Wine and Wagons
Helenendorf: Azerbaijan's First German Settlement
by Jacqueline Grewlich-Suchet
(Jacqueline Grewlich-Suchet is the wife of the German Ambassador in Azerbaijan. She has graduate degrees in Architecture from Paris (Beaux-Arts) and Archaeology (Louvre). Later she specialized in tropical medicine and practiced obstetrics. In Azerbaijan, she involves herself in social work and has helped to rehabilitate Siyazan clinic and the Guba asylum. As well, she is involved with some of the local orphanages.)

But about 180 years ago, another exiled population had chosen to settle down in this fertile region. Curiously, they came from Germany.
Again, the culprit was war, which had left their community desperately struggling to find ways to survive.
Jacqueline Grewlich-Suchet, wife of Klaus Grewlich, the German Ambassador to Azerbaijan, writes about some of the history of these first Germans who settled in Azerbaijan. She gathered this information from residents living in the town of Khanlar itself and from historians of Azerbaijan's Academy of Science.
In 1909 in his book, "A German Colony in the Caucasus", Count Schweinitz wrote a description about a German settlement called Helenendorf [now Khanlar]. Here's the picture he painted of the little town in the northwestern region of Azerbaijan nearly 100 years ago.

Read further and view some photos here >>>

Link: http://www.un-az.org/undp/bulnews15/culture.html