Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

Hurekavank 
The Unpredictable Past 
S A M V E L   K A R A P E T I A N   U N RO L L E D  
a six-foot square of stiff paper 
on the floor of his office. From a distance it was a large white space 
sprinkled with colored dots that could have been an abstract painting 
by Jackson Pollock. But standing beside it, Samvel was a general, out-
lining his campaign plan. 
Before us was a map of the Caucasus, based on the Russian impe­
rial census of 1914. Samvel had ascertained the ethnic makeup of all the 
settlements, large and small, between the Black and Caspian Seas and 
given each nationality a coded color. Then he had colored in every vil­
lage and town on the map, according to its ethnic allegiance. The re­
sulting galaxies of color were his attempt at a kind of historical x-ray of 
the Caucasus. The plains were crowded with black spots, which desig­
nated the “Tartars,” or the Azerbaijanis. A thick cluster of green spots in 
the high mountains of the Kelbajar and Lachin regions signified the 
Kurds. Occasional light blue circles represented the Russians. Then, in 
what is now Azerbaijan, Samvel pointed out to me two long bands of 
red, one running along the southern foothills of the Caucasus moun­
tains, the other vertically down through Nagorny Karabakh. These 
were the Armenians—Samvel’s message was that they were the true 
custodians of the foothills of Azerbaijan. 
Samvel Karapetian is a leading combatant in one of the fiercest con­
flicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the one over the ancient past. 
His office, buzzing with life, on the sixth floor of the Institute of Art in 
the center of Yerevan, looks like the Armenian staff headquarters in this 
campaign. Filing cabinets stuffed with documents, thousands of photo-
graphs, and more than two hundred maps of Nagorny Karabakh line 
the walls. Posters and calendars depict the monasteries of Karabakh. 
Nagorny Karabakh, the disputed province is the battleground for 
the fiercest fights between Armenian and Azerbaijani historians. Recent 
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history is of little interest to them. Instead they are moved by the notion, 
unrecognized by international law, that whoever was there first, is the 
true tenant of the land—what the Romans called prior tempore-fortior 
jure. As a result, Karabakh has become a place, as someone once said of 
the Soviet Union, with an “unpredictable past.” 
The first feathery leaves were coming out on the trees in the graveyard 
of Hurekavank. They were beginning to give the gray vault of the me­
dieval church a green headdress. Samvel had brought me to the church 
and graveyard as the first stop in our expedition through the North of 
Nagorny Karabakh. He likes to make an annual spring journey there 
in late March or early April, when the weather is mild and there are 
fewer leaves on the trees that can obscure the monuments he wants to 
photograph. 
Samvel and his two women colleagues set to work with Prussian ef­
ficiency. First of all, Emma and Narine undraped a long tape measure 
and recorded the dimensions of the church. Then they used twigs and 
pencils to scrape dirt from the long, cold slabs of tombs inside so as to 
read the inscriptions. Samvel deciphered the Armenian letters and 
noted down who lay beneath the tombs. Samvel’s physical appearance 
made him a compelling sight; he is tall and has watchful restless eyes, 
and his head is completely bald and shiny. 
Underneath the tombs, Samvel explained, were the bishops and 
princes of the Beglarian family. The Beglarians were one of five families 
of meliks, or princes, who dominated Karabakh from the fifteenth to the 
nineteenth centuries. They were feudal lords, and because they kept in­
vaders at bay and kept Armenian traditions alive in the mountain fast­
nesses of Karabakh, they have been credited with carrying Armenian 
statehood through the dark days of Persian rule. Yet, judging by their 
histories, their schemes and feuds, hatched in drafty castles, have more 
of Macbeth than Henry V about them. Brother killed brother to take the 
title, melik families plotted against one another. In 1824, shortly before 
their feudal titles were abolished, the Russian governor general of the 
Caucasus, Alexei Yermolov, wrote a despairing letter to the tsar, detail­
ing how Beglarian family members were bickering over the family es­
tates and the serfs who went with the estates.
1 
Samvel and the women moved through the dewy grass of the 
Beglarians’ graveyard like a film crew checking out a location. Bram­
bles and saplings were stripped away. Each tomb was measured and 

