Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

part of Finland but have generous powers of self-government. At one 
point, says Gukasian, his Finnish hosts took him aside and pointed out 
that this was a good model for Nagorny Karabakh: “They said, ‘Here is 

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a good model,’ and I said, ‘I am ready—right now if you want—to be-
come part of Finland! But we are talking about Azerbaijan.”
13 
Gukasian’s story suggests that the format of the peace negotia­
tions between the Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents may be badly 
flawed. Both presidents have been concentrating on finding a compre­
hensive or “package” agreement under which all issues can be resolved 
at once. They have adopted this approach partly because of the sense of 
urgency they feel about President Aliev’s failing health. But it also 
stems from the controlling authoritarian instincts of two leaders, who 
are unwilling to let the process out of their grip. 
Having failed to find a comprehensive plan, the only logical way 
out is to pursue a “step-by-step” agreement in which some smaller 
steps—the opening of the Armenia-Nakhichevan border, the return of 
small areas of occupied land—get the peace process under way on the 
ground. Such symbolic, incremental steps carry their own risks, but they 
could begin to give society a stake in peaceful cooperation, rather than 
defiance and cynicism. They could begin to thaw the frozen landscape. 
Even without the war, Armenia and Azerbaijan leaders have cooper­
ated very little over the past hundred years. In Soviet times, they would 
conduct most of their business in and through Moscow. Since then, the 
south Caucasus has been a tangle of front lines, closed borders, dead 
ends, and isolated enclaves. In any real political or economic sense, it is 
not a proper region at all. 
This was not always the case. The eighteenth-century Armenian 
troubadour Sayat-Nova wrote in Armenian, Georgian, and the lingua 
franca  of the Caucasus of the time, Azeri (some of his Azeri poems 
were even written in Armenian script) and moved happily between 
the different nations and regions of the Caucasus. He thought of him-
self as a bridge builder. In one of his Azeri poems he elegizes on his 
posthumous fate: 
Mercy on the old master building a bridge,
The passer-by may lay a stone to his foundation.
I have sacrificed my soul, worn out my life, for the nation.
A brother may arrange a rock upon my grave.
14
Sayat-Nova’s biographer, Charles Dowsett, speculates on the use of 
the word “nation” in the poem: 

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What nation? If the Armenian nation, or the Georgian, why is the 
poem in Azeri? It would seem his horizons are broader, and that he is 
thinking in terms such as a Caucasian unity, in which Armenian, Geor­
gian and Azeri might live together in harmony, under the beneficent 
rule of a wise leader like Irakli II, and Azeri, as the common language, 
was the best vehicle for the message.
15 
In a few lines Sayat-Nova spells out a different kind of future for Ar­
menians and Azerbaijanis, locked in their self-destructive states of fear 
and defiance: a gentler future based on a much more harmonious past. 
But sadly the poet’s message is not being heard. 

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