Shaki, Azerbaijan
The Silk
The silk that made the Silk Road worth naming.
A city built on silk
Şaki
Şaki sits in the foothills of the Greater Caucasus, where the mountains trap moisture and the valleys stay green through summer. For over a thousand years, this geography made one thing possible: the white mulberry tree.
The silkworm feeds only on white mulberry leaves. It cannot be rushed. It cannot be industrialised without becoming something else. The Şaki valley understood this long before the rest of the world began to forget it.
At its peak, the Şaki Khanate was one of the most prosperous territories of the Caucasus — not because of oil or gold, but because of silk. Caravans from China to Constantinople passed through here. Venetian merchants knew this city's name.
The silk trade collapsed in the twentieth century. The factories closed. The looms fell silent. But the families did not forget. The knowledge passed from grandmother to granddaughter, from master to apprentice, in kitchens and courtyards, never written down, never needing to be.
From leaf to thread
Every step by hand. Every step in Şaki.
THE WHITE MULBERRY — Morus alba
THE COCOON — harvested by hand
THE THREAD — unwound in hot water
The silkworm spins its cocoon in 72 hours without stopping. Inside, a single continuous thread — up to 1,500 metres long. This is what becomes a Navohi scarf. Not yarn. Not fibre. A single thread, spun by an insect, unwound by human hands.
The technique · Kelaghayi
A resist that remembers
The galib is a wooden block, hand-carved with geometric patterns that have not changed in five centuries. The master dips it in a mixture of paraffin and rosin — substances that repel dye — and presses it onto white silk with a precision that takes years to learn.
This is the resist. Wherever the galib touches, the dye cannot enter. The pattern is not painted on. It is protected from colour, and what remains is light on dark — the geometry of a tradition that survived the Soviet era, the decline of the Silk Road, and the arrival of the printing machine.
In 2014, UNESCO inscribed the Kelaghayi tradition on its Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The citation notes: a practice transmitted exclusively through non-formal apprenticeship, primarily within families.
The colours · Kök boya
Colours that deepen with age
Every colour in a Navohi piece comes from the earth.
Pomegranate rind yields a deep burnt orange-red, the colour of Caucasian autumn. Madder root gives the crimson that dyed Byzantine tapestries. Walnut shells produce the darkest brown — nearly black, nearly warm. Indigo, the oldest dye in the world, turns silk the colour of deep water.
Synthetic dyes were invented to replace these. They are cheaper, faster, and perfectly consistent. They are also finished — a synthetic-dyed fabric fades toward nothing.
A kök boya — root-dyed — Şaki silk does something different. It fades into itself. Ten years from now, worn and washed and carried, the colour will be deeper, more complex, more yours. This is not an accident. It is the chemistry of something that grew from the ground.
2014
UNESCO Recognition
Kelaghayi inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Five centuries of unbroken tradition.
7 plants
Natural dye sources
Pomegranate, madder, walnut, indigo, weld, sumac, pomegranate blossom. Every colour from the earth.
1,500 m
Per cocoon
A single silkworm thread inside each cocoon. Unwound by hand. Woven in Şaki. Worn by the world.
The craft, still living
A short film about the Kelaghayi masters of Basgal — the village where Şaki silk has been block-stamped for five hundred years.
Basgal village, Azerbaijan. Filmed by Euronews. The technique you see is the same technique used in every Navohi piece.
We could have sourced silk anywhere.
We didn't.
Bursa produces silk. Como produces silk. China produces more silk than the rest of the world combined.
We chose Şaki because Şaki is not just a source. It is an argument.
When a kelaghayi master presses a wooden galib onto white Şaki silk, five centuries of craft meet the specific thread spun by a silkworm that fed on the leaves of a valley it cannot be separated from. The result is not a product. It is a place.
Navohi exists to take that place to the world — through the hands of artists from Lagos, Kyoto, Oaxaca, Jaipur, and Berlin. The designs change. The artists change. The silk does not change.
Every Navohi piece begins in Şaki.
That is not a detail.
That is the point.