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scrubbed of moss and dirt, and had its inscriptions noted down. Then, 
while Emma or Narine held an improvised measuring stick with three 
paper numbers above the tomb, like a movie clipboard, Samvel cap­
tured it on camera. All the photographs were later digitalized and 
stored on CD. 
“There isn’t a village in Karabakh where I don’t have somewhere I can 
call home,” said Samvel. It was evening and we were sitting at the table 
in Zarmen Dalakian’s front room. A rusty woodstove served as central 
heating system, cooker, and toaster, and heated the milk from a brown 
cow called Maral. Dinner was bread, cheese, and herbs. Samvel had 
stayed in this house twenty-one years before, when he was nineteen. 
Since then, the village of Talish had been captured by the Azerbaijanis, 
burned, held for almost two years, and then recaptured. Most of Talish 
is still in ruins. 
Samvel began delving into history in 1978 at the age of seventeen. 
Instead of going to college, he made a long walk across Nagorny Kara­
bakh, taking photographs of all the Armenian monuments he came 
across with a Smena camera, the cheapest Soviet model. Two years 
later, the year he first came to Talish, he walked for a whole summer, 
seven hundred miles across Azerbaijan and Nagorny Karabakh, camp­
ing or staying in village houses like this one. A mission was born. 
In Soviet Azerbaijan, Samvel aroused suspicions. “There isn’t a re­
gional center in Azerbaijan, where I wasn’t in the police station or the 
KGB headquarters more than once,” he said. And very soon he began 
to identify the reason: he said he had stumbled across a concerted cam­
paign to “Azerbaijanify” the cultural history of the republic by erasing 
Armenian artifacts. As he came back each year, Samvel said, he discov­
ered wrecked monuments that he had seen intact before, a ninth-cen­
tury cross-domed church in the Getabek region in northwest Azerbai­
jan, for instance: “I came there for the second time in 1982—I’d been 
there first in 1980—and it was half-ruined. I saw a shovel and pickax ly­
ing on the ground, as if someone had left his tools there during a lunch 
break. The only thing I could do was throw the tools into a gorge.” 
By the time he was in his midtwenties, Samvel had become a walk­
ing encyclopedia. He kept an archive on hundreds of churches, inscrip­
tions, and tombstones in boxes in his apartment in Yerevan. All his 
spare time and money went to the research: “If I had a choice between 
buying a camera film and something to eat, I would choose the film.” 

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But it would take more than one lifetime to complete the goal he had set 
himself: to record all the Armenian monuments outside the borders of 
the Republic of Armenia. 
Our host Zarmen poured each of us a glass of tutovka, the viciously 
potent Karabakh mulberry vodka. The next day peace talks were due 
to begin in Key West, Florida, on the future of Nagorny Karabakh. I 
wanted to hear Samvel’s opinion on the talks, although I guessed what 
his answer would be. Samvel said he opposed any attempt at diplo­
macy with Azerbaijan, which traded in ancient Armenian lands. “I 
don’t even want to think about it. I hope there won’t be a settlement.” 
Still, he asked my opinion on what a peace deal would mean for the Ar­
menian side. I said that it would mean giving up at least six of the oc­
cupied regions around Nagorny Karabakh and allowing the hundreds 
of thousands of Azerbaijanis, who had been expelled from there, to re-
turn. “Even Kelbajar?” Samvel queried. I nodded. “That’s impossible,” 
he answered. He had not fought in the war, but as soon as the Kelbajar 
region had been “liberated” in 1993, he had gone to the region, now 
emptied of its inhabitants, and found hundreds of Armenian tombs, 
churches, and fragments. It was a historic treasury of Armenian art, he 
asserted, that must remain in Armenian hands. 
What claims does history have on the present? In what sense can 
Kelbajar be called “Armenian,” when no Armenian had lived there for 
almost a hundred years? I said that I could not accept that Kelbajar was 
“liberated” territory, when all of its fifty thousand or so Azerbaijani or 
Kurdish inhabitants had been expelled. Surely, I argued, these people 
had the right to live in the homes in which they were born. But for 
Samvel, the past eclipsed the present: those people were “Turks” and 
interlopers. When he used to travel on buses in Azerbaijan, he would al­
ways end up losing his seat: “Every Turk or Azerbaijani asks you for a 
little land and says, ‘Just give me a little land to live in!’ But in a few 
years you end up with a tiny piece of land and he gets the lot.” 
The recorded history of Karabakh is agreeably untidy. The earliest 
known European visitor to the region, the German Johann Schiltberger, 
who served with the Mongol armies, spent the winter of 1420 in the 
lower plain of Karabakh and found both Christians and Muslims there. 
“The Infidels call the plain, in the Infidel tongue, Karawag,” he wrote. 
“The Infidels possess it all, and yet it stands in Ermenia. There are also 
Armenians in the villages, but they must pay tribute to the Infidels.”
2 

