Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

Do not be captive to fleeting fame,
O my young beauty!
Do not throw yourself into bloody battle
With the Karabakh horde! 
4
The rich character of Karabakh is better illustrated by the dozens of dif­
ferent dishes on my dinner table in Stepanakert than by the smooth sur­
faces of the reconstructed tank or the Gazanchetsots church. The region 
has been a crossroads and meeting place between Christianity and 
Islam, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Persians, and Russians. Older people 
do not need reminding of this. In 1924, the Armenian scholar Stepan 
Lisitsian made a detailed ethnographic study of the newly formed Na­
gorny Karabakh Autonomous Region. This work, which he submitted 
for publication in Baku, was never published in his lifetime, presum­
ably because it defied Soviet preconceptions of what Azerbaijani Kara­
bakh ought to be. But Lisitsian’s message was not nationalist and he 
was fascinated by the crossbreeding of cultures in Karabakh: 
The continuous vicinity of the Turk-Tartars of the plains (Karabakh 
and Mughan) and of the mountain plateaux (Mountainous Kurdis­
tan), the centuries-old political subjection to the supreme authority 
of the Persian shahs, constant relations with the Turkic tribal elders 
(there were frequent cases of marriage contracts between them and the 
melik houses)—all this brought about a broad penetration of Turkish-
Iranian influence not only amongst the local feudal lords, but in other 
levels of the Karabakh Armenian population, in the form of a univer­
sal knowledge, especially by its male section, of the Turkic language, 
the giving of children Muslim names, the learning of Turkic-Iranian 
music, an increasingly closed and humble situation for women and in 
rare cases polygamy (in the family of the Shakhnazarian meliks), the 
holding of a second wife outside marriage if no children were born 
and so on. Unfortunately, there has been little scholarly elucidation 

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and study of the important question of the interaction of Turkic-Azer­
baijani and Armenian cultures.
5 
At the Victory Day dinner table, an old man with a handsome birdlike 
face framed with gray sideburns sat on my right. He told me he had 
lived in the town for seventy years, from the time when it was only a 
small village. He must have seen unimaginable changes in his lifetime. 
I commented, “Well, of course, the main change is that there used to be 
a lot of Azerbaijanis,” to which he responded laconically, “And all of 
them have gone.” 
Midway through the meal, my neighbor rose to his feet and pro-
posed a toast in tutovka, the local stinging but sweet mulberry vodka. 
He began—for my benefit—in Russian, swerved into the thick Kara­
bakh Armenian dialect, and then into a smoother gliding language that 
I realized with a shock was Azeri. I heard the repeated word “Aghdam” 
and gathered that he was telling a funny story about a trip he had made 
in Soviet times to the Party headquarters in the Azerbaijani city of Agh­
dam. The older guests at the table, all of whom understood Azeri per­
fectly, chuckled and tears came to their eyes, as he told his anecdote; the 
younger diners looked at one another and me in smiling confusion, un­
derstanding nothing. 
The history of Shusha contains the best and worst of Nagorny Kara­
bakh. It is a story of joint prosperity and dynamism. But it has ended 
with the gene of nihilism in both communities triumphant, destroying 
both each other’s achievements and their own. In a sense, the ruins of 
Shusha are a testament to both sides’ refusal to accommodate each 
other’s histories. 
The town’s history begins in the 1740s, when Panakh Khan, leader 
of the Javanshir dynasty in Azerbaijan, made a bid to be the ruler of 
Karabakh. The Persians and the Ottomans were in retreat, and the Rus­
sians had not yet arrived in the Caucasus. Panakh Khan built a series of 
fortresses to establish himself as the khan of Karabakh. He cemented his 
position by a marriage alliance with one of the five Armenian meliks, or 
princes, Shakhnazar of Varanda. In 1750, Panakh Khan built a fortress 
in Shusha. The cliffs on the southern side provided a natural defense 
and only two gates were needed in the new city walls. 
Under Panakh’s successor, Ibrahim Khan, the town flourished. 
The Azerbaijani poet and politician Vagif settled here in the 1750s and 

