Grand Journey: Baku and the Regions in 3 Days

This is the most complete route I offer — three days in which you'll see almost all of Azerbaijan in miniature: prehistoric petroglyphs, Baku's fiery modern architecture, a mountain craft village with nearly two thousand years of history, a Russian village in the Caucasus mountains, and one of the most isolated villages in the world, perched on a mountain ridge.

The first day starts early with a trip to Gobustan, an open-air museum with thousands of rock carvings 5,000 to 40,000 years old: scenes of hunting, dancing, boats with rowers. It's one of the most significant Stone Age sites in the Caucasus, and I'll show you the reserve's most striking panels.

On the way back we'll stop at Bibi-Heybat Mosque on the Caspian shore — the current building was rebuilt in the 1990s on the site of a 13th-century mosque destroyed during the Soviet era. We'll have lunch at a seaside fish restaurant, then visit the Nobel Brothers' house-museum — their oil empire once made Baku one of the wealthiest cities in the world.

In the evening, a walk through the modern part of the city: the Flame Towers, whose three tongues of flame have become Azerbaijan's newest symbol, and Little Venice, a canal system on the boulevard where you can take a boat ride and relax on one of Baku's most scenic waterfronts.

Day two starts at the 15th-century Diri Baba mausoleum, a structure that seems to grow straight out of the rock, then continues to Shamakhi, to the 8th-century Juma Mosque and the family mausoleums of the Mustafa khans, tied to the legend of the Queen of Shamakhi.

Next comes the mountain road and Lahij, the "town of craftsmen," where the art of copper engraving has stayed almost unchanged since the 8th century. We'll walk its cobbled streets and stop by workshops where craftsmen still work as their great-grandfathers did.

We end the day in Ivanovka, a village with a Russian name founded by Molokans in the 19th century, still home to one of the last working kolkhozes in the world. In the evening we return to Baku.

Day three is dedicated to the Guba region, a place once visited by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov. Here striking landscapes sit alongside distinctive villages, each with its own separate history.

We start at Krasnaya Sloboda, the world's largest settlement of Mountain Jews and the only community of its kind in the former Soviet region. A unique language, culture and religion survive here, and expensive cars drive past grand villa-like houses.

Next is the Guba Genocide Memorial, built on a mass grave discovered in 2007, holding victims of the 1918 massacre. There's a museum here now — an important stop for understanding the region's genuinely difficult history.

After lunch: the red-brick Sakina Khanum mosque, shaped like a faceted cylinder, and a 19th-century domed bathhouse where, according to legend, Alexandre Dumas once bathed — and, a century and a half later, so did his great-great-grandson.

We finish in Khinalig, a village more than 5,000 years old, cut off from the world for centuries by hard-to-reach mountains. That isolation let its people preserve a unique language, unrelated to any language family, and traditions found nowhere else: the houses sit so close together that one roof serves as the next house's yard.

The route is a 3-day, 2-night trip; the meeting and finishing point is arranged individually. The price includes the guide and transport; unless otherwise agreed, accommodation, meals and entry tickets are paid separately. Message me on WhatsApp to arrange the full programme and dates.