Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

chargé d’affaires, wearing an olive raincoat, got out of a black Volga. We 
were all waiting for someone, and we all knew who it was. Finally, in a 

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long cavalcade of cars came President Heidar Aliev. Tall and gaunt, he 
emerged from his car and moved down the line of ambassadors, shak­
ing hands. Wherever he stepped, a small reverential space opened up 
around him, which somehow emphasized his loneliness. Preceded by 
soldiers carrying an enormous red wreath, Aliev walked down the long 
alley toward the eternal flame at its far end. The brass band struck up 
martial music. 
The crowd was allowed to follow and was funneled slowly down 
the alley. We walked past the tombs of the victims of 20 January 1990, 
the Karabakh war. Portraits of the dead are carved on the tombs. In the 
main, they are young boys in camouflage fatigues or in open-necked 
shirts and striped blue-and-white sailor’s shirts. People stopped to lay 
their carnations. 
The ceremony felt empty of emotion until one moment. A woman 
wearing a head scarf suddenly veered away from the crowd and 
banged her palms against the memorial of a man, pressed her body flat 
against the tomb, and started keening with grief. The lamentation was 
almost a song, “Ai-ai-ai,” coming from a deep well of pain. Was this the 
tomb of her husband? The date of birth shown was 1933, and she 
seemed about the same age. A woman in her forties in a white raincoat 
—her daughter, I imagined—came up behind the widow and silently 
held her by the shoulders to contain this paroxysm of emotion. The 
woman’s private grief had broken through the public façade of the cer­
emony. People moved on more slowly, exchanging sympathetic glances 
and muttering softly to one another. 
Baku, a city of a million people, is the capital of Azerbaijan and its seat 
of power, but only recently has it become an identifiably Azerbaijani 
city. For most of the past hundred years to be from Baku is to have a 
distinctive nationality of one’s own. Garry Kasparov, the world chess 
champion, born here of a Jewish father and an Armenian mother, 
when asked his nationality, used the Russian word Bakinets  or Baku­
vian. The city’s lingua franca is still just as much Russian as Azeri, spo­
ken with a gentle southern lilt that rises in intonation at the end of a 
sentence. 
The city’s cosmopolitan outlook and style sprang from a late-nine­
teenth-century oil boom. At its peak, Baku was producing half the 
world’s petroleum output and drew immigrants of dozens of national­
ities to service the new industry. The city’s most famous rags-to-riches 

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99 
tale is that of Zeinal Abdin Tagiev. After a “gusher” of oil was found 
on his land, this illiterate Muslim farmer grew fabulously rich and 
went on to become the town’s most famous patron and philanthropist, 
funding the performance of the “first opera in the Muslim world,” 
Leila and Majnun. 
Powered by this mercantile spirit, Baku became, in 1918, the capital 
of the short-lived “first Muslim democratic republic in the world,” 
which legalized votes for women before the United Kingdom did. Here 
it was possible to be both Muslim and modern—although sometimes 
the transition required some agility. The classic Baku Muslim is Ali 
Khan, the hero of the novel Ali and Nino. He is proud of his Persian an­
cestry but also revels in the technology and progressive politics of Baku 
and marries his Georgian childhood sweetheart. Though he is a twenti­
eth-century man, Ali still feels pain when his Christian Georgian wife, 
Nino, moves all the carpets out of his house in the Old Town to make 
way for European furniture. 
Baku’s rich blend of peoples and politics flowed into its architec­
ture. From the narrow Middle Eastern alleys of the Old Town, one steps 
into a small Prague, built at the turn of the last century. The main street 
running through the center of the city, now called Istiqlalyat or “Inde­
pendence” after a flurry of name changes, is a confection of different 
façades: a mock Venetian palace is followed by the grand Gothic porch 
of the City Hall. And style is still important in this city. It is hard to be­
lieve that people’s standard of living has plummeted since independ­
ence as they perform the passegiata along the boulevard by the Caspian 
Sea every evening, arm-in-arm, well made up, and dressed in Italian 
suits and Benetton tops. 
Yet the dynamism carries a cost: Baku is also famous as the city of 
ethnic strife and violent massacres. The worst outbreaks of bloodletting 
occurred when the Russian Empire was at its weakest and the Armen­
ian and Azerbaijani communities each identified the other as a threat. If 
Armenians feared Azerbaijanis as the vanguard of the Turkish army, 
then Azerbaijanis suspected the Armenians were a potential Russian 
“fifth column.” In February 1905, the so-called Tatar-Armenian War 
claimed hundreds of lives. The British writer J. D. Henry, describing the 
city a few months later, found that “the people of Baku lived on a hid-
den volcano of race plots, labour tyranny, political conspiracy and rev­
olutionary propaganda.”
2 
In the title of Henry’s book, they were fated 
to have an “eventful history.” 

