Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan sits where the Caucasus meets the Caspian, a country that has been a crossroads for long enough that the crossroads is now the culture. Baku's old city - a walled medieval core of caravanserais and hammams - sits directly beneath towers of glass and steel that were built with oil money in a decade, the ancient and the new in a proximity that would be jarring if the city did not carry it with such confidence. The regions beyond Baku are almost entirely unvisited: the wine country of Sheki, the alpine villages of the northern ranges, the mud volcanoes that bubble on the Absheron Peninsula with magnificent indifference to the city nearby.

Our guide is being written from the ground up, with the time this place deserves.

We are still gathering the notes that make a guide worth keeping: Baku's old city guesthouses, Sheki's caravanserai, northern mountain routes and the pomegranate-based cooking that connects this table to Persia, Turkey and somewhere entirely its own.