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Schiltberger’s account of an intermingled territory is consistent 
with a history of rule by both Muslim khans and Armenian meliks, often 
separately, sometimes together. Karabakh’s population has shifted dra­
matically over the centuries, affected by invasions, famines and emi­
gration. An additional complication is that a large sector of the Azer­
baijani population was nomadic. Baron von Haxthausen, a European 
aristocrat, who traveled through the region in 1843 writes: 
The Tatars and Armenians of Karabagh form a motley and mixed pop­
ulation, the former mostly leading a nomadic life and roving about in 
the summer after they have cultivated their fields sufficiently to yield 
the bare necessary produce. They wander in the mountains, which are 
rich in wood and pasture, and during the hot months journey as far as 
the confines of the snowy regions, among the dwellings of the preda­
tory Koordish Tatars. In the autumn they return for the harvest to the 
plains, which in the rainy season yield excellent pasture for their 
flocks. They are a wealthy and hospitable race: single Tatars possess 
thousands of horses of the finest breeds.
3 
The fact of this great seasonal migration suggests we should beware of 
most nineteenth-century population statistics. It seems quite likely that 
the mountainous part of Karabakh had an Azerbaijani majority in sum­
mer and an Armenian one in the winter. 
Despite all this, historians on both sides have managed the feat of 
writing histories of the region that stretch back hundreds or even thou-
sands of years and suggest an unbroken Armenian or Azerbaijani pres­
ence. And, of course, not content with championing their own claims, 
they denigrate those of the enemy. It is common to hear in both Arme­
nia and Azerbaijan that the other nationality is really “gypsies,” roam­
ing people who never enjoyed proper statehood. 
The Armenian version is of an unbroken lineage of Armenian do-
minion in Karabakh, going back to the ancient kingdom of Artsakh 
two thousand years ago. More recently, the meliks are portrayed as pow­
erful princes, and the role of their Muslim overlords is played down. 
Armenians point out that at the end of the seventeenth century, the 
Karabakh meliks wrote joint letters to the pope, the Elector Palatine, and 
Peter the Great, appealing for protection against their Islamic neigh­
bors. When the Ottoman Turks overran Armenia, the Karabakh meliks 
held out. It was to Karabakh that Yefrem, the Catholicos of Echmiadzin, 

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fled in 1822, when he wanted to escape capture by the Ottoman 
Turks. 
Armenian patriotic historians have the advantage of the great treas­
ure house of monuments and inscriptions in stone that Samvel is 
recording: these are brought forth as the mute witnesses, as it were, to 
the Armenian past. Yet this story omits telling of the many alliances and 
friendships that characterized the two communities in the region. In 
1724, for example, the Karabakh Armenians and Azerbaijanis of Ganje 
signed a common treaty to defend themselves against the Ottoman 
Turks.
4 
If the Muslims left less behind in stone, it is not because they 
were not there but merely that they were less inclined to stay in one 
place. They did build caravanserais or bridges, but their enduring cul­
tural achievements are less solid artifacts such as songs or carpets. 
The Armenian nationalists use two main devices to denigrate their 
neighbors. One is to suggest that because most of them were “nomads,” 
they were a class lower than the settled village dwellers. Dismissing the 
claims of the people who used to live in Kelbajar, Samvel told me, “The 
people who lost their homes are third generation or fourth generation 
maximum. They were nomads, the tsar forced them to settle in those 
villages.” The other line of attack is that Azerbaijan is a recent twenti­
eth-century creation and that its people therefore have fewer “historical 
rights.” In an interview in February 1988, the writer Zori Balayan 
haughtily declared: “We can understand the terms Georgia, Russia, Ar­