A complex of fawn-coloured limestone buildings on the highest point of the Old City, the Palace of the Shirvanshahs was the seat of the local dynasty in the fifteenth century. It groups the main palace, a divan-khana for receiving visitors, a small octagonal tomb for the shah's relatives, a Shah Mosque with two minarets, and a bathhouse and reservoir below — all built within a few decades of each other and unusually coherent for the period.
The architecture is severe and elegant: plain walls, sharp geometric volumes, just a few areas of carved stonework around the doorways and the dome of the divan-khana. After the airy excess of later Ottoman and Persian palaces it is a refreshing reminder of what fifteenth-century Caucasian architecture actually looked like.