Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

Yerevan 
Mysteries of the East 
I N   1 9 0 5 ,  A 
journalist named Luigi Villari was captivated by a small 
city in the Caucasus with twenty-eight thousand inhabitants and an 
abundance of Eastern charm: 
[T]he vaulted passages themselves, redolent of all the mysteries of the 
East, with their dark curtained shops, the crowds of Tartars clad in 
long blue tunics, and the green turbans of the mullahs passing up and 
down, are very attractive. In one small open room I came upon a 
teacher imparting religious instruction to about a dozen little boys; 
he was droning out his lesson in a sing-song, monotonous voice, sway­
ing to and fro. In another den a barber was shaving a victim to his last 
hair. At every turn were coffee and tea stalls, but those strange and de­
licious sweetmeats of the East which I had tasted at Constantinople 
and Sarajevo were not to be found. In queer galleries and tiny courts 
huge ungainly camels were reposing. Then through the foul-smelling 
bazar you come out suddenly on the great mosque called the Gok 
Djami.
1 
The city was Yerevan. At the time it had a mixed Armenian and Mus­
lim population, a Russian governor, and a thoroughly Middle Eastern 
atmosphere. For several centuries, Yerevan had been an outpost of the 
Persian empire, and when Villari visited it had been under Russian ad-
ministration for less then eighty years. The city became the Armeni­
ans’ capital almost by default. “Many Armenians regard Van as their 
capital city,” wrote another traveler, William Eleroy Curtis, who came 
to Yerevan five years after Villari, in 1910.
2 
He was referring to the city 
in Turkish Armenia to the south, but he might have added the Geor­
gian capital Tiflis to the north, which had a large and wealthy Armen­
ian population. 
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With its straight roads and square buildings in deep red granite and 
tufa, modern Yerevan feels like a Soviet town. It has turned into a fully 
Armenian city, but its more-than-human scale and tidiness seem at 
odds with the quirkier side of the Armenian character. Only in summer, 
when people invade its parks to sit in cafés, drink coffee, and hold ani­
mated conversation, is the city more domesticated. All the wide av­
enues lead to the circular neoclassical Opera House. It was here in 1988 
in Theater Square, dotted with the statues of composers, that the Arme­
nians turned the monumental scale of the city to their advantage, using 
the square as the stage for their million-strong rallies—and appropri­
ately the Armenian word for glasnost, hraparakainutiun, comes from the 
word for “square,” hraparak. Since 1988, however, Yerevan has been hit 
by an energy crisis, war, and the drain of emigration. Its residents com­
plain that a once lively city has become dull and spiritless. 
One day I stepped out of the mayhem of Yerevan’s Mashtots Av­
enue into a quiet courtyard to seek out a remnant of old Yerevan, the 
building Villari called “the great mosque called the Gok Djami.” It was 
still opposite the main bazaar, now a closed hangar in front of which 
country folk were sitting and selling flat discs of unleavened bread, 
tomatoes, and sheaves of tarragon. In the courtyard, at the far end of a 
serene rectangular pool overhung with mulberry trees, glimmered a 
sheet of tiles: the outer wall of the eighteenth-century mosque. 
The architect Grigor Nalbandian led me on a tour of the site. Apart 
from a couple of moustachioed Iranian workers chipping away with 
chisels at blocks of stone, we were the only people around. Nalbandian 
has been supervising the restoration of the mosque complex in a joint 
venture of Armenia and Iran, two countries that, despite religious dif­
ferences, are political allies. The mosque walls had been restored with 
Armenian red brick and faced with Persian turquoise tiles. We took off 
our shoes to go into the echoing interior, whose floor had just been re-
laid with Isfahan marble. It was entirely empty; the only regular wor­
shippers here are the dozen or so diplomats from the Iranian Embassy. 
This strange quiet oasis in the middle of Yerevan is all that remains of 
the city’s Persian period. 
