Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

particular circle, the editors wrote: “As distinct from the Armenians, 
who were settled in Karabakh from Turkey and Iran in the nineteenth 
century, the Chechens live in the land of their ancestors. For this reason 
no one has the right to deprive the Chechens of the right to live on their 
own land.”
6 
The dispute about the nineteenth century is a relatively light skirmish 
compared to the main theater of war between Armenian and Azerbai­
jani historians: the medieval period and churches and monuments, like 
Hurekavank, that Samvel Karapetian is investigating. It is about men 
like Hasan-Jalal, the prince who ruled an autonomous principality in 
Karabakh, who built the region’s finest monasteries, and whose dag­
ger—complete with Armenian inscription—is now exhibited in the 

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Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. One might reasonably assume a con­
sensus that the owner of this dagger was an Armenian—insofar as that 
makes sense, when talking about the thirteenth century. But nothing is 
so simple. 
This is where Professor Buniatov made his most audacious claims. 
He chose as his main field of study the “ancient history of Azerbaijan,” 
and in particular “Caucasian Albania.” And he devised the theory that 
the Karabakh Armenian rulers, like the Beglarians and Hasan-Jalal, 
were not really Armenians but Armenianized Albanians. 
The “Albanians” Buniatov was referring to have nothing to do with 
the nation in the Balkans. This was the name the Romans gave to a Cau­
casian people when they first made incursions into the Caucasus in the 
first century b.c. When Buniatov began to popularize the subject in the 
1960s, the Caucasian Albanians were a long-forgotten ancient people. 
The scholarly consensus was that they were a Christian people or group 
of peoples who had mainly inhabited what is now the North of Azer­
baijan and that by the time of the Arab invasions in the tenth century, 
they had begun to assimilate with the peoples around them. So al­
though “Albanian” blood surely flowed through veins all over the Cau­
casus in the medieval period, “Albania” had vanished as a cultural and 
political idea by then. However, it also continued as a territorial name 
in that after the Albanians themselves had been assimilated, the name 
“Albania” was sometimes used to describe the area in and around Na­
gorny Karabakh. 
Buniatov challenged this orthodoxy and reclaimed a great histori­
cal role for the Albanians. In actual fact, he argued, the Albanians were 
one of three major nations of the Caucasus and the progenitors of most 
of the population of Azerbaijan; they had survived well into the mod-
ern era, but the Armenians had forcibly suppressed their church, and 
translated their literature and then destroyed the originals. Not only 
Karabakh but large areas of eastern Armenia, said Buniatov, were in ac­
tual fact “Albanian.” 
Buniatov began a poisonous quarrel for which the Caucasian Alba­
nians themselves should take none of the blame. (Their true history has 
not become any clearer as a result.)
7 
Buniatov’s scholarly credentials 
were dubious. It later transpired that the two articles he published in 
1960 and 1965 on Caucasian Albania were direct plagiarisms. Under his 
own name, he had simply published, unattributed, translations of two 
articles, originally written in English by the Western scholars C. F. J. 

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153 
Dowsett and Robert Hewsen.
8 
But his main intention was evidently po­
litical and here he succeeded brilliantly. The subtext to his theory was 
obvious to anyone who lived in the Caucasus: the Karabakh Armenians 
had no relation to the Armenians of Armenia. They were either “guests” 
of Azerbaijan (nineteenth-century immigrants) or Azerbaijanis under 
the skin (descendants of Albanians) and should behave accordingly. 
Armenian scholars were outraged. An Armenian historian, A. S. 
Mnatsakanian, set out to rebut Buniatov’s historical geography and re-
located Caucasian Albania well to the northeast, toward the Caspian 
Sea. Mnatsakanian said that it had entirely disappeared by the tenth 
century; as for the medieval-era “Albania,” to the west and in and 
around Karabakh, he said this was “New Albania,” a region adminis­
tered by Persia, of which the only Albanian component remaining was 
the name, but which was entirely populated by Armenians. 
In the 1970s, a younger generation of Armenian and Azerbaijani 
historians took up the war over Caucasian Albania and wrote articles 
full of scornful footnotes. Then a young Azerbaijani student of Bunia­
tov’s, Farita Mamedova, opened a new front. Her doctoral thesis, “The 
Political History and Historical Geography of Caucasian Albania” was 
so provocative that she was not allowed to defend it for five years. 
Gorbachev himself reportedly asked what the fuss was about and a 
copy of Mamedova’s thesis was laid on his desk. When I visited Ma­
medova in a small poky office in Baku’s Western University, it was 
hard to believe at first glance that this diminutive, dark-haired pleas-
ant woman could have caused such a destructive row. Then, as she 
began to speak quickly and intensely, spelling out the main elements 
of her thesis and recounting how “the Armenians passed a death sen­
tence on me,” her eyes gleamed; it was obvious that she relished the 
fight with the Armenians. 
I gathered that Mamedova had taken the Albanian theory and used 
it to push the Armenians out of the Caucasus altogether. She had relo­
cated Caucasian Albania into what is now the present-day Republic of 
Armenia. All those lands, churches, and monasteries in the Republic of 
Armenia—all had been Albanian. No sacred Armenian fact was left un­
attacked. Armenia’s conversion to Christianity in the fourth century 
a.d.? It had actually taken place thousands of miles to the south of pres­
ent Armenia, on the River Euphrates. The seat of the Armenian church 
at Echmiadzin? It had been Albanian right up until the fifteenth century, 
when the Armenians relocated there. 

