Why Azerbaijan in September 2026? September gives Azerbaijan at its clearest and most colourful — the Baku sky at its most specific September blue (the Caspian produces a humidity-free clarity in September that the July-August summer heat haze does not), the Sheki Khan's Palace stained glass in the autumn afternoon light at its most luminous, and the Sheki harvest (the pomegranate trees, the hazelnuts, the quince) giving the Sheki market its most complete September character. And the mud volcanoes at Gobustan: the September heat (30°C) is warm enough that the methane gas activity is at its most consistently visible without the winter cold suppressing the degassing.
The Heydar Aliyev Center at 9am on September 18, 2023. The building is white — not the white of painted concrete but the specific white of fiber-reinforced polymer cladding in the direct morning light, the white so complete it appears to create its own luminosity. The flowing surfaces (the absence of right angles — every surface curves into the next, the building having no edge in the conventional sense) make the building appear to be in motion when you walk around it. I had read about the Heydar Aliyev Center before visiting and expected to recognise it from the photographs. The photographs are accurate in every detail and completely insufficient in every quality. The building in person produces the same disorientation that the best architecture always produces — the inability to understand how the space was made and whether it was made at all or simply emerged from the landscape.
The Sheki Khan's Palace at 4pm on September 20: the afternoon light through the shebeke panels (the stained glass lattice work — thousands of coloured glass pieces assembled without adhesive into geometric patterns in wooden frames, the entire facade of the Khan's summer palace) casting a pattern on the white-plastered floor of the reception hall. The pattern shifts as the afternoon light changes angle — I watched it for 20 minutes while the September sun moved and the floor pattern changed. The most beautiful use of light in a building that I have seen in the Caucasus.
