Sheikh Bani Mausoleum‎

The Sheikh Bani Mausoleum stands in the Hazra necropolis near the village of Hazra in Azerbaijan's Qabala district, within a wooded medieval cemetery that once held seven domed tombs built for local Sufi sheikhs. An inscription on the mausoleum dates its construction to 978 AH, corresponding to 1570-1572, and names both Sheikh Bani and the Safavid ruler Shah Tahmasp I, while crediting the work to the master builder Shamakhili Shamsaddin. Like its companion tombs in the complex, it was raised in the Shirvan-Absheron school of stone architecture that defined religious and funerary buildings across the wider Shirvan region in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Of the original seven mausoleums at the site only four have survived, and the Sheikh Bani Mausoleum, despite its weathered state, remains valued for the rare combination of a precise date, a named patron and a named architect carved into its stone.