Ganja

The second city, and much the older one. People have lived on this spot since the sixth century.

Ganja is called the red city, and the name is literal: the old buildings are raised in a local brick that runs from rust to dark rose, and the low afternoon light does the rest. The Shah Abbas mosque at the centre was finished in 1606 and has never been rendered, so you are looking at the brick itself, laid four hundred years ago.

Nizami Ganjavi was born here in the twelfth century and is buried on the road out towards Baku, under a tower of dark stone that replaced the older tomb in 1991. He wrote in Persian, is claimed by half the region, and is read here as a local. The mausoleum is plain to the point of severity and much better for it.

In May 1918 the first government of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic sat in a red brick building on Javad Khan street, having moved out of Tiflis with nowhere else to go. The republic lasted twenty three months. The building is still there, and still red.