Savouring traditions

From slow food in northerly Sheki and Lekit to the tea plantations of Lankaran down on the country's southern tip, When it comes to food and drink, Azerbaijan continues to keep the old ways alive. Words: Emily Lush. Photographs: Karolina Wiercigroch

“Every house in Sheki has a rose bush, a mulberry tree and a walnut tree,” my guide Zamina Rasulova tells me, pointing them out in the frescoes. These three staples of a Sheki garden — and three linchpin ingredients in the region’s singular cuisine — are so sacred that at the end of the 18th century, artists saw fit to immortalise them on the walls of the royal palace.

Sheki’s crowning jewel, the summer residence of the khan (ruler) took two years to build and another eight to decorate with painstakingly intricate Shebeke (stained glass), miniature paintings, and an inlay ceiling pieced together from precisely 5,524 tiny shards of timber. In Sheki, there seems to be an understanding that good things take time.

This philosophy certainly applies to food. Sheki’s is a cuisine carefully crafted over centuries, rooted in locally available produce infused with reminders of the EastWest trading route that once wound its way through the streets. Today, the region of Sheki features on the Slow Food Travel route; part of a sweeping project that aims to safeguard agrobiodiversity and culinary heritage across northwestern Azerbaijan. And, with 20 years of guiding and several published books under her belt, Zamina — a proud participant in the Great Caucasus Slow Food Travel project — is the perfect chaperone for a Sheki slow food adventure.

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