Yerevan has ancient archaeological remains at the old city of Ere­
buni, suggesting that Armenians have lived there for centuries. But be-
tween the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries Armenian cultural and re­
ligious life was centered on Echmiadzin, the seat of the head of the 
church, the Catholicos, ten miles to the west. Yerevan, the capital of a 

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75 
khanate, was basically a Muslim city that contained no large churches 
but had six mosques. When the Russians conquered Eastern Armenia in 
1827, there were only twenty-five thousand Armenians living in the 
Yerevan region, outnumbered by a much larger Muslim population.
3 
The nineteenth-century city acquired a more Armenian character as 
the Russians settled thousands of new Armenian immigrants from Tur­
key and Persia there, but even in the 1870s, Yerevan had only around 
twelve thousand inhabitants. It was far smaller than Shusha, and Ar­
menian migrant workers were far more likely to seek their fortunes in 
Baku.
4 
What made Yerevan the city that it now is, was another, far bigger 
wave of migrants. In 1915–1918, perhaps a quarter of the Armenian 
population of Turkish Anatolia fled north to eastern Armenia, escaping 
the massacres and deportations by Turks and Kurds. Perhaps one mil-
lion Armenians died in the massacres, which are incomparably the 
greatest tragedy of Armenian history. Armenians call them the mets egh­
ern, the “great slaughter”; in English, they are customarily called the Ar­
menian Genocide.
5 
From 1918 to 1920, Yerevan was the capital of the 
briefly independent first republic of Armenia and the main refuge for 
hundreds of thousands Armenians fleeing Anatolia. In 1920, it became 
the capital of Soviet Armenia. When the writer Arthur Koestler visited 
Yerevan in 1932, as a Jew, he was reminded of the new Jewish settle­
ments in Palestine: 
The enthusiasm, the muddle, the errors and bad taste which ac­
companied the fever of construction were all touching and familiar re­
minders. Here, too, drab, cheap, ugly utilitarian buildings were su­
perseding the charming, colourful and filthy Orient. Erivan, too, was 
an informal and chaotic pioneer-town, the unfinished streets, between 
half-finished buildings, a labyrinth of pipes and cables. There were as 
yet so few telephones that calls were made by asking the exchange for 
the name, and not the number of the subscriber. Familiar, above all, 
was the Babel of languages, for a sizeable part of the population were 
refugees and immigrants from Turkey, Armenia, Europe and America. 
It often happened that, when I asked my way from a passer-by in halt­
ing Russian, the answer was given in fluent German or French. The 
town had a lively and well-informed intelligentsia whose political ori­
entation, in contrast to Tiflis, was very friendly towards Russia and the 
Soviet regime.
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Modern Armenia grew in the shadow of the great catastrophe of 1915. 
To make a simplification, if twentieth-century Azerbaijan’s most urgent 
task was to construct a “nation,” Armenia had a quite different chal­
lenge: it had an identifiable nation that was scattered across the world 
but no state. The Soviet Republic of Armenia was built to fit this role 
and become a new Armenian homeland. With its Opera House, Na­
tional Gallery, museum of ancient manuscripts known as the Mate­
nadaran, Yerevan thus became a repository of Armenian myths and 
hopes. Koestler called it “a kind of Tel Aviv, where the survivors of an-
other martyred nation gathered to construct a new home.”
7 
On the early afternoon of 24 April 2000, I joined the crowds walking up 
to the Genocide Memorial of Tsitsernakaberd on the western side of 
Yerevan. We moved in a slow, thirty-people-wide torrent up the broad 
paved path, as the anguished brass-laded music of the composer Komi­
tas played over loudspeakers. Since 1967, Armenians have marked 
Genocide Day on the anniversary of the day in 1915 when Armenian in­
tellectuals were arrested and then murdered in Istanbul. 
