Day 16 Friday

Friday morning wakes up cold, and I am grumpy, but Beloved quickly reminds me not to be a wet blanket, suck it up. We’re not at a 4-star Hyatt. (Well duh!)


We get some hot tea and bread and talk with England about what is to happen today. We get down to The Bank about 10:00 via taxi. --Interesting note; Sheki is a mountain town, and the hotel is “up hill” from the bank, probably an elevation change of 100 or 120 feet. However it is also about a mile and a half away. We get in the taxi, the driver turns the key one notch and shifts into nuetral and off we go. We were able to travel more than a mile of the distance without the car being turned on at all. Very clever. By the way, Lada’s are very simple vehicles, no power steering or power brakes, so safety was never decreased on this rather quiet ride!

We spend from 10:30 to 1:00 going around the town again, visiting more clients of the bank, seeing a little more of the city. At 1:00 we go with England about a five-minute walk to see another Training House here in Sheki, and meet the operators. A short greeting and interview of what they are doing in the region, they work with a humanitarian group out of Norway to help in agriculture. They have brought new concepts in farming, new breeds of cows for milk, new ways of growing fish as well as training in accounting and book keeping. They have been successful throughout the region and are very friendly generous people.

 At 2:00 we are done with our work for the Bank and England turns us loose to explore the city of Sheki. We have retained the services of Aynura, the interpreter, so we hire a cab to go visit the summer palace, a spectacular building built in 1750 as part of a complex of seven buildings, a summer residence for the ruler (King?) and the seat of his governance when he was there. The building is amazingly ornate in it’s decoration, the tile and paint work worthy of a king. However, the star of the show was the windows. They defy description, pictures barely do them justice. They are built without nails or glue, each piece interlocking like a puzzle, and each window has more than 5,000 pieces of wood and glass, and there are dozens of them. Really amazing. And they still function too--they are still able to be opened after more than 250 years now. Less than five percent of these windows have needed any renovation.

We toured the palace then walked down the hill about two hunded yards to see the “Craftsman Hall,” a museum of native arts, including a demonstration of how the puzzle windows are made and put together. We learn that a window the size and complexity of those we have seen could take as much as six months to complete each one. We also get to see a wood-carver at work, he is building a “Tar” a regional instrument like a guitar or banjo. He plays a little for us.


After this we go to a memorial site that Aynura shows as a good lookout point. The city is laid out beneath us.

Shortly enough it is time to eat, and then time to go. We will visit Sheki again some time when it is a little warmer and the trees have some leaves!