Ganja: Azerbaijan's second city, with the Nizami mausoleum, the brick mosque of 1606, the khan's plane trees and a house made of bottles

360 km from Baku, in the west, where the Kura plain rises towards the Lesser Caucasus, is Ganja, Azerbaijan's second city and the one almost nobody visits, which is a mistake: it has a thousand years more history than the capital, a national poet buried in its cemetery, a red-brick mosque with the two most photographed minarets in the country, a garden of plane trees from the time of the khans and a provincial-city life, with its bazaars and chaykhanas, that Baku no longer has. This guide tells what to see in a day or two, what to eat, how to get there and where to go on to.

The history in five dates

Founded around 859 by the Arab governors of Arran, it was the capital of the Shaddadids in the 10th and 11th centuries and a rich city of the Silk Road; the earthquake of 1139, the one that formed Lake Goygol, destroyed it and forced it to move a few kilometres; in 1141 Nizami was born here, the poet of the Five Treasures who wrote in Persian and whom Azerbaijan claims as its own; in 1606 Shah Abbas rebuilt it after retaking it from the Ottomans and left it the mosque and the baths; and in 1804, when the Russians stormed it, Javad Khan died on the wall with his son and became the city's hero. It was Yelizavetpol under the tsars and Kirovabad under the Soviets, from 1935 to 1989, and became Ganja again with independence.

What to see

The Shah Abbas mosque and the baths

The Juma mosque, of 1606, in red brick with two minarets and a dome, was designed by Sheikh Bahai, the Persian scholar of Abbas's court, who left on the facade a sundial that still marks noon; beside it, the 17th-century Chokek baths with their domes, and the plane trees of the khan's garden, the Khan Bagi, planted more than four hundred years ago and shading the whole square. This is the heart of the old town, with the bazaar and the chaykhanas around it.

The Nizami mausoleum

On the outskirts, on the Baku road, the poet's mausoleum, a granite tower of 1991 that replaced the Soviet monument of 1947 over the medieval tomb, with a garden, an exhibition on his work and sculptures of the characters of his poems: Leyli and Majnun, Khosrow and Shirin. Nizami is to Azerbaijan what Dante is to Italy, and the mausoleum a place visited by schoolchildren and newlyweds.

Javad Khan, the Imamzadeh and the Bottle House

The mausoleum of Javad Khan, rebuilt in 2005 in the centre, with the tomb of the khan who died in 1804; the Imamzadeh, a 14th-century Shia shrine with a blue dome on the outskirts, restored and a place of pilgrimage; and the Bottle House, on a street in the centre, which Ibrahim Jafarov built between 1966 and 1967 with some fifty thousand glass bottles set into the walls, with the name of his brother lost in the war and mosaic portraits; it is the strangest place in the city and the one people like most.

What to eat

Ganja is known in the country for plov, rice with lamb, chestnuts and dried apricots served in the restaurants of the centre, for dushbara, the soup of tiny dumplings, and for qutab, the thin flatbreads stuffed with herbs or pumpkin eaten at the bazaar stalls; for dessert, Ganja baklava and halva. The chaykhanas in the khan's garden serve tea in waisted glasses with jam, which is the city's after-dinner ritual.

How to get there and where to go next

From Baku, the fast train takes about four hours and is the comfortable way; by car or bus, four and a half along the motorway; and Ganja airport has flights from Istanbul and Russia, which allow you to enter the country from the west. With one day you see the city; with two, you add the trip to Lake Goygol, 25 km away, with the former German colony of Helenendorf, and with three, Mingachevir or Sheki. Ganja is the base for the whole west.

Frequently asked questions