The Silk Road was not a single highway but a network of routes, and the branch through the Julfa District of Nakhchivan was one of its lesser-known arteries. From Gazanchi village, caravan routes extended eastward to join the main road in the Ordubad region, linking the commerce of Persia with points north and west. The Gazanchi Bridge carried these traders and their goods across the Alinjachay. At 3.55 meters wide, 10.85 meters long, and 8.8 meters high, the bridge was built for pack animals and foot traffic, not wheeled vehicles. Its builders used roughly hewn rubble stones for the body, reserving finely cut sandstone for the arches' frames and archivolts -- the structural elements that bear the load and define the bridge's graceful curve.

The bridge survived four centuries of use before receiving official recognition. In 2001, the Cabinet of Ministers of Azerbaijan included it in the national list of architectural monuments. Six years later, it received a second designation from the Cabinet of Ministers of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic. That same month -- November 2007 -- the Azermarka company honored the bridge with a postage stamp, one of five in a set dedicated to Azerbaijani bridges, printed with a circulation of 20,000 copies. In 2018, restoration work reinforced 120 meters of surrounding riverbanks, replaced worn stones on the load-bearing sections, and cleaned and re-mortared the joints with lime. The work aimed to preserve the bridge's original character while strengthening it for another few centuries.

The Gazanchi Bridge belongs to a class of Safavid-era infrastructure that once connected this remote exclave to the wider world. Built in 1551 under the reign of Shah Tahmasp I -- decades before Abbas I came to power -- it reflects the Safavid dynasty's interest in roads and bridges that served commercial interests across the empire. The Nakhchivan exclave contains several such structures -- remnants of a time when the Aras River valley was a major east-west corridor. Today the Alinjachay flows beneath the same sandstone arches that bore the weight of Silk Road caravans. The village of Gazanchi still sits nearby. The trade routes have shifted to highways and railways, but the bridge remains -- an unremarkable-looking structure that, upon examination, reveals the precision of its stonework and the ambition of the network it once served.