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became Ibrahim’s court poet and chief Vezir. Vagif was killed at the 
end of a long war with Persia in 1795–1797, during which the Persian 
shah, Agha Mohammad Khan, was also assassinated at Shusha. In 
May 1805, Ibrahim Khan negotiated terms of submission to the Rus­
sians. He kept most of his local powers but agreed to cut all links with 
foreign powers and to pay the Russians an annual tribute of eight 
thousand gold coins. The subsequent treaties of Gulistan and Turk­
menchai in 1813 and 1828 entrenched Russia’s control over the Kara­
bakh khanate. The last khan, Mehti Kulu, was forced to flee to Iran 
in 1822. 
In the nineteenth century, Shusha was one of the great cities of the 
Caucasus, larger and more prosperous than either Baku or Yerevan. 
Standing in the middle of a net of caravan routes, it had ten cara­
vanserais. It was well known for its silk trade, drawing on Karabakh’s 
famous mulberry trees; for its paved streets and big stone houses; its 
brightly colored carpets; and for its fine-bred horses. In 1824, George 
Keppel, the earl of Albemarle, on his way back to England from India, 
arrived here from Iran, crossing into “the black and lofty mountains of 
the fruitful province of Karabaugh.” “Sheesha” made a strong impres­
sion on him: “The town is built on a huge mass of sloping rock of great 
height. The ascent is so precipitous that the houses appear to be hang­
ing on it like bird-cages. I was upward of two hours in reaching the 
top.”
6 
Keppel found two thousand houses in the town, with three-quar­
ters of the inhabitants Azerbaijanis and one-quarter Armenian: “The 
language is a dialect of the Turkish; but the inhabitants, with the excep­
tion of the Armenians, generally read and write Persian. The trade is 
carried on principally by the Armenians, between the towns of Shekhi, 
Nakhshevan, Khoi and Tabriz.”
7 
The town was a crucible of talent. The Armenians were the builders 
and architects, and two Shusha Armenian sculptors, Stepan Agajanian 
and Hakop Gurdjian, made careers in Paris. For the Azerbaijanis, 
Shusha was the “conservatoire of the Caucasus” and the center of their 
musical tradition. Natevan, Azerbaijan’s most famous woman poet, 
was the daughter of the last khan, Mehti Kulu. Uzeir Hajibekov and one 
of Azerbaijan’s first twentieth-century novelists, Yusif Vezir Chemen­
zeminli, were born here. 
Yet prosperity depended on the Russians’ keeping order. In 1905, 
the town fell victim to the violence of the Armenian-Tartar war. Luigi 
Villari, the British journalist and writer described how it ended: 

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On the 2nd [of September], the Moslem chiefs sent a messenger to the 
Armenians, and finally a peace conference was held at the Russian 
church. Tartars and Armenians publicly embraced one another and 
swore eternal friendship—until next time. Prisoners were exchanged, 
as between properly constituted belligerents. The number of killed 
and wounded amounted to about 300, of whom about two thirds were 
Tartars, for the Armenians were better shots and also enjoyed the ad-
vantage of position. The damage is estimated at from 4,000,000 to 
5,000,000 rubles. The [Russian] troops of whom 350 were available, 
seem to have done nothing at all while the fighting was going on, but 
the military band performed to celebrate the conciliation!
8 
Two more sackings in the twentieth century ended Shusha’s greatness. 
In March 1920, an Azerbaijani army sacked the town, burning the Ar­
menian quarter and killing some five hundred Armenians. In the Soviet 
era, the town, which formerly had forty thousand inhabitants, con­
tained only half that number. Then in May 1992, it was the Armenians’ 
turn to destroy the town. 
Both Armenians and Azerbaijanis also did their best to destroy the 
other’s cultural legacy. In 1992, the Azerbaijanis stored cases of Grad 
rockets in Gazantchetsots church. They dismantled the stone statues 
outside the church and sold off its great bronze bell. In December 1992, 
an Armenian officer reported that he had found the bell being sold in a 
market in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk. He bought it for three million 
rubles and sent it back to Armenia.
9 
In their turn, the conquering Armenians dismantled and sold off 
dark bronze busts of three Azerbaijani Shusha musicians and poets. 
Again, these memorials were rescued by chance, this time from a scrap-
metal merchant in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. I saw the three bronze 
heads, forlorn and pocked with bullets, lying in the courtyard of the 
headquarters of the Red Cross in the center of Baku: the poet Natevan, 
an earnest girl in a head scarf reading a book, missing a thumb; the com­
poser Hajibekov, a bullet-ridden gentleman in double-breasted suit and 
broken spectacles; and Bul Bul, a famous singer with a serious domed 
bronze forehead. 
But for the efforts of a few brave Shusha Armenians, much more 
might have been destroyed. Mher Gabrielian, an Armenian artist, told 
me how he came back to his native town on the morning of its capture 
on 9 May 1992 and saw with horror that marauders and vandals were 