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As for the primary written traces of this Albanian civilization, 
Mamedova said they had all been deliberately destroyed, first by the 
Armenians and the Arabs in concert, then in a second campaign of sys­
tematic destruction in the nineteenth century. Mamedova then told me 
how in 1975 she had gone to the great monastery of Gandzasar in Kara­
bakh, the seat of Hasan-Jalal, with a group of French scholars. Her com­
panions had been skeptical of her theories, but then, using the fluent 
medieval Armenian she had learned in Leningrad, she had read off the 
inscription on the façade. It began: “I, Hasan-Jalal, built this church for 
my people of Aghvank . . .” “Aghvank” was the ancient name for Alba­
nia. And she added another detail that I ought to know. Down below in 
the village of Vank, she had noted the physiognomy of the locals—none 
of them looked Armenian, she said, and that was because they were not. 
They were actually all Albanians. 
But how come all those hundreds of “Albanian” inscriptions, I 
managed to say, in places like Gandzasar and Hurekavank were all 
written in medieval Armenian? Mamedova explained that although Al­
banians, such as Hasan-Jalal, had written in Armenian, they had never 
referred to themselves as Armenians, only as “Aghvank,” as Albanians. 
She had another theory as to the inscriptions, although this had not 
been substantiated: “There is a theory that the inscriptions were super-
imposed later, in the nineteenth century, but we don’t have any evi­
dence of that yet.” 
Mamedova had consistently said that she was not political; but in a 
second meeting her political views did shine through. “It is impossible 
to solve the Karabakh problem without the Albanians,” she said. I must 
have looked skeptical. “There are only two nations with an identity but 
no state,” she went on. “The Jews and the Armenians. The difference is 
that the Jews created a state in their historical homeland; the Armenians 
created one not in their historical homeland.”
9 
The urbane Mamedova is the sophisticated end of what, in Azerbaijan, 
has become a very blunt instrument indeed. The crudest version of the 
Albanian argument has swept through Azerbaijan. Not once did I hear 
any pre–nineteenth-century church in the entire country called any-
thing other than “Albanian.” The Albanians have even spread to the 
distant southeastern region of Nakhichevan, all of whose surviving Ar­
menian churches have been declared to be Albanian. 
A 1997 pamphlet entitled “The Albanian Monuments of Karabakh,” 

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by Igrar Aliev and Kamil Mamedzade, ducks the issue of the medieval 
Armenian inscriptions altogether. The front cover bears a drawing of 
the façade of the church of Gandzasar, but the draftsman has carefully 
left out all the Armenian writing. All the photographs in the church 
were taken from a safe distance, so the Azerbaijani reader has no idea 
that there is any Armenian writing there at all. Aliev and Mamedzade 
finish their historical overview by saying: 
The undisputable conclusion follows from everything said above that 
the so-called Armenians of Karabakh and the Azerbaijanis as such 
(who are the descendants of the Albanian population) of northern 
Azerbaijan share the same mother. Both of them are completely indis­
putably former Albanians and therefore the Armenians as such on the 
territory of Nagorny Karabakh, into which they surged in huge num­
bers after the first quarter of the nineteenth century, have no rights.
10 
In Armenia meanwhile, the Albanian dispute helped propel a number 
of scholars of ancient history into frontline politics. One of the founding 
members of the Karabakh Committee in 1988 was Aleksan Akopian, a 
leading Armenian historian of the Albanian period. He now pursues his 
enthusiasm for history and archaeology as the “governor” of the occu­
pied Azerbaijani province of Lachin, situated between Armenia and 
Nagorny Karabakh. 
I went to see Akopian in his office in the Armenian parliament. An 
engaging man with a thick moustache, he said he was delighted to hear 
news of Farita Mamedova. “Ah, my sister!” he exclaimed. The two of 
them had studied ancient Armenian in Leningrad under the same pro­
fessor, and Akopian seemed to look back on their bitter academic quar­
rels, fought in obscure historical journals, with something like tender­
ness. “I had brothers and sisters in Azerbaijan,” he explained. “I was al­
ways fighting with them. For ten years I took part in the war between 
Armenia and Azerbaijani historians. The war had begun earlier and I 
took part in the last ten years of it.”
11 
Then Akopian set off at a rattling 
pace to outline the borders of his own “Albania.” It had almost nothing 
in common with the Azerbaijani version, being an ancient northerly 
province. It was not to be confused with “New Albania,” situated in 
Nagorny Karabakh, a province that took only its name from the Alba­
nians, when they were fast becoming extinct. The fact that Hasan-Jalal 
was the prince “of Albania” in the thirteenth century was perhaps 

