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The Azerbaijani currency not being accepted outside the country, we spent our last Manats to buy some sweets.
People lined up at the ATM machine to get their periodic pension check, this being the end of the month, our guide explained.
Our guide said that there were “29 cities” in Caucasian Albania. In addition to Shaki, we had a chance to see Balaken (Bailakan). There was no evidence of Caucasian Albania in sight. Today, Balaken was a small town at the border of Georgia through which trucks from Turkey entered Azerbaijan and, hence, stores catered especially to Turkish visitors.
Outside the Kish church was a bust of Thor Heyerdahl with a quote from him on a plate below it. The Norwegian ethnographer was here to say that “Scandinavian mythology describes a God called Odin that came to northern Europe from a place called Azer. I have studied these writings and concluded that it is not mythology, it is real history and geography.”
A collection of pottery from Bailakan, Shaki, and other places in an exhibit cabinet. They were dated to 3rd and 2nd Centuries B.C., but not specifically attributed to the Caucasian Albania.
The Museum, however, had a large sign describing Caucasian Albania based on other sources: "Numerous settlements ... discovered by archeologists are evidence of animated life, developed economy and culture of ... Azerbaijan. According to cuneiform inscriptions of King Sardur ... during ... 7th century B.C. ... in Azerbaijan there were upwards of one hundred large populated localities and fortresses. Ancient authors Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Claudius Ptolemy focus on the great quantity of towns in Caucasian Albania to mention ... Kabala. Excavations made in Kabala ...
The sign did not identify it as Albanian. There was a “copy” of “a stone with Albanian epigraphy” discovered elsewhere, in Mingachevir. This epigraphy looked more like spots than inscription.
Among the oldest discoveries reported are the ceramics, identified as belonging to what is commonly referred to as the Kur-Araz culture of about 3000 B.C. The Kish Church itself has been turned into a museum. Among its artifacts I saw “vessels” from a Shaki “necropolis,” dated to the late 2nd and early 1st Millennium B.C.
To learn more about the Albanians, since 1998 archeologists have been excavating near the Kish Albanian Church. Just outside the Church I could peer through the glass cover into the excavated walls and foundations of a “temple,” dated to “2-1” Century B.C.
"This is what we call the Armenization of the population of Karabakh. Similarly, some Armenians who today live in Armenia are Albanians who changed their church in the Middle Ages.” Albanian Christians, however, remained in the Shaki and Gabala regions. Even today there are “8,000" people who practice this faith in Azerbaijan. “Also there are some in the Khomsi, one of the provinces of Armenia.” Around the Church in Kish we ran into several women who, the guide identified as followers of the Albanian Church.
Azerbaijan with its largely Muslim population would like to project itself as a ‘”secular” country, but it has made the Kish church a major locus of its narrative as an old Christian nation, indeed giving birth to Christian Armenia. It maintains that the Kish church was the most ancient Christian community in the Caucasus.
The village of Kish is near the ruins of the old town of Shaki. The Kish Church’s round-towered structure has survived the mudslide that destroyed that town. A sign at the building dates the Church back to the I-V Century. It has been renovated more recently, but other signs also imply that in the 19th Century, repair and renovation by Armenians settled in Azerbaijan by the Russians introduced into it architectural elements uncharacteristic for the Albanian architecture, in order for their “Armenization.”
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