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Following the October Revolution, another inferno of violence en­
gulfed the city. “When one speaks of the streets of a town running with 
blood,” said one British political officer, “one is generally employing a 
figure of speech. But if one is referring to Baku between 1917 and 1919, 
one is being starkly literal.”
3 
A group of mainly Armenian commissars 
took over the city and formed the Baku Commune, a small Bolshevik 
bridgehead in an otherwise anti-Bolshevik Caucasus. When in March 
1918 Azerbaijanis revolted against the Baku Commune, Armenian 
Dashnaks and Bolshevik troops poured into the Azerbaijani quarters of 
the city and slaughtered thousands. In September, just after a British 
protection force withdrew and before the Ottoman army marched in, a 
revenge match was played out. This time the Azerbaijanis went on the 
rampage and thousands of Armenians were put to the sword. The total 
death toll of the intercommunal fighting on both sides in 1918 ran close 
to twenty thousand. 
In the Soviet epoch, ethnic violence was in abeyance and intercom­
munal relations were good, but the tension did not entirely disappear. 
Armenians knew not to venture out when the Yerevan soccer team 
Ararat was playing in town—and especially if it won. In the Caucasus 
an ethnic, rather than a civic, understanding of belonging prevails, and 
the roles of “guest” and “host” are very well defined. In Armenia, the 
Azerbaijanis were very definitely made to feel that they were “guests”; 
so, in a less overt way, were the Armenians of Baku. The British writer 
Susan Richards picked up on this when she stayed with an Armenian 
mother and daughter in Baku in 1989. Tatyana, the daughter, had al­
most exclusively Azerbaijani friends. Richards writes: 
The ascendancy of the Turkic Azeris had been confirmed in the repub­
lic by Soviet power. As long as this was not threatened, the Azeris had 
little reason to be anything but easygoing. But there were terms. The 
appearance of Azeri ascendancy had to be maintained. . . . Tatyana’s 
own attitude illustrated the delicate balance between Azeri tolerance 
and ascendancy. Her pale-skinned beauty marked her as an Armen­
ian, but she had put herself under the protection of the Azeris. “The 
other day,” she remarked to me, “my boss, who was introducing me to 
someone, said: ‘This is Tatyana. She’s Azeri.’ It’s quite obvious that I’m 
not, of course. But it was his way of saying ‘She’s one of us.’ It’s all a 
matter of attitude. Armenians who don’t get on here have only them-
selves to blame.” That was all very well unless, as her mother feared, 

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B A K U :  A N   E V E N T F U L   H I S TO RY 
101 
she happened to come across an Azeri who did not happen to know 
that, despite her Armenian blood, she was “one of them.”
4 
Black January 1990 destroyed all of these cultural negotiations. Even 
well-integrated Armenians like Tatyana and her mother were forced to 
leave Baku, and two currents of its history diverged. 
“We live peacefully with them, peacefully and normally,” said Bella 
Saakova. Bella, a Baku Armenian, was sitting in a small room in a hos­
tel in a dusty suburb of Yerevan. By “them” she meant her neighbors, 
the Armenians of Armenia. She has lived in Armenia for the past ten 
years, since being deported from Baku in January 1990, yet still does not 
feel at home. Like most of her fellow Armenian refugees, Bella has not 
taken Armenian citizenship and her greatest sense of belonging is to her 
lost home city. If you were to x-ray Bella, you would find a Bakuvian all 
the way through.
5 
A good selection of Baku-in-exile was seated at Bella’s table in Yere­
van. All were Armenians, but they talked in Russian and had Russian 
first names. There was a softness about them, which I was not used to 
in Armenia, generally a dour straight-talking place, the Scotland of the 
Caucasus. These people had the unalloyed nostalgia and pedantry that 
goes with exile. Now they were arguing about Baku schools. “I went to 
School No 142, the best in Baku,” maintained Grisha firmly. Alyosha 
began a song in Azeri about the wind blowing in from the sea to Baku. 
Grisha picked up one in Russian, “Baku, my own city . . .” 
The conversation at Bella’s table turned on two topics: their shared 
memories of Azerbaijan and the dark days in January 1990, when the 
last Armenians were expelled from Baku. All the guests at the table had 
different accounts of how it had ended, and it seemed that the manner 
of leaving had imprinted a defining idea of what Baku meant for them. 
Grisha told stories about those who had been beaten and were stripped 
and robbed in the Shafaq Cinema before being shipped on ferries across 
the Caspian Sea. 
Bella’s story of her last days in Baku reflected her forgiving charac­
ter. She said she would remember forever the terror of standing on the 
cold, wind-battered quayside, waiting to board a ferry and leave the 
city, as a line of Soviet police protected a crowd of elderly and beaten 
Armenians. Yet her strongest memory was still of the kindness shown 
her by her Azerbaijani neighbors. She had left her possessions in the 

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care of one neighbor, and still remembered another, who, in the minutes 
before she left her apartment to take refuge in the local police station, 
had packed a basket of food for her and her children for their terrible 
journey. In the basket were medicine, salami, cheese, and loaves of 
bread. “I can never forget that,” Bella said. “Perhaps that’s why I have 
a completely different attitude to Azerbaijanis. You know, when people 
say bad things about them—even when they deservedly say bad 
things—I remember my neighbor. I immediately remember her and I 
remember that bread.” 
Baku was still Bella’s lost Eden. When I was setting off to visit her 
old city, she sighed, “I would give up ten years of my life to go back for