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equivalent to Queen Elizabeth’s youngest son’s being the Earl of Wes­
sex, a long-vanished English kingdom. 
It would have taken a few years to spare and knowledge of several 
ancient languages to form an informed judgment on the Albanian ques­
tion. Fortunately, Professor Robert Hewsen of Rowan College, New Jer­
sey, the foremost expert on this period of Caucasian history, was able to 
advise. In his elegant, carefully worded reply to my list of questions, I 
detected the voice of someone who had spent his career negotiating the 
reefs of Caucasian historical politics. 
Hewsen enclosed an article from 1982 in which he had gone back 
over the original sources; he had strongly reprimanded Buniatov for 
bad history but also criticized the Armenian Mnatsakanian for being 
selective with the evidence.
12 
In his letter, he stressed that the amount 
of evidence on Caucasian Albania was really quite small, but he con­
curred with the idea that by the tenth century the Albanians had pretty 
much been broken up: “Since, according to Strabo, the Albanians were 
a federation of twenty-six tribes, the general consensus is that their 
state began to disintegrate in the Arab period and was gone by the 
tenth century; an Albanian ethnic group may have survived longer: 
we don’t know.” 
Hewsen said it was hard to find any traces of the Albanians. Most 
people assumed that the Udins, a tiny Christian nationality, who used 
to live in northern Azerbaijan, were descendants of the Albanians. They 
spoke an indigenous Caucasian language related to Lezghian. Apart 
from that, the few fragments of their writing in existence had yet to be 
deciphered. There was almost no supporting evidence for the charge 
that the Armenians had deliberately destroyed the Albanian literature. 
If “Albania” had survived, it was as a separate branch of the Armenian 
church, based in Karabakh. Finally we came to the Karabakhi prince, 
Hasan-Jalal. Professor Hewsen concluded that “I have found not a 
shred of evidence that [the meliks] ever thought of themselves as any-
thing but Armenians, albeit members of the Albanian branch of the Ar­
menian Church.” 
Hewsen had also traced Hasan Jalal’s genealogy and found it to be 
almost exclusively Armenian: 
[Hasan-Jalal’s] descent can be traced back to the fourth century and in­
volves the following houses: In the male line, (1) the princes (who later 
became kings) of Siunik. Through various princesses, who married his 

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ancestors, Hasan-Jalal was descended from (2) the kings of Armenia or 
the Bagratuni dynasty, centered at Ani; (3) the Armenian kings of 
Vaspurakan of the Artsuni dynasty, centered in the region of Van; (4) 
the princes of Gardman; (5) the Sassanid dynasty of Persia, and (6) the 
Arsacids, the second royal house of Albania, itself a branch of (7) the 
kings of ancient Parthia.
13 
All of this confirmed what perhaps no one should have doubted in 
the first place: that the man whose dagger in the Hermitage bears an Ar­
menian inscription was not in fact a latter-day Caucasian Albanian.Yet 
it needed a scholar in New Jersey to prove it. 
The great thick beech forests of Nagorny Karabakh are one of the red 
bands that curled down Samvel Karapetian’s map of the Caucasus in 
1914. Before we parted, Samvel and I were to go on one more expedi­
tion deep into these forests, to one of Karabakh’s most famous and re-
mote monasteries. 
Our two local guides, Boris and Slava from the village of Talish, led 
the way, carrying double-barreled hunting rifles. We entered a timeless 
forest wilderness and walked for hours, picking our way over great rot­
ting timbers, beneath the silver shafts of beech trees. Samvel strode in 
front with the guides, keeping up an eager pace. As he darted along, he 
sometimes seemed less a human being than some strange marine crea­
ture flitting through the green. My feelings toward this tireless historian 
veered between admiration and alarm. He was, an Armenian friend 
justly said, “a constructive ultranationalist.” Whatever Samvel is seek­
ing to prove, the general effect of his work will be to record for the wider 
world treasures of medieval Christian art that are little known in the 
outside world and might otherwise be lost. Yet, if his political views 
were to predominate, would the Caucasus ever move out of its sus­
pended animation in the medieval period? 
After three hours, we spotted our destination. A tiny splash of pale 
stone stood out in the greenery, with a small square belfry jutting sky-
ward. Yeghishe Arakyal stands on a rocky outcrop above a gorge, the 
foaming River Terter far below. A thick defensive wall surrounds the 
seven churches; the medieval princes obviously needed to protect 
themselves well. As soon as we came through the gate, Samvel and 
his team got out their tape measures and cameras and immediately set 
to work. 

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When darkness had fallen, we were under the spell of the Karabakh 
forests. All I could hear was the crackle of the bonfire, an owl, and the 
distant surge of the river. Then there was something else: a faint patter 
of Armenian voices. I got up, went out into the darkness, and crept 
around the pale shapes of the monastery chapels, pressed against each 
other like the hulls of ships. Samvel, Emma, and Narine were standing 
with their faces pressed against the low stone doorway of one of the 
churches. Narine held a flashlight whose beam fell onto the inscription 
above the door, Emma stood with pen poised above a pad of paper. 
Samvel, his big bald head capped by a navy-blue-and-orange woolly 
hat, was reading out the Armenian letters, one by one. Samvel was un­
stoppable. He was even using the hours of darkness to gather more in­
telligence in his long war. 

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11