Shaki

Shaki lies in a wooded valley on the southern slopes of the Greater Caucasus. For centuries its people raised silkworms and traded cocoons and raw silk, while craftsmen produced textiles, carpets and metalwork. Mulberry trees in household gardens fed the worms, and airy upper rooms beneath steep roofs provided space for their cultivation. The town's position on routes between Asia and Europe brought merchants and their wares to its markets.

Shaki was contested by Safavid and Ottoman rulers before becoming the center of a khanate in 1743. In 1772 a destructive mud flood swept away the earlier town; its inhabitants rebuilt on higher ground at Nukha, east of the old site. The new town grew around gardens, streams and channels, whose waters supplied houses and irrigated productive plots, with caravanserais, baths, mosques and shops serving the silk trade. The khan's fortified residence overlooked this busy settlement.

The palace built under Mammad Hasan Khan in 1797 expressed the wealth of the khanate in painted interiors and intricate #italic shabaka#! windows of colored glass and wood. Merchants' houses likewise combined decorated rooms with productive gardens and their mulberry trees. In the early nineteenth century Russian authority replaced the khans, but the town's streets and buildings retained the imprint of the silk economy that had shaped them.