdown project
Just a few souvenir shops. It’s a pretty closed community; they don’t welcome outsiders moving in, have their own dialect, and frown upon marriages with non-locals
Jit trying to fit in
Several spice shops

There was a bit of a traffic jam trying leaving the village…

After the crowd thinned we had a 40 minute drive back down the twisted, semi-washed out roads that we couldn’t see in the dark (just as well!) to our lunch stop / change back to our big bus.

Our last stop before Sheki was to visit a 10th C. Christian church. Between the 4th-10th C. Christianity was the official & upper class religion until the Arab domination brought Islam to Azerbaijan. The little village of Nic is unique in that it resisted conversion and remains to this day an Eastern Orthodox village, preserving their old Udi language and heritage. During the Soviet era it was used as a storehouse (all religion was banned) but the new Azerbaijani government has made it a point to be more accepting of other faiths/peoples and paid for its restoration.

Another 1h15m drive to Sheki and our day was over. Well, except for the 5-course dinner. The food has been excellent but who can eat so much? Fortunately it’s almost always served family style so I just need to work on my own self control….