It was a family occasion. The crowds climbing the hill were un­
solemn, chatting and taking photographs. They carried spikes of tulip 
and florid bunches of lilac, their tips pointing downward. There was no 
sign of the dignitaries who had laid their wreaths earlier in the day. Our 
progress up the hill was slow, yet my friends were struck only by how 
modest the turnout was. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, literally the 
whole of the city had taken part in this ceremony. “Ten years ago this 
was a big thing for all of us,” said Tigran. “You moved ten yards or so 
and then stopped and waited. And then moved on. It took four or five 
hours” 
We reached the top of the hill. On our left was a long gray wall en-
graved with the names of the cities whose Armenian communities had 
been wiped out: Kars, Erzerum, Trebizond, Van, and so on. Ahead stood 
the memorial: twelve vast shields of gray basalt, each standing for a vi­
layat, or Turkish province, lean inward toward a central bowl, sunk in 
the ground, inside of which a fire was burning. We laid our flowers on 
a waist-high bank of red and white petals that was rising from the rim 
of the bowl. Then we came out on to another broad flight of steps that 
descended into the city. Before us, the great white cone of Mount Ararat 
was spread over the entire horizon, and it seemed as though the de-
signers of the memorial had deliberately planned this view and this de-

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77 
scent. The sight of Ararat has come to be another symbol of loss for Ar­
menians, for it now lies out of bounds in Turkey. 
Something was different in the air in Yerevan for the rest of Geno­
cide Day, but it took a while for me to realize that it was the background 
musical hum of the city. For this day only the radio stations, turned up 
full blast in every taxi and café, had forgone their diet of tinny Russian 
pop music and were playing Armenian tunes. The wail of the duduk, the 
Armenian pipe, sounded out. Armenia shed its Soviet identity for a day 
and assumed a much more alluring Middle Eastern garb. 
The lack of big official ceremonies or public meetings on 24 April 
made the commemorations more dignified, but this perhaps also re­
flected the priority the modern population of Armenia put on the Geno­
cide. So many other issues—from Karabakh to economic survival—had 
intervened in people’s lives that it seemed that the events of 1915 had 
ceased to be a collective defining principle for modern Armenians. My 
friend Tigran offered another thought: Victory over Azerbaijan, he said, 
had altered the previous fixed self-image of Armenians as “the noble 
victim.” This time, after all, they had won, and others had lost. How can 
you remain “the weeping nation” when you have inflicted a defeat on 
your neighbor? 
Yet for the wider Armenian world, the 1915 Genocide still largely 
defines what it means to be Armenian. This is not so surprising, given 
that the Armenian Diaspora, especially in the United States and France, 
comprises mainly the descendants of people who fled Eastern Anatolia 
after 1915. Since the 1950s, Diaspora groups have focused huge energies 
and spent millions of dollars trying to make Turkey admit that it com­
mitted genocide against the Armenians and other countries, to recog­
nize the massacres as such. 
To the surprise of many, Armenia’s first president, Levon Ter-Pet­
rosian, deliberately chose not to make 1915 a political issue. The closure 
of the Armenian-Turkish border in 1993 and the lack of diplomatic rela­
tions were a result of the Karabakh dispute, rather than the quarrel over 
1915. Ter-Petrosian’s successor, Robert Kocharian, also sidestepped the 
“genocide” issue at first. Then, in 2000, he began lobbying around the 
world for the recognition of the massacres as “genocide.” The European 
Parliament and the French Senate passed resolutions calling the 1915 
massacres “genocide.” The U.S. Congress was about to follow their ex-
ample when a telephone call from President Bill Clinton, worried about 
the Turkish reaction, persuaded Congress to suspend the motion. 

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The parliamentary resolutions in Europe enraged Turkey, which 
canceled several French commercial contracts. Turkey’s version of 
events is that the 1915 massacres were far smaller in scale than the Ar­
menians allege and occurred during a civil war at the end of the Ot­
toman Empire, in which both Turks and Armenians died. In Turkish na­
tional ideology, the events thus have a very different resonance: the Ar­
menians are perceived as the fifth column of the Great Powers, who 
were seeking to destroy the new Turkish state in its infancy. 
Amid the mutual recriminations, a few brave attempts have been 
made to start a Turkish-Armenian dialogue about what really hap­
pened. A Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Committee was formed in 
2001 but was much criticized in both countries. In 2000, Turkish and 
Armenian historians met and corresponded. They were not helped by 
the fact that access to both the Ottoman archives from the period re­
lating to the massacres and the archives of the Armenian Dashnak 
government of 1918–1920 are restricted to a small handful of favored 
scholars. 
