Things to do in Naxçivan City
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Carpet Museum
The Carpet Museum is housed in the rebuilt palace of Ehsan Khan, Naxçivan’s 18th-century monarch. Despite the şəbəkə windows and attractive exterior porches, the building isn’t quite as impressive as Şəki’s equivalent. Nonetheless the rug displays are well chosen if you want to learn the difference between a kilim and a sumax or palaz, or to recognise the four main styles of Azeri carpet making. The ghoulish centrepiece is a totally non-ironic silk-wool carpet portrait of a young Heydar Әliyev, replete with Soviet medals. Two side rooms relate to the history of the Naxçivan khanate, replicate the khan’s cushion-throne and gratuitously add photos of Yerevan (n…
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Kazim Karabəkir Paşa Mosque
Not to be outdone by the Iranians funding mosques in town, Turks stumped up money to build the impressive Kazim Karabəkir Paşa Mosque behind the bazaar. This grandly-domed stone edifice has elegant missile-style twin minarets and splendid gilt inscriptions on the white marble doorway. However, if you're coming from Turkey you'll be likely to have seen dozens of similar structures.
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Gənclik Kafesi
Like most decent restaurants in Naxçivan the cavernous Gənclik offers point-and-pick precooked Turkish dishes, though there’s also a salad-bar, of sorts. Staff are friendly and women do venture in (usually chaperoned, of course) but there’s little atmosphere. Mirrored glass misleadingly makes it appear permanently closed. No alcohol.
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Kafe Şələlə
For women wanting a teahouse experience without eliciting endless attention the best bet is Kafe Şələlə, where tables are ranged up an amphitheatre of paved terraces around an artificial waterfall. However, beware that the jams or pickled walnuts that arrive in lieu of sugar will each cost a whopping AZN3 extra.
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Möminə Xatun Mausoleum
The impressive Möminə Xatun mausoleum is Naxçivan’s icon and one of Azerbaijan’s best-known landmarks. It’s a glorious, gently leaning 26m brick tower decorated with geometric patterns and Kufic script (a stylised, angular form of Arabic) picked out in turquoise glaze.
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İmamzadə
The khans who once ruled from the carpet museum were buried in a squat, rather over-restored brick tomb complex with a simple blue-glaze dome. Known simply as the İmamzadə, it's below a graveyard on what were once the city's citadel walls. Access is from the road to the train station.
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Heydar Әliyev Museum
The grandly rebuilt Heydar Әliyev Museum is a veritable modern palace of shiny marble. It’s somewhat more interesting than other such hagiographic shrines elsewhere in Azerbaijan if only because Naxçivan was Heydar’s home region.
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Mausoleum of Yusif Hüseynoğlu
Hidden in Naxçivan back streets are a couple of medieval pointed tomb-towers in an octagonal form common throughout eastern Anatolia. The best known is the 1162 Mausoleum of Yusif Hüseynoğlu, by the same architect as the Möminə Xatun tower.
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Həzrət Zohra Mosque
Built in pallid yellow brick the Həzrət Zohra mosque sports twin, rectilinear minarets and a metal-clad dome looking more like a lagged boiler tank.
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Blue Mosque
The red-brick Blue Mosque isn’t very blue at all but makes a useful landmark when approaching the Möminə Xatun area by marshrutka.
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House-Museum
Cavid’s sweet little wooden house-museum, where the writer once lived, long before being infamously deported to Siberia.
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Çay Evi
One of the nicest, simply called Çay Evi, sits amid trees that also hide the chess school and philharmonia.
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musical comedy theatre
Across the manicured square, Naxçivan's musical comedy theatre is an archetype of provincial Soviet classicism.
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Historical Museum
If you have time to kill, the Historical Museum is attractively presented, if fairly standard.
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Yemekxana Altay
The friendly Yemekxana Altay is slightly cosier but more male-dominated Turkish restaurant.
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Gənclik Kafesi
There’s a spacious subterranean cavern-bar beneath the Gənclik Kafesi.
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Anadolu
Anadolu is slightly cosier but more male-dominated Turkish restaurant.
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