Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

The Last Citadel 
O N   A   RO C K  
above the serpentine road that twists up from Stepana­
kert to Shusha stands a victory memorial. It is the same T-72 tank from 
which Gagik Avsharian was thrown headlong in the heat of battle at 
midday on 8 May 1992. After the Armenians had won the war for Kara­
bakh, they had the burned tank rebuilt, resprayed olive green, and 
placed on the hill with its original number, 442, repainted in white on 
its hull. It pointed toward Shusha. 
Eight years and one day later, on 9 May 2000, Armenian Nagorny 
Karabakh was celebrating its Victory Day. It was marked in three stages 
on the way up to the citadel of Shusha, like three stations of a crusader 
pilgrimage, beginning with the memorial tank and ending with a serv­
ice of thanksgiving in the Gazanchetsots church. 
The hull of the tank had been strewn with red and white carnations, 
and a group of relatives were making a personal memorial. Of the three 
men in tank 442, only Gagik, the commander, had survived. At the rear 
stood Stella, the widow of Ashot, the driver, and Hovanes, his ten-year-
old son. Stella looked pale, forlorn, and still absurdly young. The grand-
mother of Shahen, the gun operator, was wearing a black head scarf and 
holding a handkerchief in her clenched hand. She began to keen with 
grief for her lost grandson, wailing and beating the back of the tank 
with her fists. 
Suddenly, the grieving relatives were overtaken by brash official 
celebration. A brass band struck up martial tunes in the road below as a 
line of dignitaries climbed the steps. The Karabakhi archbishop Parkev 
under his arched black cowl, military officers in full uniform, and the 
prime minister in a gray designer suit all filed past and laid more flow­
ers. A few minutes later, members of the brass band were running to 
jump on their bus. A cavalcade of cars roared toward Shusha and every-
one reassembled in the lower part of the town for the next ceremony, the 
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unveiling of a monument to a World War II fighter pilot named Nelson 
Stepanian. 
Our final destination, the Gazanchetsots church, was, when com­
pleted in 1887, one of the largest Armenian churches in the world and a 
token of the success of the Shusha Armenian bourgeoisie. Closed by the 
Communists, it was rebuilt after 1992, clad in shiny white limestone. It 
now towers, immaculate once more, above the ruined town. Inside, the 
church was echoing and impersonal. Archbishop Parkev, looking for­
midable in his steep black cowl, boomed out the Armenian liturgy and 
the choir’s antiphons rebounded from the walls. After the commemo­
ration of the recent war against Azerbaijan and the Great Patriotic War 
against the Germans, this was the final benediction, before everyone 
could go down to Stepanakert’s football stadium for a pop concert. 
Shusha has been called the “Jerusalem of Karabakh.” Whoever pos­
sesses the town controls not only a strategic fortress in the heart of the 
enclave but also a place saturated with history. Shusha is called, as well, 
the cradle of Azerbaijan’s music and poetry, the home of poets like Vagif 
and Natevan. For cultured Azerbaijanis, its loss in 1992 was a stab in the 
heart. “When we heard the news, I and a lot of my friends simply 
wept,” one Baku intellectual told me. 
To the Armenians, Shusha is a more troubling place. The lonely 
steeple of Gazanchetsots, rising above a still-ruined town, suggests that 
it is still more a symbol than a real town that people will readily inhabit. 
A long time ago, before 1920, Shusha was a great Armenian merchant 
town. More recently, to pursue the crusader image, most Armenians 
have come here either to loot or to pray—but not to live. I supposed that 
most of the Armenians I rubbed shoulders with here on Victory Day 
had come not so much to celebrate Shusha, the Armenian citadel, as to 
give thanks for the destruction of Shusha, the Azerbaijani gun em-
placement. The retention of the mountain fortress is a guarantee of their 
security—and almost no Armenians will countenance the return of 
Shusha’s Azerbaijani inhabitants in an eventual peace deal.
1 
On the evening of Shusha’s Victory Day, I was invited to dinner in Ste­
panakert. A rich cross section of Karabakh Armenian society had gath­
ered in an old two-story house in the center of the town. The women sat 
at one half of a long table, nearer the kitchen, the men at the other. The 
table was strewn with sheaves of tarragon and oregano, and the meat 
was hare or deer from the hills. 

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These Armenians were defiantly different from the Armenians of 
Armenia. The Karabakh Armenians are highlanders, famous for their 
hospitality and heavy drinking. They have a highlander’s distrust of 
lowland Armenians, who often call them “ishak,” or “mule,” because 
they are so stubborn. Other Armenians find it hard to understand the 
thick Karabakh dialect, where the stress falls later in the word and 
whose vocabulary is strewn with Persian, Turkish, and Russian words. 
At dinner, many of the guests spoke Russian to one another—a legacy 
of life in Soviet Azerbaijan but also of traditional ties with Russia. In 
Stepanakert, someone had told me: “We Karabakhis hate the Armeni­
ans. We love the Russians, we love the Persians, but we hate the Arme­
nians.” A joke, of course, but with a dose of truth in it. 
Among Armenians, Karabakh has the reputation of being a place of 
refuge and the last line of defense against the Islamic east. This helped 
create a military tradition among the Karabakhis similar to that of the 
Scots in the British Empire. Among the Armenian warriors born here 
were two marshals of the Soviet Union, a clutch of heroes of the Soviet 
Union like Nelson Stepanian and even—so far from the sea—a Soviet 
admiral, Hovanes Isakov. Further back, Karabakh produced General 
Valerian Madatov, a tsarist general who fought Napoleon and, fighting 
against him, Rustam, the man who served as Napoleon’s manservant. 
Carried away by this military tradition, the Karabakhis have even 
appropriated as their own Napoleon’s great marshal and king of Na­
ples, Joachim Murat. I was repeatedly told that he was an Armenian, 
born in the Karabakhi village of Kerkijahan. Yet this is a myth—Murat’s 
biographers say he was in fact the son of a provincial innkeeper from 
the central French region of Guyenne. Kurban Said, the author of the 
great novel of the Caucasus, Ali and Nino, actually got there before me. 
His hero visits Shusha in 1914 and observes: “[The native nobles] never 
tired of sitting on the steps that led up to their doors, smoking their 
pipes and telling each other how many times the Russian Empire and 
the Czar himself had been saved by Karabagh generals and what horri­
ble fate would have overtaken them if their defense had been left to 
anyone else.”
2 
The Armenians would be surprised to learn that the Karabakh 
Azerbaijanis were famous warriors too. After the province was incor­
porated into the Russian empire in 1805, famous tall steeds from 
Karabakh carried the Azerbaijani cavalry of the Karabakh Regiment, 
one of four Muslim regiments serving in the tsar’s army. At first glance, 

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it may seem surprising that Azerbaijanis should have fought in the 
Russian army against the Ottoman Empire, but they were Shiites, fight­
ing against Sunnis, split by the great divide of Islam.
3 
In 1829, Alexan­
der Pushkin saw the “Karabakh regiment” in action, outside Kars, as it 
returned to camp with eight Turkish banners. He dedicated a poem to 
the young warrior Farhad-Bek, adjutant to the regimental commander: