Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

Party. He went away. 
From late 1988 to early 1992, after the Armenians had left, Shusha was 
a defiant Azerbaijani outpost in the middle of Armenian-controlled 
Nagorny Karabakh. When full-scale war broke out after the collapse 
of the Soviet Union in 1992, Armenian fighters eventually captured 
Shusha. Shusha Armenians, like the Khachaturians, came back to a 
town that was now their home again—and was also utterly destroyed. 
When the couple drink tea in their garden, they look across at their 
ruined former place of employment. The neoclassical Realschule is one 
of the saddest wrecks in the town. The three-story school, which was 
built in 1906, once had four hundred pupils and educated all the chil­
dren of the bourgeoisie. Its graduates went to universities in Moscow 
and Saint Petersburg. Today, the school’s grand façade has three rows 
of black windows, like an empty packet of pills in which the holes have 
been punched out. As we walked in, an inscription on the marble floor 
at the entrance still welcomed us in Latin: Salve. But a winding staircase 
of pink marble led up only to more rubble and corridors of grass grow­
ing between the stone floor tiles. 
Re-creating the story of Shusha required traveling back and forth be-
tween the town itself in Karabakh, controlled by the Armenians, and 
Shusha-in-exile, the community that carries on in Azerbaijan. The two 
halves of the town have been wrenched apart, first by fighting and now 
by the cease-fire line. 

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S H U S H A :  T H E   N E I G H B O R S ’  TA L E  
47 
I began on Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea coast at a sanatorium, where 
the name “SHUSHA” had been painted in thick white capitals on the 
steps. Long webs of washing, suspended on wires, stretched from the 
windows and crisscrossed one another. In 1992, thousands of Shusha 
Azerbaijanis were washed up in this old seaside resort north of Baku. It 
is a dry and sandy place, with only a few spindly pine trees to remind 
them of the forests of Karabakh. 
The Jafarov family lived in a dark room, piled high with cushions 
and blankets. They told me that their son Chengiz was killed on 8 May 
1992 by the Armenians as Shusha was falling. Yet when I asked about 
Soviet times, they gave the sort of reply that I was to hear dozens of 
times from both sides: “We lived normally with the Armenians.” As far 
as they were concerned, the destructive germ of hatred had come from 
outside, not from within. 
Chengiz’s best friend, Zaur, a gentle man with a thick moustache 
and the outsize stature of a rugby player, hobbled into the Jafarovs’ 
room with a stick. In the spring of 1992, he said, he had been a police-
man and one of the Azerbaijani defenders of the town. Six weeks before 
the final Armenian assault, a “Grad” missile landed near him and its 
shrapnel crashed into his legs. Zaur had had his left leg amputated and 
had needed twenty-two operations to get back on his feet. He said he 
does not have a full-time job and spends most of his time in the stuffy 
sanatorium. “The summer is beginning here and in three or four 
months time we will be dying of the heat. We are mountain people, we 
are not used to this heat and that’s when our longing begins.” 
Zaur had had two close Armenian friends. They had grown up to­
gether on the street that runs down from the upper mosque, played vol­
leyball and soccer, helped one another buy things on the black market. 
When Zaur went into the army, one of them came to the barber and paid 
for his haircut as a good-luck gesture. “During the war I was always 
afraid that I would suddenly see Vigen or Surik through the sights of 
my gun,” he recalled. “I had nightmares about that.” 
Zaur gave me an entrée into a circle of Shusha Azerbaijanis in exile. 
They were excited that I was actually planning to travel to their home 
city. Yusif was a lawyer. He was in his late thirties or early forties and 
had a rather Chekhovian sadness about him with his soft voice, thin 
black moustache, and unhappy eyes. He was more introspective and 
more bitter than Zaur and told me he had only recently broken his vow 
not to get married until his town was liberated from the Armenians. 

