If it's stirring folk tales about Azerbaijani khans and the legends of the Old Silk Road that you're after, Sheki (also spelled Shaki) is surely the place to be. Cradled between the rises of the Greater Caucasus Mountains, it's a town steeped in history and myth. Caravanserai inns pepper its corners, amid touches of Turkic art and Persian culture, all intermingled with nostalgic dashes of Soviet futurism and propaganda.

Sheki tour guides can get you treading in the footsteps of merchants from centuries gone by at the main Caravansarai complex. Its rough stone walls once hosted wagon trains en route from China and the east, and it was perhaps the biggest of its kind in the whole of the Caucasus. Hop the moss-sprouting cobbled streets from there to the summer palace, the Khansarai. The erstwhile home of Sheki's nobles and princes, it opens out from a panoramic courtyard overlooking the peaks and town center to an interior of geometric stained-glass, arabesque tiling and sumptuous court rooms.

After the big sights are done, delve into the stone-dressed lanes of Sheki's other districts. They are laced with lovely brick homes and little Byzantine-style church spires. There are weaving workshops and glass emporiums with traditional shebeke window panes for sale within, too. Going even further means entering the mountains, where sheep farms and wild streams are the norm.