The New York Times
September 23, 2012 Sunday
Late Edition – Final
Off the Map in the Black Garden
By RUSS JUSKALIAN
STANDING on a limestone ridge in the foothills of the Lesser Caucasus
Mountains, I surveyed the landscape that lay before me. To the west,
illuminated by a late-day sun and with ever more craggy peaks as a
backdrop, was Vankasar Mountain, capped by a solitary, ancient church.
To the east, yellow grassland and scrub stretched to the horizon. And
then there was the ghost city of Agdam, its thousands of ruined
buildings representing the last exchanges of a late 20th-century
conflict that many people have never heard of.
I had come to the breakaway Southern Caucasus region of
Nagorno-Karabakh expecting a land of extremes. Nagorno-Karabakh, an
ethnically Armenian enclave whose name means ”mountainous black
garden,” appears on few maps. Its tumultuous recent history would
affect any traveler, no doubt, but for me, the experience of visiting
this place had a personal dimension. My grandmother had fled Anatolia
as a girl, escaping an Armenian genocide at the hands of the crumbling
Ottoman Empire. To come to Nagorno-Karabakh, a place where Armenians
have asserted their right to live freely — but at the cost of having
forcibly removed their Azeri neighbors — generated mixed emotions, to
say the least.
Once part of an ancient Armenian kingdom, Nagorno-Karabakh was made a
special autonomous oblast, or administrative zone, under the authority
of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, by Stalin in the 1920s.
This designation temporarily calmed fighting between the predominately
Muslim Azeris and mostly Christian Armenians who lived in the region.
But as the Soviet Union disintegrated in the late 1980s, old ethnic
feuds turned bloody, and both ethnicities were subjected to pogroms
and persecution at the hands of the other. Armenians, representing
around 75 percent of the Nagorno-Karabakh population at the time,
sought independence from Azerbaijan. Skirmishes led to full-on war by
the early 1990s, resulting in upward of 30,000 casualties and hundreds
of thousands of displaced people on both sides.
In 1994, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh effectively won that war
and claimed independence with the signing of a cease-fire order. In
the process, nearly the entire Azeri population was forced to flee.
Today, the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.) is not
recognized by any other country in the world. With no official
borders, Armenian and Azeri soldiers are still dug into trenches on
the front lines.
Though I had become interested in the region because of my ethnic
heritage, once I started digging into the history of Nagorno-Karabakh,
I wanted to experience what was said to be a breathtaking landscape
filled with ancient monasteries, mountainous tableaus and hard-working
people trying to rebuild.
So last spring I went there, accompanied by my girlfriend. I didn’t
expect luxury hotels, haute cuisine or air-conditioned buses, and I
didn’t find them. Instead, we stayed at local homes where running
water might not be guaranteed, ate simple meals with our hosts and
traveled in Soviet-era knockoffs of Fiats and antiquated minibuses
with bald tires. In exchange for the lack of amenities, I was hoping
not just to understand more about this little-known area, but also to
understand more about my own background.
EARLY on a humid May morning, we headed to a dusty square in Yerevan,
the capital of Armenia, where we boarded a crowded minibus, called a
marshrutka, bound for Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital, Stepanakert — a
trip that would take eight hours. Aside from two Asian tourists, the
bus was filled with local women carrying toddlers, and old men, a few
of whom played cards on an upturned cardboard box. The final part of
the route twisted almost 10 miles through the Lachin Corridor, a
mountain pass that had previously been (or still is, depending on whom
you ask) a part of Azerbaijan.
By the time we got to Stepanakert, it was raining. We headed to the
Foreign Ministry to pick up our travel papers, checked into a simple
hotel and fell asleep. Early the next morning, the sun still burning
off the night’s fog, we explored the covered market in central
Stepanakert. The air was filled with the scent of ripe cherries and
local herbs. In one corner, two women with faded aprons and
orange-tinted hair worked over a griddle. The first rolled balls of
dough into discs. To each disc, the second added a small mountain of
chopped herbs and then folded the dough over the filling. The grilled
stuffed bread, called jingalov hats, tasted of pungent mustard greens
and watercress.
A 20-minute drive away, in the town of Shoushi, we met Saro Saryan,
who, with his wife, runs a homestay, which would become our base.
Dressed in a blue Ministry of Civil Defense uniform and cap, Mr.
Saryan greeted us in his booming voice. ”Russ? Come,” he said.
Mr. Saryan walked with us around town, first showing us the old
fortress walls, and then the Tolkienesque Ghazanchetsots Cathedral,
built of white limestone. As we approached a massive stone building
that stood gutted, Mr. Saryan said, ”This used to be a university. My
hope is that one day you can come back and see students here.” Past
bombings had transformed the broad hallways. In one room, the ceiling
had been replaced by sky, the floor was covered in kudzu-like shrubs,
and tufts of wildflowers clung to empty niches.
Shoushi clearly has seen hardship upon hardship. One of the only
Azeri-majority strongholds in the 1980s, then called Shusha, it was
the staging site for rocket attacks on Stepanakert, which was mainly
populated by Armenians. Much of the town, including the university,
was damaged first by Armenian bombardment, and then by the Azeris
after the Armenians took control in 1992. The capture of the town by
the Armenians was a turning point in the war.
That evening, for 5,000 dram each (around $12), we slept in a room
around the corner from the Saryans’ kitchen. On most days we sat down
with the Saryan family to a dinner of lavash bread, fresh cheese,
honey and grilled meat or stuffed grape leaves.
