Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan is a country of impossible contrasts: in a single morning you can walk the medieval lanes of Icherisheher, Baku's old city, and have lunch beneath the Flame Towers, three glass skyscrapers shaped like fire. The fire is no accident: Zoroastrian temples fed by gas seeping from the ground burned here for centuries, and the hillside of Yanar Dag has been alight for decades.

This category gathers our articles about the country: oil-boom Baku and its palaces, the ten-thousand-year-old petroglyphs of Gobustan, the mud volcanoes of Absheron, Sheki with its stained-glass palace built without a single nail, the caravanserais where Silk Road merchants slept, and mountain villages like Lahic where copper is still hammered by hand.

Azerbaijan is usually visited together with Georgia and Armenia, and that is how we organise it: see our routes including Azerbaijan, borders handled by our team.