A Lost Land Remembered - Travels in Artsakh 2015

 

Above is my bedroom wall. On the left, a map of Armenia with Artsakh from 2015. On the right, a map of Armenia as defined by the Treaty of Sevres, from 1920. Today, both maps are obsolete.

Thoughts on the Current Situation of Armenia and Artsakh 

First, here’s a song about it.

I am still coming to grips with the recent war that cost Artsakh most of its land and crippled Armenia. The Armenian genocide is best understood not as a singular event that occurred in 1915, but as an ongoing process that began when the Seljuk Turks invaded the area in the 1070s and continues to the present. When people think about genocides they think of the Holocaust, which was done very quickly, in one dramatic, horrific event. But many, maybe even most genocides, happen across centuries. It is slow, but methodical and carefully calculated. As it so happens, committing a complete genocide is harder than it sounds. Whenever the world is distracted enough, Turkey, and its partner Azerbaijan, take another step toward its completion. If the organizers of this genocide (who to be fair are not the regular citizens but their governments) have one virtue, it is patience. It will not end until Armenians are gone. There will never be peace. This war was the latest phase of the genocide. This is why it is ridiculous to tell Armenians to “get over” the genocide because it happened a long time ago. The genocide is ongoing. It has been going on for nearly a thousand years, and it is happening right now. Russia may have the power to put the process on pause, as it has done on and off for the past century, but for how long? As long as they deem it advantageous to do so, obviously. They don’t do it out of any sort of moral obligation. There are no morals involved in the way the world works. If no other greater power is going to put a stop to the genocidal process, as was completely demonstrated by the deafening silence from the international community during this most recent war, and Armenia can’t defend itself against Turkey, then Armenia may only last as long as Russia allows it to last. This is why Armenia must make itself useful to Russia in order to survive. The West isn’t going to lift a finger to help Armenia. At most they’ll shake their fists angrily at Turkey from far away. But they will do nothing. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, to be sure. 

 

Perhaps genocide is a typical human behavior. Dividing ourselves into warring tribes, trying to eliminate other tribes. Perhaps it dates back to when homo sapiens eliminated the Neanderthals and other now-extinct hominids. Humans survived because they were the most blood-thirsty and cruel of the hominids. They learned to fear and dehumanize their enemies, which made the killing easier. With the rest of the hominids gone, humanity turned on itself. Some of us grow past the dehumanization of anyone different from themselves and are able to shut it off when it creeps into their subconscious with some effort. But most do not. Racism and bigotry is a remnant from the days other hominids existed. This little hypothesis of mine is the only thing that makes sense to me when videos of Azeri soldiers mutilating Armenian prisoners of war, and even civilians, to their death, surface online. I cannot bring myself to watch such things, but knowing they exist is haunting enough to make me lose sleep. When you look at this all from the outside, as perhaps an alien from another world would look at it, and divorce nationalism from your thoughts, you see it for the madness that it truly is. Sometimes I envy the Americans around me, so caught up in their frivolous concerns, never having to worry about whether their country might not exist tomorrow. So naive and blissfully ignorant. Their security was accomplished through the genocide of Native Americans, of course. Meanwhile I get to have these thoughts going through my head. Whenever I think or write about something else (as I will soon on this blog, I promise), it is merely to distract myself from this existential dread. I am beginning to think perhaps those who do not have depression are just good at not thinking about the world around them and keeping themselves distracted, with their heads in the sand. I’m not very good at that. You might as well call excessive thinking a mental illness.

 

In the aftermath of the war, I have seen Armenians looking for someone to blame in all this. Some go after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Maybe it is his fault. Some go after the oligarchs who ruled before him. Maybe we should pin all the blame on them.  Maybe it’s both. I don’t know if I’m for or against Pashinyan myself, although I lean more towards being for him. But I don’t live in Armenia, so it doesn’t matter really. I will say that there isn’t a politician on Earth that I fully trust, though. Some, who I think see the bigger picture, see that everyone’s a little bit to blame. Perhaps there is validity in that, and we should each look at our own guilt and self-reflect. I lost a relative in the war; Hayk Mkrdchyan, a young man with too much life ahead of him to die. My family in America was able to put together some money to send over to his immediate family, which made me feel better. Like I had done something. But really, there wasn’t much I could do about this war. Maybe my fault in all this was choosing to return to America after my time in Armenia. I probably could have had a career there. My Masters degree in Creative Writing would actually mean something over there, unlike here. But, many people would have been upset with me if I made the decision to stay. In the end, I didn’t choose Armenia when I had the chance. I chose my loved ones and family. I would have felt some guilt no matter the choice I made, but I admit my fault. I sure didn’t go back because I prefer America, though. I would rather live in Armenia if it weren’t for my family. Although I would like to move to Armenia with my family one day, who knows when I will actually have the money to even do that. In 2015, I naively thought I would be back to visit Armenia in a couple years, but I barely ever even get to travel to visit family in California, let alone make trips to Armenia. Lack of time and money. My individual choice not to stay may not have amounted to much, but too many diasporans who could move to Armenia and unlike me actually have the means to, don’t. And too many native Armenians leave. Perhaps the wealthy diasporans have the same excuses I have. But if I were as wealthy as Cher or Serj Tankian, I'd bring my wife and son over to live in Armenia, and still have plenty of money to fly back to visit family in America once or twice a year. Anyway, you can blame a million different things, but the loss of this war is our collective shame. Even despite Turkey’s unexpected involvement (as I have heard, Armenia may have been able to repel an attack from Azerbaijan alone, but not with Turkey’s NATO-empowered army and Syrian mercenaries involved), it still didn’t have to be this way. It could have ended worse too, but it also could have ended a lot better.