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S H U S H A :  T H E   N E I G H B O R S ’  TA L E  
Yusif wanted to know what had happened to his house. He drew a lit­
tle map on a scrap of paper, giving me precise instructions on how to 
find it in the town. 
In the spring of 2000, fewer than three thousand people were living in 
semiruined Shusha—perhaps a tenth of its former population. Most of 
them were poor Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan. In a queue of peo­
ple holding buckets to collect water from a water-jet in a marble facing, 
I found only two original inhabitants who knew the town. It was quite 
likely that Zaur’s friends had left. Eventually however, I was led to a 
four-story apartment block next to the church and a stocky man with a 
thick moustache and big black eyes. It was Zaur’s friend, Vigen. As I ex­
plained my business, Vigen’s wife brought us coffee. 
Vigen was puzzled at first, then overjoyed to hear the message from 
Zaur, whom he had last seen more than ten years before. “How is his 
family?” Vigen asked. “His father died, didn’t he?” The war vanished 
for a moment, as he wanted to catch up on old Shusha news and gos­
sip—which I was unable to supply. He already knew that his friend had 
lost a leg. “I was fighting in the Martakert region,” Vigen explained. “I 
heard an acquaintance from Shusha on the radio. I tuned in and we 
caught up with the news. He told me that Zaur had been hit.” The 
Shusha street telegraph carried on across the front line and some “ene­
mies” still remained friends. 
I told him what Zaur had recalled about fearing the appearance of 
a friend in the sights of his gun. “I had the same fear!” he said with a 
smile. But Vigen’s assessment of the future was much more sober. After 
all, he too had fought in the war and was now working for the govern­
ment of the separatist statelet of Nagorny Karabakh. Would it be possi­
ble for the Shusha Azerbaijanis to return? “I think that his generation 
will grow up before that can happen,” Vigen answered, pointing to his 
six-year-old son. 
My other errand seemed less promising: in this shattered city there 
seemed little hope of finding anything left of Yusif’s house. All the 
same, a few days later two journalist friends and I went looking for it. 
We found one of Yusif’s former neighbors who recognized the name 
and led us to his four-story apartment-block. Almost all the apartments 
had been burned out, but half a dozen or so were inhabited. No. 28, 
Yusif’s home, seemed to be one of them and there, leaning over the first-

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49 
floor balcony of what should have been his home, was a dark-haired 
Armenian woman whose name was Anoush. 
Anoush called us up. We explained ourselves, rather apologetically. 
She was agitated—not surprisingly—by this sudden visitation but in­
vited us in. She was a teacher about the same age as Yusif, in early mid­
dle age, with thick blue eye shadow surrounding her big black eyes. 
Her daughter made more coffee while we sat on the sofa and heard 
Anoush’s story of how she had ended up here. Hers was another ac­
count of a life wrecked by war. Shusha was still burning, she said, when 
she first arrived here on 10 May 1992, less than two days after Yusif and 
his father had left. The Karabakh Armenian authorities were encourag­
ing people who had lost their homes to move up to Shusha and they 
wanted to act fast, because they were worried that the whole town 
would be burned to the ground by looters. Anoush was a perfect can­
didate for a new home: three months before she had lost her apartment 
in Stepanakert to a “Grad” missile fired from Shusha and before that, 
her house in her native village had also been burned in an Azerbaijani 
assault. So she moved into Apartment No. 28, which was now her only 
home. “The door was open, everything was gone,” she said. We has­
tened to say that we had not come to assert the rights of its previous 
owner or to query hers, but the difficult—and unanswerable—question 
“Whom does this house belong to?” still hung in the air. 
On one wall of Anoush’s sitting room was a floor-to-ceiling photo-
graphic reproduction of a Russian autumnal scene. It was the kind of 
picture that hung on the walls of a million Soviet homes: a group of sil­
ver birch trees turning to orange and gold in a northern forest. Anoush 
pointed out an eight-inch piece of the picture on one side, which had 
been torn away, and how they had repainted the missing section of tree. 
She and her daughter had done the repair job with such care that it was 
not obvious at first glance. She smiled nervously as if to say that here 
was a token of her attachment to her home. 
It was the birch tree photograph that confirmed that I had found Yusif’s 
apartment. Back in Azerbaijan, I sought him out in his noisy lawyer’s 
office in central Baku, taking with me a few photographic snaps of 
Shusha. When we had shuffled through to a picture of the birch trees on 
the wall, he drew in a breath and said, “Yes, that’s my house.” We got 
up, went out into the traffic noise, and carried on talking in a café on 