The petroglyphs of Gobustan, pressed into limestone 8,000 years ago on the shores of what was then a vast inland sea, show the same long boats as the rock paintings on Finland's lakeside cliffs. Thor Heyerdahl spent two decades here asking why. The answer may be that Şaki has always been where the world connects.
Where kelaghayi lives
Two villages. One tradition.
ŞAKI · North Azerbaijan
The ancient capital of the Şaki Khanate. A silk-producing city for fifteen centuries. In the 19th century, the Şaki silk factory was one of the largest in the world — 7,000 workers, exporting to Japan, Switzerland, and Italy.
The Soviet era nearly extinguished it. The factory closed. The workers dispersed. But the families kept the wooden stamps. The masters kept the recipe for pomegranate resist. The knowledge survived in kitchens and courtyards, exactly where it had always lived.
Today, the Şaki silk factory operates again. The masters press galiblar into silk with the same gesture their great-grandmothers used. The city smells of mulberry in June.
BASGAL · Ismayilli District
Sixty kilometres from Şaki, deep in the mountains of the Ismayilli district, sits Basgal — a village that considers itself the true home of kelaghayi. Some historians date the settlement to the 4th century. Its silk products were on the Great Silk Road before Europe knew what silk was.
In 1862, Basgal weaver Nasir Abdulaziz traveled to London for the International Exhibition. He brought kelaghayi. He returned with a silver medal and a diploma. A Basgal scarf from that year is said to be in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Today, the Basgal Silk Centre — ‘Kelaghayi’ — operates from a low-tech workshop of cauldrons, barrels and wooden stamps. Masters Nizami Mammadov and Abbasali Talibov, who learned from their grandfathers, still work there. ‘We do not let just anyone into the room where the scarves are dyed,’ one says. ‘We do not want to disturb the magic.’
Both villages. Both traditions. Both in every Navohi piece.
Places that carry the memory
The geography of silk
Albanian Church · Kiş Village
The oldest Christian church in the Caucasus — and the place where Thor Heyerdahl’s bust stands. He came here for decades to prove that the ancestors of the Vikings set sail from the shores of the ancient Caspian.
Gobustan Petroglyphs · Caspian Shore
8,000-year-old rock carvings showing long boats identical to Viking ships. Thor Heyerdahl saw in them the origin of Norse civilization. The same iron-oxide that coloured these rocks colours Aino Mäkinen’s silk.
Palace of the Şaki Khans
The summer palace of the khans who built their fortune on silk. Its shebeke windows — geometric stained glass held without glue or nails — are the visual language of Şaki: precision, colour, and the patient geometry of a civilization that had time to perfect things.
Kelaghayi Silk Centre · Basgal
A workshop of cauldrons, barrels and 300-year-old wooden stamps. The masters who work here learned from their grandfathers. The dye recipes are not written down. They are in the hands.
A note on Thor Heyerdahl
“The Norwegian explorer spent two decades excavating at Kiş village, just outside Şaki, searching for evidence that the Caucasus was the ancestral homeland of the Norse people. His bust stands in the village square of Kiş today — a Norwegian face looking east toward the mountains where the silk road began.”
Heyerdahl's theory — that boat-building knowledge traveled from Azerbaijan to Scandinavia around 100 AD, carried by people whose long-oared vessels appear in identical form at Gobustan and at Alta, Norway — remains contested by mainstream archaeology. But the petroglyphs are real. The similarities are real. And when Aino Mäkinen presses an iron-oxide motif from Finland's lakeside granite into Şaki silk, something closes that Heyerdahl spent his life trying to understand.
Navohi did not plan this. The material planned it.
Thor Heyerdahl (1914–2002) · Kiş, Azerbaijan · his bust was erected by the people of Şaki
The master
Narmin Hasanova
4. generation kelaghayi master · Shaki, Azerbaijan · UNESCO Intangible Heritage
A fourth-generation kelaghayi artisan from Shaki, Narmin works at the crossroads of UNESCO-recognized tradition and global contemporary art. Every collection that leaves her workshop carries 500 years of Azerbaijani silk heritage.
Meet Narmin →The silk is ready. The next artist might be you.
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