Azerbaijan’s Silk Road: Rethreading history’s greatest trade network

We have simply been handed a bowl filled with white, lozenge-shaped balls, every the dimensions of a boiled candy. They look like product of dry, compressed cotton wool and so they rattle when shaken.

“These,” reveals our affable information Ilqar Aghayevm, “are the cocoons. They’ve already been sorted and baked and sure — I am afraid the pupa inside did not survive. That is the rattle you possibly can hear. But when it had bitten its method out and change into a moth, it could have died a number of days later anyway”.

Ilqar is clearly extra conscious than many within the Caucasus of Western sensitivities to animal welfare, however there is not any method across the uncomfortable proven fact that making silk requires the sacrifice of tens of millions of silk pupae earlier than the close to miraculous course of of making silk material may even start.

The baked cocoons have to be softened, their outer coatings eliminated by fanciful soft-brushing machines, then unraveled, spooled onto bobbins, re-spun and at last woven. The method employs a veritable military of nimble-fingered operatives — largely older girls in colourful floral aprons — to maintain the rumbling machines threaded.

After a lot work, adopted by dying and hand stamping it is moderately astonishing that Azerbaijan’s archetypal kelaghayi (hand-stamped silk scarfs) price as little as $30 — a minimum of from the manufacturing unit’s elegant outlet boutique.

Silk Highway, Silk Roads, Silk Routes?

This quiet city was a serious silk-trading middle effectively into the Nineteenth century.

Mark Elliott

It comes as some shock to find that, in earlier centuries, this gorgeous rustic backwater was one of many most important stops in a Caucasian department of the traditional Silk Route. And the work being carried out right here at present is a part of a far wider resurgence of East-West commerce throughout the area.

The Nice Silk Route, or Silk Highway, was the fabled overland provide chain that famously allowed the provision of Chinese language items to succeed in historical Rome from the second century BCE.

In an historical world with out trains or planes, transporting precious commodities throughout huge inhospitable swathes of Eurasia required effectively outfitted groups of pack animals — usually camels touring in teams referred to as caravans.

These would usually search in a single day security in sturdy walled enclosures the place the merchants might discover lodging and sustenance. This developed into caravanserais (actually “sarays,” or palaces, for caravans) all alongside the commerce routes: precursors of traveler’s inns, however for a pre-motorized period.

Geopolitical alternative

The very best-known sections of the Silk Route crossed the deserts of Central Asia and Iran, however there have been many factors in historical past when dysfunction, insecurity or worldwide politics served to interrupt the extra main routes.

Usually, trans-Caucasian routes tended to develop widespread when circumstances have been much less conducive to commerce through the Persian world.

Immediately’s geopolitical issues in each Iran and Russia may be seen as one other such part within the periodic cycles that sometimes spur Asian commerce to funnel itself through the Caspian, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

This Twenty first-century “silk route” is most clearly symbolized by the newly inaugurated rail-link between Istanbul and Baku — dubbed the “Iron Silk Highway” — which parallels the much more essential Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline for a lot of its route.

And simply as in days of outdated, with burgeoning commerce volumes comes a complete raft of related advantages — not least a rediscovery of older layers of the area’s Silk Route historical past, as a spur for additional commerce and for tourism.

Tourism draw

Again at Sheki’s silk manufacturing unit, Ilqar relates how lower than a decade in the past the town’s historic silk business had confronted collapse because the manufacturing unit went out of business.

Nonetheless, Azerbaijan’s newest financial growth helped fund a large resurgence within the native reputation of the kelaghayi: carrying these conventional scarfs has gained an nearly patriotic aura since they have been added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage itemizing in 2014.

Sheki’s silk, in addition to its Silk Route heritage, is now being consciously harnessed as a vacationer draw.

As of late 2022, a big a part of the town’s photogenic outdated core is awash with renovations of historic buildings and museums geared toward bringing out extra of the story.

Sheki’s most archetypal lodge, The Karvansary, is itself inside a big outdated caravanserai. Wraparound corridors result in modest rooms set behind repeated archways that body a central gated courtyard which now protects slightly fountain pool moderately than a chaos of pack animals. This lodge can also be due for a makeover within the upcoming 12 months.

The rejuvenation of Basqal

Whereas Sheki takes the limelight, it is not Azerbaijan’s solely “silk middle.”

The overgrown village of Basqal gained accolades for its silk merchandise at London’s 1862 Worldwide Exhibition world truthful. Within the twentieth century, Basqal’s historic middle had change into very rundown, leaving its single surviving scarf-design workshop completely antiquated, making do with stained outdated bathtubs for the a number of dyeing processes.

Right here too, issues at the moment are shifting quick. A model new workshop is underneath development and in August 2022 a good-looking restoration of the outdated middle was unveiled.

The streets’ river-stone cobbles have been stabilized, outdated homes in typical earthquake-resistant ketil (layered timber and stone) have been partly patched up whereas newer buildings have been given a disguise of latest stonework and lantern-lamps.

Most importantly, within the leafy outskirts, the huge new Basqal Resort & Spa opened this summer time designed as a “silk route getaway” for fastidious vacationers, a social enterprise for native employment and an inventive inspiration with demonstration lessons of kelaghayi silk-printing.

And the newly widened freeway, that now runs a lot of the method right here from Azerbaijan’s glitzy capital Baku, makes driving this fashion far quicker than ever earlier than.

Different Silk Highway legacies

One of many causes that Sheki grew right into a silk middle was the destruction of the previous regional capital Shamakhi by each army siege (1742) and earthquakes (particularly 1859). Nonetheless, different Silk Route remnants stay elsewhere.

Immediately Baku is by far Azerbaijan’s greatest, richest metropolis, but it surely was comparatively unimportant earlier than the late Nineteenth-century “oil growth.”

Its one precedent days of brilliance was between the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, and 4 small stone caravanserais from that period have survived remarkably effectively.

As of late 2022, the 14th-century Multani Caravanserai and fifteenth century Bukhara Caravanserai are each being given facelifts as a part of Azerbaijan’s “rediscovery” of its silk route heritage.

The primary Twenty first-century rail-and-oil commerce route passes via central Azerbaijan’s second metropolis, Ganja, whose silk street credentials are much less publicized. Nonetheless, this too was additionally an traditionally vital regional middle.

You’ll be able to keep in a Seventeenth-century caravanserai in Ganja, Azerbaijan’s second metropolis.

Mark Elliott

For Azerbaijan’s silk route community to be absolutely restored, one final reconnection awaits — that of the traditionally vibrant commerce route alongside the Araz River, which flows via border nation between Turkey, Armenia, Iran and Azerbaijan.

As soon as one of the vital vital threads of the area’s medieval commerce matrix, worldwide disputes left any transport this fashion paralyzed for many years.

But when sooner or later the route turns into viable, the magical journey to Turkey through the traditional metropolis of Nakhchivan (in a disconnected exclave of Azerbaijan) ought to as soon as once more be a serious commerce and tourism hall.

With or with out your valuable kelaghayi in hand, that is one more timeless journey that can actually reawaken the grand spirit of the Silk Route.