i.
Azerbaijan
In 2010, I was in Baku for a few days. My friend Elliot and
I were going to take a boat across the Caspian to the port of Turkmenbashi in
Turkmenistan. The boat, a freighter, was continually delayed for departure and,
as such, we had to put up in Baku longer than we’d expected.
As dull as the experience became after a while—both Elliot
and I were anxious to get to Turkmenistan—it was an important one.
For the last two years, I’d been living in Armenia and
traveling around the country. I’d seen some of the results of the Karabakh (or
Artsakh, in Armenian) conflict. In some places, Armenians who’d fled Azerbaijan
in the late 80’s still lived with only basic amenities. Along side these homes,
were others that were empty. But when I asked Armenians about their erstwhile
neighbors, I couldn’t get them to condemn anyone. Most of the people I talked
to still referred to the Azeris as neighbors or ‘harevaner’.
Perhaps because the Armenians were so forgiving and
gracious, I could only assume that the people on the other side of the border
were the bellicose saber-rattlers. And with a passport full of Armenian stamps,
I think I crossed into Azerbaijan almost looking for a fight. I hoped to tell
anyone who would listen that the Armenians wished them no harm. The problem
was, there was no one to listen.
It hadn’t been possible to travel overland into Azerbaijan,
so we’d flown in Baku, a city that felt much more cosmopolitan that Yerevan or
Tbilisi. Karabakh, and the resulting devastation, felt very far away from the
central shopping district where we wandered between McDonalds, different Irish
pubs and oil workers out for the weekend..
The only time Baku felt like anything I’d imagined
Azerbaijan to be was during the last call to prayer of the day when the setting
sun was rippling from the smooth paving stones, the cats hunted through
dumpsters and more bearded men in shalwar kameezs seemed to be out. Even then,
it wasn’t threatening, just a little vague. True, there were a lot of flags,
many of them very large, but the people didn’t see to be weighed down with
nationalist fervor. They walked along with the levity of a people with no
grudges, people with McDonald’s to go to. It was hard to believe Sumgait was
only 20km away.
…
One afternoon after we’d brought our bags down to the pier
only again to be told that the freighter wouldn’t leave that day, we took the
long way back to where we were staying with a houseful of lovely EVS
volunteers. On the way we stopped at the memorial for those who’d died in the
Karabakh war. I don’t think we knew it was there. We just happened to pass it.
There was the same statue I’d seen all over the Caucasus, but instead of
commemorating the Great War, it marked a much more recent occasion. The marble
was whiter, less weather-beaten, but I couldn’t tell if this made it more or
less dignified as a monument.
Later that afternoon, we stopped to get peroshki, as we did
many times on that trip, and when we told the proprietor we’d been in Armenia, he
seemed curious and even hazarded a ‘barev’. I think he tried to say something
else in Armenian as well, but we weren’t able to understand it until he’d
repeated it a few times. The word was rusty from disuse. ‘Sosed’—neighbor. and
left the experience feeling slightly confused. Rather than get a fight, I was
only meeting indifference and here even appreciation. Who were these people who’d
ordered the war? Who were these people who’d build the monuments? Had they all
died? Despite the flags had they been forgotten or had everyone just stopped
paying attention?
A few days later, we got our answer when our freighter
finally came in. We’d gotten a call the night before and celebrated with
probably too many Efes beers and so when we got to the pier, we forgot to be
nervous about all the Armenian stamps in our passports. In fact, we forgot all
about them until an official summoned us up from our sweltering room below
decks where we’d been trying to figure out the bathroom with only a fifty gallon
drum of water, a toilet with no flush and a hose.
When we got above decks and met the loose jowled military
figure with our passports, we knew it best to feign ignorance when he pointed
to the stamps.
“Armenia?” We asked. “Shto?” But even in broken Russian (on
our side) the official ferreted an explanation out of us. It was clear he didn’t
like what he heard, but that there wasn’t much he could do. We didn’t have
Armenian names and we didn’t have a Karabakh stamp in our passports, and I was
glad we didn’t. After seeing the bathroom in the freighter, I could only
imagine what the bathroom would look like in jail. He grunted at each answer. “Volunteers.”
