Palace of Karabakh Khans - a historic palace in ancient city of Shusha – cultural capital of Azerbaijan

Baku, May 7, AZERTAC Palace of Karabakh Khans is a historic palace located in the north-east part of Shusha – the city which was declared as the cultural capital of Azerbaijan by President Ilham Aliyev in 2021. The palace belongs to the highly artistic palace buildings of Azerbaijan of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is currently in a ruined condition. The palace consisted of a large number of rooms located on two floors, and a large T-shaped main hall, which was the compositional center of the entire palace. This hall was separated from the external space by enormous lifting windows-web, widely used in palace, residential and religious construction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the territory of the modern Republic of Azerbaijan. Important meetings of Khanate were held in this palace, and in between, there was a serene life of the Khan’s family. One can no longer feel the smoothness of silk fabrics embroidered with decorative knit, nor the tenderness of Karabakh carpets with unique life-affirming ornaments left in the palace. As written by a historian Mir Mehdi Khazani, the internal castle, built by Panahali Khan, was “a palace similar to a small castle, with the surrounding wall and towers”; Panahali also had “a beautiful palace” (castle) built on a hill next to his residence for his eldest son, Ibrahim. As seen from drawings by Russian engineers, the internal castle, its plan of a complicated form relevant to the hill’s relief, was a compound including palace buildings, divankhana (court), and other premises.