Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

one hour. No, really.” Bella also had a very different view of Nagorny 
Karabakh from that of most Armenians: for her it wasn’t the sacred Ar­
menian cause but, rather, the bone of contention that had spoiled every-
thing between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. 
When I asked Bella if she had ever visited Karabakh, she replied 
that she had once, as a child. “To be honest, I would like to go there one 
more time, simply to see what I am being tormented for!” she told me 
with a laugh. “I’ve formed this idea of seeing with my own eyes the 
reason why I’ve been punished. I believe that I’ve been punished for 
something.” 
The gravel alleyways of Darnagül were well shaded by cedars and cy­
presses—and were also completely quiet. There was no one to ask for 
directions. I had come to visit the main resting place of Baku Armenians 
in the city’s northern cemetery so that I could report back to Bella and 
her friends in Armenia on how the resting place of their parents and 
grandparents looked. I went through the gate of this forlorn place with 
some trepidation and soon ran into three cemetery wardens, who obvi­
ously did not like seeing a foreigner here at all. “You have to ask the 
proper authorities,” one advised. I said that I wanted only to go for a 
stroll, shrugged them off, and set out at a brisk pace down a curving 
gravel path. 
Turning a corner, I discovered why they had wanted to stop me. 
On either side of the path, the metal fences that surrounded the grave 
plots had been overturned and gravestones had been smashed or de­
capitated. In one plot the black marble headstone of Roza Markarova 
(1925–74), her earnest face etched into it, lay sideways on the ground. 
Fortunately, the destruction was only along the path. Further into the 

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103 
graveyard, the tombs were untouched and merely overgrown with 
weeds and nettles. The vandals had evidently made one sortie down 
the path, smashing everything they could find, and then left. 
I wandered around for a few minutes, feeling the peculiar atmos­
phere of this utterly forlorn place. Coming back, I faced one of the ceme­
tery wardens again. “So no one ever comes here now?” I asked. “Ar­
menians and Azerbaijanis used to come in the old days,” he told me. 
“That was before they dropped the bomb.” “The bomb?” I wasn’t sure 
I’d understood him correctly. “That was the Yeraz, who came in and de­
stroyed everything, they exploded a bomb,” he said. He was referring 
to the Azerbaijanis from Armenia and the hate-filled days of January 
1990. I left the cemetery to its dead and its ghostly wardens. 
The watershed of 1990 is not so long ago, but it already needs the 
patience of an archaeologist to uncover Armenian Baku. It is perhaps 
not as fully erased as Muslim Yerevan, but that would be much harder, 
because there were two hundred thousand Armenians here as recently 
as the mid-1980s. Still, Armenians have been removed from all the 
tourist literature and most of their monuments have simply vanished. 
In the center of Baku, only one visible remnant is left, the Armenian 
church of Gregory the Illuminator in Fountain Square, which dates to 
the 1860s. It remains a gutted shell eleven years after it was burned in 
December 1989; the cross has been removed from the belfry, now used 
as a pool hall. Where another smaller and older church, of the Virgin 
Mary, used to stand, in the shadow of the Maiden’s Tower in the Old 
Town, there is now an empty space. A diplomat who served in Baku in 
1992 at the height of the Karabakh war told me that he saw this eigh­
teenth-century chapel being taken to pieces. The Armenian provenance 
of other buildings is now simply unknown to most people. For exam­
ple, on the exuberant main street, Istiqlalyat, stands the Philharmonia, 
a pastiche of the casino in Monte Carlo, built in 1910 by the Armenian 
Gabriel Ter-Mikelov, who also designed the grand house opposite, a 
joyful creation in mock Arabian style, complete with a high faux-orien­
tal balcony. Ter-Mikelov doubtless thought of himself as a Bakuvian 
first and an Armenian second; it is only the attempt to suppress his 
name that makes me stress his nationality. 
A small Armenian Baku of sorts does live on. The Armenians there 
are spectral folk and not easy to spot. There are somewhere between 
five and twenty thousand of them in the city, almost all women married 
to Azerbaijani husbands. In this respect, Baku has preserved a little of 

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B A K U :  A N   E V E N T F U L   H I S TO RY 
its tolerant past—although these women do not readily advertise their 
nationality. There are still “terms.” 
I was introduced to several of the Armenian wives. Olga, with her 
black eyes and elegantly plucked eyebrows, looked as though she came 
out of an ancient Egyptian painting. She said that most of her Armen­
ian relatives, including her brother, had fled and were in Russia or 
America, but she had stayed with her Azerbaijani husband and chil­
dren. Hadn’t she been afraid? I asked. She responded that when the 
Popular Front was in power and Azerbaijani nationalism was at its 
peak in 1992–1993, she had not stepped out of her house, but when the 
old Communist Heidar Aliev returned to power, she began to feel safe 
again. “Since Aliev came back, I’ve felt calm.” “Nowadays I am only 
worried about earning enough to live,” she insisted. 
Other women in this city find life as Armenians very tough indeed. 
I met three Baku Armenians, all of whom had been scapegoated for 
their nationality. It seemed from their stories that it was all right to be 
an Armenian woman in Baku in the everyday course of things, but if 
you had a problem, you quickly discovered you had no rights. 
Sofia was accompanied by her Azerbaijani husband of sixty years. 
She was an imposing woman, with a line of medals pinned on her jacket 
announcing that she had served in the war. She had spent years being 
refused a pension, and one official had said in her presence, “Send her 
documents to Yerevan.” Sofia’s two companions had both lost their 
apartments. Tanya had been dispossessed by Azerbaijani refugees; Yev­
genia by her Azerbaijani daughter-in-law. Both had fought in vain in 
the courts to recover their legally owned property. Yevgenia, a little lady 
with a pinched face, looked terminally exhausted and close to tears. 
These women’s problems were small personal tragedies in the larger 
scheme of things, but all of them had family in Baku and nowhere else 
to go. 
I took the case of the three Armenian women to Hidayat Orujev, 
President Aliev’s adviser and ideologue on nationality issues. Orujev is 
the spokesman both of Azerbaijan’s tolerance and Azerbaijan’s suffer­
ing at the hands of the Armenians. So in his office, high in the presi­
dential building overlooking the Caspian Sea, he told me, “I haven’t 
had a single complaint that was as a result of inter-ethnic relations.” 
When I put the specific grievances of Sofia, Tanya, and Yevgenia to him, 
Orujev said he would investigate but suggested to me that I was naïve 
and being led astray: “There are people who falsify, who want to use the 

