Palace of the Shirvanshahs

The palace is a group of structures arranged across terraces down the slope rather than a single mass. The main residential block sits at the top, with a courtyard and divankhana below it, then a burial vault, a mosque with a minaret, a bathhouse and a covered cistern.

The divankhana is the most photographed element — an octagonal stone rotunda inside a small courtyard, with a carved portal that repays close inspection. Its purpose is uncertain: a council chamber, a court of law and a mausoleum have all been proposed.

The stonework is the point throughout. Honey-coloured limestone, cut with precision, with ornament concentrated at portals and left plain elsewhere. It is a very different aesthetic from the tilework traditions further east.

Down the slope are the remains of the palace hammam, only rediscovered and excavated in the twentieth century. It was largely subterranean — an intelligent response to the climate, holding heat in winter and staying cool in summer.

The ovdan, or covered cistern, sits nearby. Water storage was a serious problem on the Absheron Peninsula, and the engineering solutions here are more sophisticated than they first appear.

The Shirvanshah dynasty ruled the Shirvan region for an unusually long stretch — by some accounts from the ninth century into the sixteenth, making it one of the more durable dynasties in the Islamic world.

The move from Shamakhi to Baku in the fifteenth century, after earthquake damage, is what produced this palace. The dynasty fell to the Safavids shortly afterward, which means the complex was a royal seat for a relatively brief period.