Icerisheher - Part II: Palace of the Shirvanshahs

When my mom was in town over the holidays, we walked around Icerisheher and had a local breakfast at one of the small huts there. The walk from Baku's Fountain Square to the restaurant in Icerisheher is quite lovely.
I should probably apologize for the bad quality of my pictures. I have a nice camera, but lately, I've become a little lazy carrying around the big camera as taking pictures with my Iphone is soooo much more convenient.

As I mentioned in my last post, Icerisheher was built like a big defensive system. There were about 70 of these semicircular towers, but only a few survived or were rebuilt. 

When Anthon and I walked around Icerisheher for the first time, there was a traditional music group playing Azeri music. There were also several small outside cafes that are now closed during the winter. 

We were pleasantly surprised at how clean the streets are, as you may be able to see in the pictures. Cleanliness is very important to Azerbaijanis. Jeddah's old downtown Al Balad was pretty filthy and smelly, so we appreciate having a very clean city to walk around here. 

There are quite a few of these restaurant huts throughout Icerisheher. Some are just cafes where you can smoke shisha, but there are several other huts that offer traditional Azeri bread called Tendir. It is made in these clay ovens. 

Here is a video that I found on youtube that shows what a traditional Azeri breakfast looks like, and how Tendir is made. 

Video link: Azerbaijani breakfast and tendir making  (it ends at about 4.44min)

It was a national holiday when we went and many stores were closed that morning, so our tendir breakfast place was quite busy with tourists (mostly Middle Eastern) and local people, but luckily they had a free table for us. 

The hut was nothing fancy, but it looked quite cozy with all the traditional decorations on the walls and ceilings. 

We weren't really sure what to order, so we just ordered the "traditional" breakfast. It came with fresh bread, several kinds of white cheeses (some salty, some mild, some creamy), butter, very delicious honey, olives, a few vegetables and scrambled eggs with tomatoes and cheese. The scrambled eggs with tomatoes looked like Shakshouka which we had quite often in Jeddah, but the Azeri version is soooo much better (in my opinion)!

I loooove freshly squeezed orange juice, so I ordered some and it was very, very good.

For three adults, we paid about 60 Azeri Manat, which is about $31 - not the cheapest breakfast, but totally worth it for this wonderful and delicious cultural experience. 

When you enter the Mangal hut where we had breakfast, you can see older ladies with white aprons, headscarves and gold teeth make bread, dumplings, and qutab (a thin rolled-out dough that is filled with herbs, meat, pumpkin or other cheese, then folded and griddled on a convex griddle like the black and brown one in the picture, and served with melted butter on top).

After our delicious and very filling breakfast, we headed over to the Palace of the Shirvanshahs. We had apparently walked by it several times before without noticing that it was right there behind the gate. 

We paid 4 Azerbaijani Manat per person for the entrance, which is currently about $2.10. 

The complex consists of the palace as the main building, a divankhana/stone pavilion, burial vaults, a mausoleum, the shah's mosque with a minaret tower that you can see in this picture, and the remnants of the palace baths. 

The complex was built during the 15th century by Sheykh Ibrahim I of Shirvan, who transferred his capital from Shemakha to Baku after a devastating earthquake. 

Similar to the Maiden Tower, surprisingly little is known about the buildings. Historians are not sure if the palace was built as a memorial or as the ruler's palace. Less than 100 years later, after the conquest of Baku by the Safavids, the palace already began to fall into ruin, so we don't have too much information about it today.    

I found this map of the palace complex very helpful. 

Right next to the ticket booth is the Divankhana, which is an octahedral vaulted stone pavilion. It is located in the middle of a little courtyard that is surrounded by a gallery arcade.

The vaulted stone pavilion. On the left side, you can see a little bit of the gallery arcade.

A beautiful, ornate portal of the pavilion with Arabic calligraphy

As you enter the main Palace through a high portal, you find yourself in a octahedral room, which leads to other areas of the palace. Today, there is a little museum inside with neat Azerbaijani artifacts like the ones in the pictures below.
The Azerbaijan region has always been rich in natural resources such as copper, gold, silver, iron ore and fossil fuels. Since Baku is situated along the Great Silk Route, the city could trade its resources with, for example, precious stones that weren't found in the area.

A copper Salver dish used for baking and serving national sweets

Copper Sarpush, used to keep pilaf warm and protect the dish from dust and insects

Traditional clothing hadn't changed much until the early 20th century, when Azerbaijanis started wearing more European-style clothes. Until then, men wore loose pants held by a belt, a tunic made of wool, silk or satin (depending on their income) and a turban or Arakhchin cap. 

Women wore skirts with waist-length blouses. On top, they wore jackets like the one in the pictures, padded according to the season. The hair and head of women were always covered with an Arakhchin cap and a veil or scarf. 

Santur - a stringed percussion instrument that was widely used in palaces during the 12th-15th century. 

A salt bag for storing the precious mineral during journey

Bath Shoes - awesome, huh? I would love to see how they walked in these shoes.
They definitely look cooler than our plastic flip-flops these days. 

Probably the most interesting object at the museum - a mustache keeper/trainer!!!!
The description says "used by men to keep one's mustache in shape during sleeping"

      After a few minutes at the museum, we walked around the palace complex, and took a closer look the mausoleum, mosque and the remains of the bath house.       

Nice view from a top the palace complex. You can't see it in this picture, but there are some stairs in the lower left corner that lead you to the mausoleum and the other buildings. On the left side of the stairs, there is a small entrance to a place where you can dress up in traditional Azerbaijani clothing and take pictures. I would have loved to take pictures with Anthon and my mom, but the two were too cool for that :-/

I didn't see any prices listed and the photographer was busy with a small family, but it was probably not that expensive as things here generally seem to be reasonably priced. 

When you keep going down the stairs and turn right, there are a few rooms that talk about the Bayil Fortress that was build during the 13th century, but sank into the sea during an earthquake in 1306. 

The mausoleum of the sufistic state astronomer Seyd Yahya Bakuvi (15th century) on the left 

Entrance to the Royal Mausoleum/Dynastic Mausoleum of the Shirvanshahs

My mom and husband didn't seem to be too interested in exploring the complex, so we rushed through the rest and must have somehow missed entering the mosque. But we did see the remains of the royal bath house.

So yeah, that was our little excursion to the Palace of the Shirvanshahs. I hope you liked learning more about this relatively unknown palace complex. If you're town, this is something worthwhile to see.