In this cacophonous atmosphere, I was impressed by the argument 
of the Armenian historian Gerard Libaridian, who was also President 
Ter-Petrosian’s chief foreign policy adviser, that to politicize the “geno­
cide issue” was to demean it. Once the issue became political, he said, it 
became an imperative for both sides to stick to intransigent positions, 
rather than engage in intelligent debate. “It seems that in the battle for 
and against recognition, both sides appear to be repeating the logic of 
the past in order to justify it,” Libaridian wrote. “The tail ends of the 
two rejectionist positions—comprehensive rejection of the other—seem 
to be feeding off each other.”
8 
Much of the discussion of the issue was less about history than a 
visceral assertion of victimhood vis-à-vis one’s neighbors. Armenians’ 
perception that they had been destroyed in 1915 had a strong resonance 
in 1988, when the Nagorny Karabakh dispute began. “Fear of being de­
stroyed, and destroyed not as a person, not individually, but destroyed 
as a nation, fear of genocide, is in every Armenian,” Lyudmila Haru­
tiunian, a well-known Armenian sociologist told me. “It is impossible 
to remove it.”
9 
Harutiunian made the point that in colloquial speech, 
most Armenians call both Turks and Azerbaijanis “Turks” and make no 
distinction between them. In 1988, the “Turkish threat” of 1915 was 
therefore transposed onto the Azerbaijanis and a memorial to the vic­
tims of the Sumgait pogroms was put up on Tsitsernakaberd hill near 

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79 
the Genocide memorial. But when Armenians committed acts of vio­
lence against Azerbaijanis, Harutiunian said, many in Armenia refused 
to believe they had happened. “Armenians responded with approxi­
mately the same methods [as the Azerbaijanis], but the Armenians’ his­
torical memory does not have a basis for that.” 
War changed the nature of the debate. In 2000, with the Nagorny 
Karabakh dispute unresolved, it was inevitable that Azerbaijan would 
get involved in the Genocide controversy. In October 2000, President 
Aliev declared: “In history there was never such a thing as the ‘Ar­
menian genocide,’ and even if there had been, it would be wrong to 
raise the matter after 85 years.”
10 
After its defeat and suffering at the 
hands of the Armenians, Aliev wanted to assert Azerbaijan’s right to 
victimhood too. 
Yerevan has many secrets. One of them, I believed, lay among a jumble 
of garages, outhouses, and vegetable plots behind a tall apartment 
block at No. 22 Vardanants Street, not far from the city center. At the top 
of a narrow flight of steps was a small open space, surrounded by rusty 
green garages and piled with bricks and sand. Here, I was pretty sure, 
had been a mosque, used by Yerevan’s Azerbaijanis, that had had the 
misfortune not to be classified as “Persian” and was demolished. 
The space was so miserable and empty that I wondered if I was in 
the right spot. At the foot of the steps, an old woman in a floral dress, 
sitting on a camp stool with a cloth laid on the ground before her, was 
selling grapes, beans, and onions. She had a swarthy face and drop ear-
rings; it looked as though she came in from the countryside every day 
to sell fruit and vegetables. “Was there ever a mosque up there?” I asked 
her, pointing up the steps. Yes, she answered, there had been. 
“What happened to it?” 
“We didn’t touch it till the last day, after they destroyed the Ar­
menian church in Baku.” She seemed to mean the beginning of 1990. 
“But why did they knock it down?” 
“Why leave it?” she shrugged. “We are Christians, they are Mus­
lims. When there were problems with Azerbaijan, our Armenians came 
and destroyed it in three days. They brought a special machine, I don’t 
know what it’s called, which goes like this . . .” She made a flat rolling 
motion with the palm of her hand, miming the path of a bulldozer. 
I said, tentatively, that a building shouldn’t be made to suffer for the 
actions of people. 

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“Yes, walls aren’t to blame,” the woman agreed. “But they fight 
against everything. What’s left for the people? What kind of life is 
that?” Her words didn’t make sense, but I guessed that the “they” she 
was talking about had nothing to do with the mosque.
