The Last Citadel
O N A RO C K
above the serpentine road that twists up from Stepana
kert to Shusha stands a victory memorial. It is the same T-72 tank from
which Gagik Avsharian was thrown headlong in the heat of battle at
midday on 8 May 1992. After the Armenians had won the war for Kara
bakh, they had the burned tank rebuilt, resprayed olive green, and
placed on the hill with its original number, 442, repainted in white on
its hull. It pointed toward Shusha.
Eight years and one day later, on 9 May 2000, Armenian Nagorny
Karabakh was celebrating its Victory Day. It was marked in three stages
on the way up to the citadel of Shusha, like three stations of a crusader
pilgrimage, beginning with the memorial tank and ending with a serv
ice of thanksgiving in the Gazanchetsots church.
The hull of the tank had been strewn with red and white carnations,
and a group of relatives were making a personal memorial. Of the three
men in tank 442, only Gagik, the commander, had survived. At the rear
stood Stella, the widow of Ashot, the driver, and Hovanes, his ten-year-
old son. Stella looked pale, forlorn, and still absurdly young. The grand-
mother of Shahen, the gun operator, was wearing a black head scarf and
holding a handkerchief in her clenched hand. She began to keen with
grief for her lost grandson, wailing and beating the back of the tank
with her fists.
Suddenly, the grieving relatives were overtaken by brash official
celebration. A brass band struck up martial tunes in the road below as a
line of dignitaries climbed the steps. The Karabakhi archbishop Parkev
under his arched black cowl, military officers in full uniform, and the
prime minister in a gray designer suit all filed past and laid more flow
ers. A few minutes later, members of the brass band were running to
jump on their bus. A cavalcade of cars roared toward Shusha and every-
one reassembled in the lower part of the town for the next ceremony, the
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unveiling of a monument to a World War II fighter pilot named Nelson
Stepanian.
Our final destination, the Gazanchetsots church, was, when com
pleted in 1887, one of the largest Armenian churches in the world and a
token of the success of the Shusha Armenian bourgeoisie. Closed by the
Communists, it was rebuilt after 1992, clad in shiny white limestone. It
now towers, immaculate once more, above the ruined town. Inside, the
church was echoing and impersonal. Archbishop Parkev, looking for
midable in his steep black cowl, boomed out the Armenian liturgy and
the choir’s antiphons rebounded from the walls. After the commemo
ration of the recent war against Azerbaijan and the Great Patriotic War
against the Germans, this was the final benediction, before everyone
could go down to Stepanakert’s football stadium for a pop concert.
Shusha has been called the “Jerusalem of Karabakh.” Whoever pos
sesses the town controls not only a strategic fortress in the heart of the
enclave but also a place saturated with history. Shusha is called, as well,
the cradle of Azerbaijan’s music and poetry, the home of poets like Vagif
and Natevan. For cultured Azerbaijanis, its loss in 1992 was a stab in the
heart. “When we heard the news, I and a lot of my friends simply
wept,” one Baku intellectual told me.
To the Armenians, Shusha is a more troubling place. The lonely
steeple of Gazanchetsots, rising above a still-ruined town, suggests that
it is still more a symbol than a real town that people will readily inhabit.
A long time ago, before 1920, Shusha was a great Armenian merchant
town. More recently, to pursue the crusader image, most Armenians
have come here either to loot or to pray—but not to live. I supposed that
most of the Armenians I rubbed shoulders with here on Victory Day
had come not so much to celebrate Shusha, the Armenian citadel, as to
give thanks for the destruction of Shusha, the Azerbaijani gun em-
placement. The retention of the mountain fortress is a guarantee of their
security—and almost no Armenians will countenance the return of
Shusha’s Azerbaijani inhabitants in an eventual peace deal.
1
On the evening of Shusha’s Victory Day, I was invited to dinner in Ste
panakert. A rich cross section of Karabakh Armenian society had gath
ered in an old two-story house in the center of the town. The women sat
at one half of a long table, nearer the kitchen, the men at the other. The
table was strewn with sheaves of tarragon and oregano, and the meat
was hare or deer from the hills.
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These Armenians were defiantly different from the Armenians of
Armenia. The Karabakh Armenians are highlanders, famous for their
hospitality and heavy drinking. They have a highlander’s distrust of
lowland Armenians, who often call them “ishak,” or “mule,” because
they are so stubborn. Other Armenians find it hard to understand the
thick Karabakh dialect, where the stress falls later in the word and
whose vocabulary is strewn with Persian, Turkish, and Russian words.
At dinner, many of the guests spoke Russian to one another—a legacy
of life in Soviet Azerbaijan but also of traditional ties with Russia. In
Stepanakert, someone had told me: “We Karabakhis hate the Armeni
ans. We love the Russians, we love the Persians, but we hate the Arme
nians.” A joke, of course, but with a dose of truth in it.
Among Armenians, Karabakh has the reputation of being a place of
refuge and the last line of defense against the Islamic east. This helped
create a military tradition among the Karabakhis similar to that of the
Scots in the British Empire. Among the Armenian warriors born here
were two marshals of the Soviet Union, a clutch of heroes of the Soviet
Union like Nelson Stepanian and even—so far from the sea—a Soviet
admiral, Hovanes Isakov. Further back, Karabakh produced General
Valerian Madatov, a tsarist general who fought Napoleon and, fighting
against him, Rustam, the man who served as Napoleon’s manservant.
Carried away by this military tradition, the Karabakhis have even
appropriated as their own Napoleon’s great marshal and king of Na
ples, Joachim Murat. I was repeatedly told that he was an Armenian,
born in the Karabakhi village of Kerkijahan. Yet this is a myth—Murat’s
biographers say he was in fact the son of a provincial innkeeper from
the central French region of Guyenne. Kurban Said, the author of the
great novel of the Caucasus, Ali and Nino, actually got there before me.
His hero visits Shusha in 1914 and observes: “[The native nobles] never
tired of sitting on the steps that led up to their doors, smoking their
pipes and telling each other how many times the Russian Empire and
the Czar himself had been saved by Karabagh generals and what horri
ble fate would have overtaken them if their defense had been left to
anyone else.”
2
The Armenians would be surprised to learn that the Karabakh
Azerbaijanis were famous warriors too. After the province was incor
porated into the Russian empire in 1805, famous tall steeds from
Karabakh carried the Azerbaijani cavalry of the Karabakh Regiment,
one of four Muslim regiments serving in the tsar’s army. At first glance,
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it may seem surprising that Azerbaijanis should have fought in the
Russian army against the Ottoman Empire, but they were Shiites, fight
ing against Sunnis, split by the great divide of Islam.
3
In 1829, Alexan
der Pushkin saw the “Karabakh regiment” in action, outside Kars, as it
returned to camp with eight Turkish banners. He dedicated a poem to
the young warrior Farhad-Bek, adjutant to the regimental commander:
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