In the heart of the South Caucasus’ most seismic region, in central-eastern Azerbaijan lies Shamakha. From this two millennia-old town of 31,000, a winding road climbs up on the hills at the bottom of the Caucasus range. Soon the tarmac ends, the road becomes a track from which occasionally smaller routes depart leading to hidden villages. The roads are bad - snowy in winter, muddy in spring. Then 45 km from the centre of Shamakha, up at 1,700 metres, sits Zarat Kheybari, a cluster of 15 houses, a small school, and a locked mosque. Nothing else.

Here live the Tats, or at least few of them. The history of this indigenous group of Persian origin in the Caucasus lacks clear details. Their language is related, but different from, Farsi and it features various dialects, so different that Tats from different areas can hardly understand each other, and decades of slow but steady contamination by the Azerbaijani language. In Azerbaijan they live mainly in the north-east regions of the Absheron peninsula, Shamakhi, Khachmaz, Guba, and Xizi. In his 1995 book “From our wedding treasure,” Maqsud Hajiyev stated that the assimilation of the Tats with the local Azerbaijani led to inaccurate calculation of their number - in 2009 official statistics set their number in Azerbaijan at 25,200 people.