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191 
burning it to the ground. Mher and a couple of his friends stood in front 
of one of Shusha’s two nineteenth-century mosques to stop a group of 
young men in an armored personnel carrier firing tank shells into its fa­
cade. They barricaded themselves inside the town museum for several 
days, preventing looters from stripping its collection of carpets, pots, 
and paintings. As one of the Armenian minority in Shusha, a largely 
Azerbaijani town, Mher had many Azerbaijani friends. He wanted me 
to understand how the burning of Shusha grieved him as much as it 
did them: “I know it’s very painful for them, and it is for us too. I per­
sonally do not consider myself the victor of this town. The town as such 
is dead.”
10 
I do not believe Shusha will ever recover its former grandeur. In 2000, it 
was virtually a ghost town. Most of its population of two thousand 
were refugees who had moved here only because they had nowhere 
else to live. I saw poverty in their faces. By the upper mosque, still in-
tact but eerily deserted, I met beggars for the first time in Nagorny 
Karabakh: two small children, who pestered me for money. The only 
prominent Armenian who has made a commitment to Shusha is the 
local archbishop, Parkev. He moved here only a few days after the town 
was captured in 1992 and began raising money to rebuild its churches. 
But few people, it seems, share his vision of rebuilding the old Shusha. 
“If only we can find jobs, lots of people will come here,” Parkev told 
me. “We have opened a tea business and a jewelry business. There’s a 
proposal for a jam-making business that would mean thirty or forty 
people would come here. But we also need money to restore buildings.” 
It was three days after Victory Day and I was sitting in the archbishop’s 
study in Shusha. Parkev has keen intelligent eyes, quick sentences, and 
the kind of big bushy black beard that small birds could make their 
nests in. People talked of him as a figure of authority in Karabakh who 
could intercede with the politicians on behalf of ordinary people. It 
seemed that, as well as the spiritual leader of the province, he was also 
Shusha’s small-business project planner.
11 
The archbishop said he first came to Karabakh in the spring of 
1989 when Arkady Volsky’s administration allowed churches to be re-
opened. Early in the twentieth century there were 118 churches and 
12 monasteries in Karabakh, but after 1930 they were all closed and all 
the priests were banned, imprisoned, or shot. His job was to begin the 
revival. I wondered if it was possible to be an Armenian and not a 

