By Russ Juskalian
The road from Kalbajar to Armenia over the Sotk Pass Nagorno-Karabakh
Kalbajar is mostly a ghost town today Ghazanchetsots Cathedral, in Shoushi At
the Zuar hot spring A once grand home in Shoushi reduced to ruble
By RUSS JUSKALIAN
Published: September 21, 2012
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 (contact@hyurservice.com; 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 (saro.saryan@gmail.com), 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;
info@armeniahotel.am, 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.
This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:
Correction: October 3, 2012
An earlier version of this article omitted the most
recent safety advice from the State Department about traveling in the region.
The department’s Web site advises travelers from the United States to avoid the
region, noting that “because of the existing state of hostilities, we cannot offer
consular services to U.S. citizens in Nagorno-Karabakh.”
http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/travel/off-the-map-in-nagorno-karabakh-a-region-in-the-southern-caucasus.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1
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