Azerbaijan National Carpet Museum

The holdings run to more than 10,000 items, and while carpets dominate, the collection also covers metalwork, ceramics, jewellery, embroidery and national dress. The earliest pieces date to the seventeenth century, with fragments considerably older.

Displays are organised by weaving school rather than chronology, which is the right decision — it lets you see how a single motif mutates as it travels. The seven principal schools are Guba, Baku, Shirvan, Ganja, Gazakh, Karabakh and Tabriz, and each has a recognisable signature in palette, knot density and border structure once you have been shown what to look for.

Azerbaijani carpet weaving was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010, and the museum is the principal institution behind that designation.

The museum's strongest asset is that it explains technique rather than simply presenting finished objects. Displays cover the difference between pile and flatweave, the structure of a knot, the sourcing and chemistry of natural dyes, and the way a design is held in the weaver's memory rather than drawn from a pattern.

Live weaving demonstrations run in the building, and watching even a few minutes of the work recalibrates your sense of what these objects cost to make. A finely knotted carpet of moderate size represents many months of labour by an experienced weaver.

Motifs repay attention. Recurring elements — the buta, stylised birds, medallions, comb and amulet forms — carry meanings tied to protection, fertility and mourning, and the same shape can read differently depending on the region that produced it.

The museum sits directly on Baku Boulevard, close to Mini Venice and within an easy walk of Flag Square and the Baku Eye. That makes it simple to combine with the seafront section of a Baku city tour rather than treating it as a separate expedition.

It is also a genuinely good option in bad weather. Baku is windy — the name is popularly linked to the Persian for 'city of winds' — and a large indoor collection ten minutes from the Old City is useful when the Caspian is throwing weather at the promenade.