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Christian. No, not really, Parkev replied, to be an Armenian and to be a 
Christian was one and the same. 
In the archbishop’s stories, Christianity was more a collective badge 
of identity and defiance than a spiritual creed. He had always been in 
the thick of events. He told the story of how one night in November 
1991 he went into his bedroom in his apartment in Stepanakert. A few 
minutes later, a rocket fired from Shusha smashed into the room he had 
just left, burning everything in its path. 
When the Armenian offensive to take Shusha was bogged down on 
the evening 8 May 1992, Parkev said that it was he who had identified 
the problem and the solution. The trouble was that the statue of the 
Antichrist—Lenin—was still standing in Stepanakert’s central square: 
“I said, ‘Take down Lenin,’ and a few hours later we captured Shusha. 
That’s how it was. In two or three hours we were almost in the center.” 
Archbishop Parkev was careful to say that he had supported the cap­
ture of Shusha spiritually and that he had not taken part in the actual at-
tack. Yet I knew that one priest at least had not bothered with that dis­
tinction. Four years before, on my first visit to Shusha in 1996, not far 
from where we were sitting, I had met a real warrior-priest, straight out 
of medieval Christendom. It was a Sunday morning, and a colleague 
and I came upon a service being held in the small church of Kanach 
Zham. The words of the Armenian liturgy sounded clearly off the stone 
walls. It was led by Father Koryun, a tall, young priest with a thick 
black beard and bright enthusiastic eyes. 
After the service, Father Koryun invited us to his home in a semi-
ruined apartment block. He plied us with cognac and introduced us to 
his wife and son. Yet most of his conversation was that of a fanatic, mix­
ing the recent war with events of more than a thousand years ago. Ko­
ryun said he had come to Karabakh “on the summons of the blood of 
my ancestors.” He had not only taken services but fought as well. “I 
would kiss my cross and put my cross and gospel aside,” he related, act­
ing this out with gestures. “I would take off my cassock, put on my uni­
form, take up my gun and go into battle.” 
We must have looked surprised. Unabashed, the priest explained 
that he was not only a priest but a “son of the Armenian people.” “All 
of our territories will be liberated,” he said. “Look at the map.” He 
pointed to a map of Greater Armenia on the wall, in which landlocked 
Armenia had burst its bounds and spread out across Turkey, Georgia, 

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193 
and Azerbaijan to three seas. “I don’t know if I’ll see it or not, if my son 
will see it or not. It will be up to my grandson.” 
When I asked Archbishop Parkev, four years on, about this warrior-
priest, he was evasive and said there must have been some mistake. 
Some priests had baptized soldiers at the front, using helmets to hold 
the baptismal water, but no more. “A priest should fight with a cross,” 
he declared, suggesting I had mistaken the metaphorical for the real. I 
did not press him. 
The archbishop was more reasoned than his warrior-priest, but his 
priorities were almost as tough. He saw Shusha/Shushi as a purely Ar­
menian city. When I mentioned the town’s neglected mosques, Parkev 
refused to call them “Azerbaijani” because they dated from the nine­
teenth century when—Armenians would have you believe—there were 
no Azerbaijanis” in Karabakh. But why had they done nothing to re-
store them? “We asked the Persians, we gave them permission to re-
build them,” he replied. “So far they’re in no hurry to do so.” When I 
brought up the subject of the Azerbaijanis returning to Shusha, the arch-
bishop was grave. He said he came from a village in Lower Karabakh to 
the north, now purged of its Armenian population. “My village, Char­
dakhlu, is in Azerbaijani hands,” he said. “For a thousand years it’s 
been an Armenian village. Tell me when I can go back there.” More 
thoughtfully, he added: “It has to be a comprehensive question. All 
problems are soluble, but we need time for such painful questions.” 
“I would like Shusha to be the capital again,” said Parkev. We were 
standing on the porch of his house, saying our good-byes and looking 
out at the vast pinnacle of Ganzachetsots and the ruins behind it. But 
how? And whose capital? It seemed a remote prospect at the beginning 
of the twenty-first century, when the town was in ruins and had just two 
thousand inhabitants; a hundred years before, it had had forty thou-
sand residents, six churches, two mosques and twenty newspapers. 
The archbishop asked me where I had studied Russian. I said I had 
a Russian literature degree, and Parkev’s bearded face lit up. “I studied 
Russian literature too. My dissertation was on Bulgakov’s Master and