As our article on Ganja’s selection as the Euro- pean Youth Capital for 2016 suggests, the city has its own unique history, culture and spirit and is developing rapidly. The added bonus for visi- tors is that it can also be used as a springboard to explore some of Azerbaijan’s finest scenery, as a Visions team recently discovered. By Tom Marsden and Eldar Farzaliyev Dashkesan: ‘‘the Urals of Azerbaijan’’ And other routes into the Lesser Caucasus Mountains An imposing statue of a miner greets visitors at the entrance to the town of Dashkesan. Photo: Eldar Farzaliyev 96 WINTER 2016-2017 TRAVEL In summer the 3 ROADS INTO THE MOUNTAINS SHAMKIR TO GEDABEY towns of Goygol Lake Goygol is often cited as the region’s top attraction About a 30-minute drive west of Ganja another pop- and Hajikend and is reachable via a beautiful road wending its provincial ular route into the mountains begins at Shamkir, a town way from the southeast of Ganja high into the Lesser Cau- also established by German settlers in the early 19th cen- are popular with casus Mountains. In summer the towns of Goygol and Ha- tury (and originally called Annanfeld). Like Goygol it local Ganjarites jikend are popular with local Ganjarites escaping from the still has a Lutheran church and the central streets retain escaping from city’s sizzling temperatures, and in winter they turn into win- a pleasant central European feel. The road from here has the city’s sizzling tery wonderlands whose woods are dotted with chaikhanas, similarly stunning views of alpine meadows, rugged temperatures, colourful lights and steaming samovars. canyons and hard-to-reach historical ruins all the way and in winter they Foreigners are still a rarity here. When I happened upon to Gedabey, a mining town whose copper deposits at- turn into wintery this route over a year ago, I was treated to the best in Azer- tracted the Siemens brothers at the end of the 19th cen- wonderlands whose baijani hospitality at a local restaurant owned by some of tury. Today the town is being mined for gold and is also Goygol’s last Assyrians, who once lived side by side with renowned for growing Azerbaijan’s tastiest potatoes. woods are dotted the town’s Swabian German settlers until Stalinist deporta- Shortly before Gedabey is the village of Slavyanka, with chaikhanas, tions began in the 1930s. I then continued my ascent in a founded in 1844 by Russian “spirit wrestlers” (Douk- colourful lights and tired Zhiguli with a jovial group of locals led by a colonel hobors). In 1895 Slavyanka’s villagers were among the steaming samovars in the Ganja police force. At Hajikend, once a retreat for masses of Doukhobors from across the Yelizavetpol, oil-boom millionaires, we stopped for tea at a small cabin in Tiflis and Kars regions to burn their weapons in protest the woods heated by a rickety stove. A little higher the snow against mandatory military service in the Tsar’s army. thickened and forced us to retreat before we were able to Shortly after, many of them emigrated to Canada with reach the spectacular views of Mt Kapaz. the financial support of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, who It was this mountain’s jagged peak that was respon- donated some of the proceeds from Resurrection and sible for creating the national park’s stunning scenery others of his works. Today, few Russian villagers remain when a devastating earthquake in 1139 sent rocks hur- in the original village but the rustic izba-style houses tling from the mountain into the river Kurekchay, form- evoke their fascinating past. Since 2004, a local spring ing dams and lakes. Today Goygol and Maral Gol are has been supplying water under the brand Slavyanka 1. the stuff of myth and legend and endless cultural inspi- In between these two routes lies another alternative, ration, fittingly described by travel writer Mark Elliott in whose unusual recent history is also still very much evi- a recent Visions article as being as iconic to the Ganja dent today. region of Azerbaijan as the Maiden’s Tower is to Baku. For many years the Goygol National Park was mysteri- NEW GANJA TO KHOSH BULAQ ously closed to the public, but fortunately for visitors to This road snakes its way into the Lesser Cau- the region it suddenly reopened last year. casus Mountains from the western suburb of Ganja The MaidenTower near the village of Soyudlu, Gedabey Lake Maral Gol. Photo: Mark Elliott 97 TRAVEL known as Yeni Ganja or “New Ganja,” and ends up from poems by Ganja’s favourite son Nizami in the neatly planned town of Khosh Bulaq. There, Ganjavi, and opposite, the new Heydar Ali- an enormous reservoir lies like a giant mirror