“America.” “Ochin karasho.” It seemed we’d finally met the adversary I’d been
hoping to meet all along, but it was in the last person I wanted to challenge—the
one with the visa exit stamp in his hand. Let him be bitter. I knew I couldn’t
change his mind, especially not in Russian.
Eventually, he mumbled something and slammed the stamp down.
We scooted back below decks to the improbable bathroom and ended up drinking chacha
with some Georgians who came barging into our room as always seems to happen on
long passages through the former Soviet Union. After the interaction with the official,
it was nice to have a predictable experience. I guess if we’d have been
employing all our faculties, the official would’ve been a predictable
experience, too. But, with all the casual indifference we’d met with, I’d
forgotten there was even a conflict that we had to be mindful of.
ii.
Karabakh
Six years later, I had my chance to visit Karabakh and I got
my visa still thinking of the Azeri official at the port of Baku and his scowl.
He seemed to be peering at me through the years from under his visored official
hat. Thinking of him, I flaunted my Karabakhi visa that night walking around
Stepanakert. It was a strange feeling to possess something that would’ve, at
one point, been so problematic, but now, would mean very little. They hadn’t
even put the visa in our passports. They just handed the unpeeled stickers to
my wife and me. But, because of this, I was continually taking the sticker out
and looking at in the fading autumn light. Karabakh.
It was October and we walked the long sidewalk out of town
to the Papik u Tatik statues. A row of streetlights stretched out to the
monument, but otherwise it was ringed with dark fields and further off, the
smoke from burning dung fires on the chilly night.
At the statues, such a famed symbol of both Karabakh and
Armenian-ness, there were a group of young people listening to Ruski Pop and
sitting around their white Lada Nivas eating sunflower seeds. We nodded to them
and climbed up to the monument. I stretched out over pyramidal head of the
Tatik. I couldn’t help it. The shape was too inviting.
…
We spent the next few days in Shushi, roaming around the
crumbling, but respected Govhar Agha Mosque and walking the janapar, the
famed hiking trail that has a Swiss or Alpen quality to its views and sheep and
twisted vinegary apple trees. The sole difference, I found between a village in
the Dolomites and the trail from Shushi was to be found in a neglected Muslim
cemetery. Just a few tombstones with indecipherable calligraphy and names, the
same tombstones I’d seen a few years before in Repulika Srbska in Bosnia and
even in Albania. There’s something particularly pious and haunting about
overgrown Muslim cemeteries. But, like the mosque, the tombstones weren’t
broken or defaced. They’d just been left alone a long time.
On our way back to the hotel, we stopped and talked with the
streetful of twilit children while gusts of wind blew the smoke from bonfires
into our clothes. It felt as if we were on a ledge looking down over the sea of
lights that was little Stepanavan. Above us the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral loomed
in new white stone, like that I’d seen in the memorial in Baku years before.
And the next day, back in Stepanakert, we stopped at a
peroshki stall we’d found at the bus station and had a long talk with the
proprietor about the war and its ravages and relics. “Look” she’d told me,
“that’s all in the past. We have no problem with our Azeri neighbors”—haravener—there
was that word again. The same word I’d heard from her Azeri counterpart in Baku
and the same word I’d heard from the displaced in Armenia. Was the border
official the only one with any animosity? Had it been required of him?
…
Today, as civilians on both sides of the line are dying, I’m
reminded of those sagacious remarks from two shopkeepers in peroshki stalls in
Baku and Stepanakert who worked right under the white stone that symbolized the
deaths of their countrymen and forgave.
To me, Karabakh, Artsakh is Armenian, because that’s the way
I experienced it. The people who welcomed me into their homes were Armenian and
the people who’d told me to visit again were Armenian. But I’d be remiss if I
forgot the crumbling mosques and the tilting headstones, just as I’d be remiss
if I’d overlooked the ruins of Armenian churches surrounding Erzurum.
Today, the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral is rejoining the Govhar
Agha Mosque, as the stone repair work is blasted open again, and both beautiful
buildings succumb to the rapid decay of mortar fire. I can’t help but to see
the kids that ran down the street from one landmark to the next, mindful only
of the approaching autumn night and the building, church or mosque, that was
closest to their home and marked the way in walls of white stone.
