Sheki Caravanserai: the silk-road merchants' inn, and how to visit

Most visitors to Sheki see the Khan's Palace and drive on. The caravanserai is a ten-minute walk downhill, it is by far the larger building, and you can walk into the courtyard and look around. From April 2027 a Japanese package will put its guests up overnight in a Sheki caravanserai rather than a hotel in town. Here is what the building is, why it turns up on the VIVANT itinerary, and how to reach it from Baku.

What is the Sheki Caravanserai?

Five caravanserais worked in Sheki in the 18th century and two are still standing, a few hundred metres apart on Akhundzade Avenue in the old quarter. This page is about the upper of the pair, Yuxarı Karvansara. It is a trapezoidal block of roughly 6,000 square metres folded around an inner courtyard, with a street façade about 14 metres high and one arched gate cut through it. Sources give it about 300 rooms and storerooms across two floors, and date the pair to the 18th and 19th centuries without separating them, so treat any single year you see for this building as an estimate. Merchants kept their goods in the cellars, traded on the ground floor and slept above, and the gate was shut at night, which made the building a strongbox as much as an inn.

The courtyard is the part that surprises people. Two storeys of arches run the whole way round it, stone channels carry water across the floor, and a raised platform sits in the middle where merchants once did business in the open. The silk trade put this building up to hold goods and people safely overnight, and it still reads that way from inside.

Why is the caravanserai on the VIVANT itinerary?

TBS began the second season of VIVANT on 26 July 2026 in its Sunday drama slot. The lead cast stayed in Azerbaijan for two months from August 2025 and filming took place at eight locations inside the country, Sasaki Masaaki, Yahoo News Japan expert commentary, 24 July 2026. That commentary names Sheki as one of the eight and Baku as a filming location in a photo caption; it identifies none of the rest. Hankyu Travel's itinerary labels six sites as filming locations, which is Hankyu's own designation rather than an announcement. The caravanserai appears in the season 2 announcement video. Most guidebooks give the building three lines, and Japanese interest in it climbed before the first episode aired.

Hankyu Travel sells a six-day Azerbaijan package, course ET391T, at ¥279,000 to ¥379,000 per person on a twin-share basis. Eleven departures run from 30 November 2026, out of Haneda via Istanbul. The caravanserai is on that itinerary, and from the April 2027 departures onward guests stay overnight in a Sheki caravanserai rather than visiting one for an hour. Birtour has no part in that package and no connection to the production. What we can tell you is what the building is and how to get to it. The other named locations, and the distances between them, are set out on our VIVANT filming locations page.

How do you get to Sheki from Baku?

Sheki is about 300 km northwest of Baku and the drive runs four to four and a half hours through Shamakhi and Gabala, climbing into the southern foothills of the Greater Caucasus at the end. It is too long a road for a day trip, so Sheki works as an overnight, which is how it sits on our 6-day Azerbaijan cultural tour. Once you are in town the caravanserai is easy to find: it is on the main avenue of the old quarter, roughly a ten-minute walk downhill from the Khan's Palace along a winding street, and the gate is visible from the road.

What does staying inside involve?

One of the two surviving caravanserais on Akhundzade Avenue runs as a hotel, with old merchants' chambers converted into guest rooms and a restaurant in the courtyard. Published sources disagree about which of the pair it is, and about how many rooms it has. We are not going to print a figure we cannot stand behind, so here is what holds either way. The converted rooms are a small fraction of the chambers in either building, they open off the arcade onto the courtyard inside thick stone walls and low doorways, and the fabric of a protected building sets the limits on what can be fitted into it. Hankyu's departures from April 2027 stay in a Sheki caravanserai overnight, which is a group booking into a small room count and part of why those dates sit nine months after the first departure of the series.

When should you go, and what else is close?

Late spring through autumn is the reliable window, both for the drive and for sitting out in the courtyard. Walking the caravanserai takes about 45 minutes if you go up to the gallery and look into the arcade properly. Everything else worth seeing is within a short walk: the old town of Sheki with its shebeke workshops and halva houses spreads around it, and the Khan's Palace is uphill at the top of the same street inside the fortress walls. UNESCO inscribed all of it as one property in 2019, which is the honest reason to give Sheki a night rather than an afternoon.

Disclosure

Birtour is not affiliated with TBS, with the VIVANT production committee, or with the travel companies selling packaged VIVANT departures. We are a destination management company based in Baku. This page describes the building itself.