reflect- yev complex, which has a dramatic Arc de ing the distant mountain peaks and clouds and locals Triomphe-style entrance, long promenade picnic in the shade of a distant wood. The healing and theme park called “Luna Park.” It was properties of the mountain air, natural springs and from here that we set off recently on our medicinal herbs make this a popular dacha spot for gradual ascent, first passing a livestock bazaar Ganjarites, for whom, finances permitting, acquiring appearing on the last of the dusty suburban ter- a dacha is quite a simple process. The hardest part rain, taking me back in my thoughts to a similar might be tracking down the local government-ap- scene I witnessed in the ancient Silk Road city of pointed roaming estate agent, who will point out the Bukhara in Uzbekistan. Ganja too was a hub for Silk specially allocated plots (prices start from $5,000) on Road merchants during those years. which to build one’s own mountain retreat. Very quickly this terrain changed from semi- But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The road desert to greener pastures, the air noticeably cooled begins in “New Ganja,” a blend of recently built and little kebab and tendir bread stalls emerged from apartment blocks, each with a mural depicting scenes time to time beside the road. On the return leg we The gold mine in Gedabey 98 WINTER 2016-2017 TRAVEL would stop at one of those, and observe as a short, thickset woman sporting a traditionally colourful headscarf skilfully pasted the inte- rior of the oven with innumerable tendir doughs. Needless to say our mouths were soon watering from the enticing buttery smell, to such an extent that immediately after leaving we wolfed down several deli- cious loaves. A little higher on the ascent we were charmed by rustic Bayan, a village largely populated by Armenians prior to the Karabakh con- flict. I couldn’t help thinking how its old stone houses built compactly against the steep mountainside and timeless 19th century character were strangely reminiscent of French writer Alexandre Dumas’ im- pressions of arriving in Old Tbilisi: Almost overhanging it [the River Kura – Ed.] on both sides of the chasm rose haphazard clusters of houses, tier after tier, wherever they could find a foothold, like a flock of birds perched among the rocks (from Adventures in the Caucasus by Alexandre Dumas – Ed). It was not for the first time in Azerbaijan that a mountain village seemed to have existed untouched in its own little world. And it was The remains of a bridge built by the Siemens brothers in the village of Duzyurd to connect the copper mine with the smelting plant 99 TRAVEL Bayan’s timeless setting. Photo: Eldar Farzaliyev from about here onwards that we began to see glimmers of what we had come to document: an old railway line, bridge and cable cars hanging motionless, suspended in mid-air, connected to the surrounding mountain tops unnervingly, like a giant spider web. They sat frozen in time, as though reminders of a lost world. 100 A reservoir in Khosh Bulaq. Photo:WINTER Eldar 2016-2017 Farzaliyev TRAVEL A marble quarry a little beyond the town of Dashkesan. Photo: Eldar Farzaliyev It wasn’t so long ago that this was the largest mining region in the Caucasus A LOST WORLD Few tourists are likely to hear of Dashkesan (lit. “Stone Cut- ter”) but it wasn’t so long ago that this was the largest mining region in the Caucasus, rich in mineral resources such as iron ore, cobalt, white marble, limestone, quartz, bentonite clay and alunites, which led to the region’s nickname as “the Urals of Azerbaijan.” The re- gion’s iron ore deposit was used for centuries, while cobalt attracted the attention of prospectors in the 19th century (who included the Siemens brothers) and iron was smelted to produce weapons and farming tools up until the Russian Revolution in 1917. In the early 20th century the area was heavily prospected, but the two world wars prevented any production on an industrial scale. This finally began in 1954, when the Azerbaijan Mining and Refining Facility was built, and went on to serve the alu- minium factories in Ganja and Sumgayit and the Rustavi metal works in Georgia. A 1991 booklet stated that the region extract- ed 2,150,000 tonnes of iron ore each year. During those years a railway was used to transport the ore from the mines and then on to the metal works in nearby Rustavi, until this was closed after the fall of the USSR. Small quantities were then sent to Turkey and other countries but it seems that this was the point when Dashkesan went into decline. The cable cars used to transport the ore from the mines to the refineries.