11 
That the Armenians could erase an Azerbaijani mosque inside their 
capital city was made easier by a linguistic sleight of hand: the Azer­
baijanis of Armenia can be more easily written out of history because 
the name “Azeri” or “Azerbaijani” was not in common usage before the 
twentieth century. In the premodern era, these people were generally 
referred to as “Tartars,” “Turks,” or simply “Muslims.” Yet they were 
neither Persians nor Turks; they were Turkic-speaking Shiite subjects of 
the Safavid Dynasty of the Iranian Empire—in other words, the ances­
tors of people whom we would now call “Azerbaijanis.” So when the 
Armenians refer to the “Persian mosque” in Yerevan, that name ob­
scures the fact that most of the worshippers there, when it was built in 
the 1760s, would have been, in effect, Azerbaijanis. 
In modern-day Armenia these basic facts are simply not known. 
But that Armenia was home to many Turkic-speaking Muslims would 
have seemed only natural to one Armenian national hero, the great 
eighteenth-century troubadour Sayat-Nova, after whom one of Yere­
van’s big avenues is named. Born in Armenia, he trained as a monk in 
the monastery of Sanahin but became a poet at the court of the Georgian 
king Irakli II in Tiflis. Sayat-Nova composed verse in Armenian, Azeri, 
Georgian, and Persian (one of his most famous poems moves between 
all four). The majority of his surviving ballads are in Azeri, which was 
the lingua franca of the Caucasus at that time. 
Yet by the twentieth century the Azerbaijanis people, who had lived 
in eastern Armenia for centuries, had become its silent guests, margin­
alized and discriminated against. The Armenians asserted their right to 
their homeland at the expense of these people. In 1918–1920, tens of 
thousands of Azerbaijanis were expelled from Zangezur. In the 1940s, 
tens of thousands more were deported to Azerbaijan to make way for 
incoming Armenian immigrants from the Diaspora. The last cleansing, 
in 1988–1989, got rid of the rest. 
If modern Armenians remember their former Azerbaijani neigh­
bors, it is generally as farmers. They say you could always rely on them 
to sell the best quality fruit and vegetables in the markets. Yet many 
were also well-to-do townsfolk whose descendants form a powerful po­
litical community in exile in Azerbaijan. They are known as the Yeraz, or 

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“Yerevan Azerbaijanis.” A prominent Yeraz, the former presidential ad­
viser Eldar Namazov, told me that his grandfather had been a merchant 
who owned large parts of what is now the city’s National Park. His fam­
ily was forced to leave Armenia in 1947. “In our family there were al­
ways many tales of what the Armenians did to the Azerbaijanis in the 
city of Yerevan,” Namazov reminisced. “I had many relatives who died 
at the beginning of the century during the slaughter of Azerbaijanis 
in the city of Yerevan and very many of our relatives died during the 
deportations.”
12 
Officially, there are now around eight thousand Azerbaijanis in Ar­
menia. In reality, the figure must be much lower; there are perhaps only 
a few hundred left, mostly pensioners. And yet Yerevan has many Azer­
baijanis in it every day, driving their trucks into the city, buying fruit 
and vegetables and selling cheap consumer goods or washing powder 
in the markets. How so? They are actually Iranian Azerbaijanis, for 
whom Armenia is a profitable market. Their gaudily colored trucks, 
with bright snub-nosed orange cabs and green and blue tarpaulins, 
crawl along Armenia’s roads to virtually captive buyers in the land-
locked republic. Perception is everything. Iran is a friendly neighbor, 
and the drivers, although Azerbaijani by language and ethnicity, are 
Iranian citizens—the living equivalent, you might say, of the “Persian 
mosque.” They are easily tolerated by Armenians, who do good busi­
ness with them. 
The Iranian Azerbaijanis are not numerous. It would need Arme­
nia’s borders with Turkey and Azerbaijan to reopen for Yerevan to re-
cover its former dynamism—the kind of business and bustle that Villari 
found so attractive in 1905. But in the year 2000 that seemed a remote 
prospect. The tortuous postwar geography of the Caucasus, with all its 
closed borders and front lines, made Moscow or Los Angeles closer to 
Yerevan than Erzerum or Baku. The Eastern bazaar was still closed. 

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