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105 
national question as a screen and solve their own problems, which sim­
ply don’t have any basis in law.”
6 
Orujev himself had lived in Armenia for eighteen years and was di­
rector of the Azerbaijani Dramatic Theater in Yerevan. He has enough 
experience to appreciate the complexity of Armenian-Azerbaijani rela­
tions, but he insisted that the guilt is all on the Armenian side. We began 
a rather surreal conversation. The presidential adviser told me in detail 
how Azerbaijan was the victim of sustained Armenian aggression and 
that tens of thousands of its citizens had died or been evicted from their 
homes. Yes, I prompted him and added that I had observed strong hos­
tility to Armenians in Azerbaijan. “Not toward the Armenians but to-
ward the government  of Armenia,” Orujev told me. Azerbaijanis had 
feelings of toleration toward Armenians, but hatred toward their lead­
ers, he claimed. 
Orujev’s official role requires a schizophrenic switching of posi­
tions. One moment he must condemn Armenian “genocide” and ag­
gression; the next he must insist that Azerbaijan’s tradition of tolerance 
and harmony is alive and well and no Azerbaijani harbors any specific 
anti-Armenian feelings. I almost felt sorry for him—but his ersatz tol­
erance is almost as inauthentic as the concrete-and-glass building in 
which he sits. Coming out of the presidential apparatus into the sun-
shine, I turned into Istiqlalyat Street and immediately saw a far more 
noble but ignored example of Baku’s synthesis of styles and traditions, 
Ter-Mikelov’s wonderful art nouveau mansion. 
The Samed Vurgun Park, just south of Baku’s railway station, used to 
be a pleasant patch of green in the city center, frequented by lovers and 
people walking their dogs. When I came there, I saw a flotilla of white 
canvas tents ranged across the bald ground; in front of them were plas­
tic tables, at which moustachioed men sat and played dominoes. This is 
yet another face of modern Baku. 
After most of the Armenians left Baku in 1990, they were followed 
by tens of thousands of Jews and Russians. In their stead the city re­
ceived the human flotsam of the conflict with the Armenians—first tens 
of thousands of Armenian Azerbaijanis and then an even bigger wave 
of refugees from the Karabakh conflict. This helped turn Baku into a 
completely Azerbaijani city for the first time in its history. The tents in 
Samed Vurgun Park were improvised teahouses, or chaikhanas, run by 
disabled war veterans. In January 2000, there were reports of a pitched 

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battle here between the Baku police and a group of invalids. The police 
had attacked with batons and the invalids had defended themselves 
with crutches; six invalids and four policemen were reported hurt.
7 
Rufa, a war veteran turned cook, invited me into his teahouse tent. 
It was a tarpaulin structure with a sand floor; electricity wires sprouted 
out alarmingly from a hotplate with a kettle simmering on it, and a 
dusty white-and-gray kitten slept underneath. Rufa confirmed that 
there had been a fight but said the police had decided to leave them 
alone, after they resisted. Rufa’s tent was run by two brothers from 
Aghdam; a third brother had died in the war. The veterans did not make 
much money—perhaps twenty or thirty dollars a month. 
In the years 1999–2001, the battle of Samed Vurgun Park was just 
one of many fights between the war veterans and the government. The 
fight had a strong symbolic aspect: Who would lay claim to greater 
authority in Azerbaijan, the authorities or the men who had been 
wounded fighting for their country? The chairman of the Karabakh In­
valids Association, Etimar Asadov, told me that the government had 
presented them with a $15,000 tax bill, even though they were a chari­
table organization and the meager benefits the veterans received were 
barely enough to live on.
8 
A year later, when the veterans began politi­
cal protests, the government arrested many of them and closed down 
the organization. 
The president had his own political reasons for wanting to crush 
the veterans’ movement. Aliev has always perceived the military as a 
threat, and many of Azerbaijan’s leading commanders from the Kara­
bakh war are now in jail. But it seemed to me that part of his spleen 
against them was that they were spoiling his vision of a new prosper­
ous Baku. Crutch-dependent invalids filled up Baku’s parks and dem­
onstrated in front of government buildings reminding people of the 
other Azerbaijan, beyond its international oil boom. 
Cosmopolitan Baku has made a comeback in the 1990s with the 
promise of new oil wealth. Over the past ten years, hundreds of Baku 
Azerbaijanis have studied abroad, found professional jobs in the oil in­
dustry, opened businesses. The city has begun to smarten up again and