Over the next few days we hired a taxi, so we could see more of the
region’s Armenian ruins. There was the white-stone Amaras monastery,
swathed in knee-high grasses and the occasional wild poppy plant; the
13th-century Gandzasar monastery, whose walls and floor, some believe,
contain the head of John the Baptist, the jaw of Gregory the
Illuminator and the right hand of St. Zachariah; and Dadivank, where
immense Armenian steles known as khachkars, some over 1,000 years old,
stood in repose.
At one point, while traveling on the Stepanakert-Martakert Highway in
a battered taxi, I saw the ruins of stone buildings. ”Agdam?” I
asked the driver.
”Agdam,” he answered, quietly. ”No photo.” Agdam had been an Azeri
village that the Armenians had razed during the war. Some 40,000
people fled, and many were killed. As hundreds of abandoned homes,
many reduced to foundations, came into view, the driver stepped hard
on the gas.
While the Nagorno-Karabakh war was one of independence — fought
within the context of a century-old genocide against the Armenians by
the Turks, the fall of the Soviet Union and anti-Armenian pogroms —
it was difficult for me, with my background, not to feel dismay that
the same persecution the Armenians had suffered was perpetrated upon
their Azeri neighbors. What about the former Azeri girls and boys, now
refugees about my age, whose memory of home is fading like a
photograph left too long in the sun? Most, I learned, have settled in
other parts of Azerbaijan. And while I may never be able to see
Azerbaijan because of my ethnicity, they may never get to see the
place where they were born.
When I mentioned this to Mr. Saryan — an Armenian who fled Baku, the
capital of Azerbaijan, around the time of the anti-Armenian Sumgait
pogrom in 1988 — he said he still had nostalgia for Baku, where he
had spent most of his life. ”I was part of a group of refugees who
met our Azeri counterparts in Vienna,” he said. ”I was just in touch
with one of them on Facebook yesterday.”
WE had only two days to travel via the northern road from Kalbajar
province back to Armenia — amid snow-capped peaks and over the
infamous Sotk Pass and its open-pit gold mine. Joined by an Austrian
named Barbara who had also been staying at Mr. Saryan’s, we charted
the route with a stop at a thermal spring. As we approached the Zuar
spring, Barbara gasped. The natural pool was belching soap bubbles
from the soap someone had dumped in. Dozens of middle-aged men
splashed about. Immediately the center of attention, we had no choice
but to join them. After a quick splash, we were invited for a warm
beer and a shot of throat-scorching mulberry vodka.
We continued to the town of Kalbajar, ascending a 6,500-foot plateau
via a series of steep switchbacks. Like Agdam, this place was mainly
non-Armenian before the war; it is now controlled by the
Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.
Kalbajar, too, looked like a ghost town — except that some of the
homes were occupied by ethnic Armenians, many from the Armenian
diaspora, coming from Georgia, Russia and elsewhere. With almost no
tourism infrastructure, a doctor arranged a place for us in a hospital
outbuilding where we slept on two wobbly metal beds.
In the morning, we headed back toward Armenia with two young men we
had hired to drive us in a 72-horsepower Soviet-built Lada Niva. We
traveled for hours, over mountains, into valleys and back up again.
Finally we came to the Sotk Pass atop a rocky hill of debris dumped
over the edge of the mountain by huge mining trucks. The road went
from dirt to fist-size stones. Crossing this geo-industrial outpost
was like passing through a portal. The earth itself seemed to be in
upheaval, with whorls of dust spinning into the air by heavily laden
trucks.
And then it was over. We headed back down the other side, back into
Armenia without so much as a sign to mark the border.
But my mind was still running in circles around Nagorno-Karabakh. I
was thinking mainly about the war, and about Mr. Saryan’s son, who,
the day after graduating from high school, had led us to a gorge near
Shoushi. I asked him if he could imagine having an Azeri friend. And,
as if the question itself had puzzled him, he said, ”Why not?”
IF YOU GO
Visiting Nagorno-Karabakh is not for the faint of heart. Every year
soldiers on both sides of the front lines are killed by sniper fire.
Outside Stepanakert, accommodation is mainly limited to homestays.
Visas can be arranged in advance in Yerevan, Armenia, or upon arrival
in Stepanakert at the foreign ministry. If you plan to visit
Azerbaijan in the future, ask for the visa to be put on a separate
piece of paper that can be removed from your passport. Azerbaijan will
not allow entry to anyone with a Nagorno-Karabakh Republic visa in
their passport.
HOW TO GET THERE
Hyur Service ([email protected]; 374-10-54-60-40;
hyurservice.com/eng). With a few locations in Yerevan, Hyur can
arrange rental cars, private transportation or all-inclusive trips to
Nagorno-Karabakh. Prices vary. The staff speaks English.
Public minibuses leave various bus stations around Yerevan, heading to
Stepanakert every morning for around 4,500 Armenian dram, or $11.30 at
400 drams to the dollar. Travel takes eight hours.
WHERE TO STAY
Saro Saryan Homestay ([email protected]), in Shoushi. Mr. Saryan
and his wife are regular features on the independent travel scene in
Nagorno-Karabakh, and speak very good English. For 5,000 dram per
person per night, you can stay at their home. Mr. Saryan has an almost
encyclopedic knowledge of Shoushi, and if he has time he may offer a
walking tour of the town and its ruins. He can also help arrange
onward travel and accommodation throughout Nagorno-Karabakh.
Hotel Armenia (armeniahotel.am; (374 47) 94-94-00;
[email protected], Renaissance Square), in Stepanakert, has 55
rooms furnished to international standards, and prices include Wi-Fi,
breakfast and use of a gym. Double rooms range from 30,000 to 41,000
drams per night.
URL:
From: A. Papazian
http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/travel/off-the-map-in-nagorno-karabakh-a-region-in-the-southern-caucasus.html