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S H U S H A :  T H E   N E I G H B O R S ’  TA L E  
Baku’s Fountain Square serving kebabs, but Yusif’s conversation be-
came more disjointed as he became sunk in thought. Perhaps I had been 
wrong to act as I did. It was one thing for him to say in rather abstract 
terms that he had lived at Apartment No. 28; quite another to be con-
fronted with the reality that it still existed, inhabited by the enemy. 
Then Yusif became transfixed by another photograph, of his gar-
den. At the back of the apartment block in Shusha a water pipe 
stretched out into a small square of green. Within a few yards, there 
were tiled paths, fruit trees, and currant bushes: a tiny oasis of verdancy. 
“We guessed it must belong to the apartment, when we saw where the 
pipe comes from,” Anoush had told me. She grew her own vegetables 
there. In Baku, Yusif told me how this garden had been his father’s 
pride and joy. “I don’t know if my father could bear to see this,” he said, 
intently studying my photograph of his garden at its glorious-May 
greenest. 
In Baku, I spent time with the exiled Shushalilar. Apart from Zaur, 
the wounded policeman, and Yusif the lawyer, there were Kerim and 
Hikmet, journalists, and Arif an artist. The fact that I had visited their 
hometown, now out of reach, gave me a strange talismanic status 
among them. My photographs reawakened the pain of the loss of 
Shusha but also opened a door into a lost world of memories, on which 
they feasted. My photos were studied and restudied and no detail was 
too small. “What street is he standing on?” one of them asked of a pic­
ture of a little boy on a street corner. Or “If you look past the mosque on 
the left you can see a corner of Hussein’s house.” 
One windy June afternoon the Shushalilar took me to lunch in a café 
on the edge of Baku overlooking a lake. Over our four hours of conver­
sation one subject kept recurring: their friend-enemies, the Armenians. 
Kerim, who edited the Shusha newspaper, had the sharpest wit and 
turned a few heated moments into irony. Zaur, dressed in a navy blue 
blazer and looking like a professional rugby player on an evening out, 
was the most moderate. He volunteered stories about his friends and 
talked without hatred about Armenians, yet he did not believe any 
progress would be made by peace negotiations. 
The others were more aggressive. When I said that France and Ger­
many had made peace after generations of conflict, for example, one of 
them said, “Yes, and Armenian fascism must be defeated like German 
fascism.” Arif, who had a ragged pepper-and-salt beard and a pinched 
gloomy face, was the group’s hard-liner. He wanted to fight another 

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51 
war to “liberate” Shusha and was pinning his hopes on the next Azer­
baijani leader after President Heidar Aliev. “After Aliev, we’ll have a 
democratically elected president and he’ll fight to make sure there isn’t 
a single Armenian left in Karabakh,” he declared. Arif was also the most 
artistic of the group. He was a trained craftsman in stained glass, an old 
Azerbaijani tradition that had all but died out. His expulsion from 
Shusha had sent him on a downward spiral, and in Baku he was strug­
gling to make a living. As the meal was ending, Arif revealed another 
seam of his bitterness toward the Armenians. For eight months he had 
been married to an Armenian girl, he admitted, but their marriage had 
fallen apart. 
I continually noticed how my new friends blamed Russia for every-
thing that had gone wrong. In their telling of it, the 1991–1994 war had 
been fought just as much with Russians as with Armenians—although, 
when pressed for details, they had very little actual supporting evi­
dence. At table, one would say: “It wasn’t the Armenians who took 
Shusha, it was the Russians” or “I don’t blame the Armenians, the Rus­
sians are using them” or “The Russians settled Armenians in Karabakh 
in the nineteenth century to drive a wedge between us and Turkey.” 
There is evidence of Russia’s having supported the Armenians during 
the war, but this went far beyond that. To hear my friends talk, it was al­
most as if the Armenians had not fought in the war at all. Was this a ra­
tionalization of Azerbaijan’s painful defeat by blaming it on big Russia? 
Or are they exempting their former Armenian neighbors from blame by 
attributing the conflict to Russia? In this matter, I noticed, no one ever 
had any personal enemies; it was always mysterious outside forces who 
were to blame. 
Shusha is a good subject for a study of the conundrum of how neigh­
bors can stop being friends and start fighting one another. The town 
was burned to the ground three times in the past century, in 1905, 
1920, and 1992, once by both sides, once by the Azerbaijanis, and once 
by the Armenians. Even by the fratricidal standards of the Caucasus, 
this must be a record. Yet in the intervals between these infernos, it 
was a thriving town and there was widespread intermarriage between 
the communities. 
Two bonds that tied the two communities together were commerce 
and Russian power, the first quite naturally, the second more artificially. 
The devastating sack of 1920 came after the Russians had left and at the 

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end of another period of economic disruption and civil war. On that oc­
casion an Azerbaijani army rampaged through the Armenian upper 
town, burning whole streets and killing hundreds of Armenians. When 
the Russians returned, wearing Bolshevik uniforms, Stepanakert was 
made the new capital of Nagorny Karabakh. The ruins of the Armenian 
quarter of Shusha stood, ghostly and untouched, for more than forty 
years. In 1930, the poet Osip Mandelstam visited the town and was 
terrified by its silent and empty streets. In a poem he shuddered at 
Shusha’s “forty thousand dead windows.” 
Finally, in 1961, the Communist authorities in Baku gave the order 
for the ruins to be demolished, even though many of the old buildings 
could have been restored. Sergei Shugarian, who was an Armenian