Travels in Artsakh, 2015

The preceding rant may as well have been a blog entry all its own. I don’t really know who I am writing this blog entry for; if I really wanted to, I could try writing something for the Armenian Weekly again. But, perhaps I would rather have a smaller audience for this. Maybe it’s because of my distaste for online arguments. Let me instead share the pictures of my trip to Artsakh in 2015, and discuss the trip. To look back at my pictures from my trip to Artsakh in May of 2015 is heartbreaking now. To know that many of the buildings I saw are now in ruins, to know that many of the cities and monasteries I visited are now in the hands of Azerbaijan, and the history of the region will be cleansed and rewritten, to know that a lot of the people I met may now be homeless or dead. I will likely never be able to revisit some of these places. But, at the same time, I feel that reflecting on these photos and sharing them is something I must do. Part of the grieving process, perhaps. I must not forget the five days I spent in Artsakh. Free, independent Artsakh, from 1994 to 2020. For a tiny sliver of that time, I was there. I shared in its independence. It may have been a short five days I spent there, but it was an important five days of my life. Those days are even more important now than they felt when it happened. These pictures are evidence of what was there before. Lest the world forget. We live in a time when we can easily take photographs, unlike 1915. 

 

I went on a trip organized by Birthright Armenia. They were able to get us into places most normal tourists wouldn’t have been able to. It was a long bus ride from Yerevan, made longer by a stop at Tatev monastery in the Syunik province on the way (not that I’m complaining of course, that’s a worthy trip in and of itself). We arrived on May 8th, an important day in Artsakh, as the anniversary of the Armenian liberation of the city of Shushi in 1992. We had a dinner party at a fancy hotel in Shushi with some retired soldiers who fought in the war, and danced together after dinner. We then stayed with a host as their guests, almost a Bed and Breakfast kind of arrangement, in Shushi, which would be our base of operations as we traveled elsewhere in Artsakh. I myself stayed with a kindly old woman, who lived alone, having lost her family in Artsakh’s war of independence in the early 1990s. I will always remember the breakfasts she put together. Some of the most delicious food; the local cheese and honey was amazing, something I have never tasted before or since. I don’t know what’s become of her now. Now that Shushi is in Azeri hands. 

Shushi

I can’t leave. There was something else written around the corner. I thought I had a picture of it but I can’t find it. 

Stepanakert

The Land

A Visit to a Farm

A Village Winery

I wish I remembered the name of the village; then I would be able to tell if it was still in Artsakh’s current borders.

A vinyard

Downtown Stepanakert 

Gandzasar Monastery

A missile hit this wall in the war back in the 1990s.

Foggy Shushi

Ghazanchetsots Cathedral

A bombed university from the 1920s

I think this was in Stepanakert. The blatant disregard for copyright amused me, but you can get away with such things in unrecognized countries.

The Museum of Fallen Soldiers

Portraits of fallen soldiers.

A symbolic model of the gates of Shushi.

A wedding that never happened, because the groom died in the war. This display made me very emotional.

Stepanakert 

I recently saw a photo online of this very building, being repaired after the war. At least it still stands, as far as I know.

A portrait of famous Armenian composer Komitas.

The abandoned Stepanakert airport.

The famous statue, “We are our Mountains”.

No one ever takes pictures of the back of this statue, so I did.

The parking lot in front of the statue, also rarely photographed 

Shushi

On the last day in Artsakh, Birthright Armenia organized a hike around the gorges of Shushi. I was too tired to go, and I wanted some solitude. So I slept in. And then, I explored the streets of Shushi on my own, taking in its energy. A nice, peaceful and serene walk on a cool, foggy day. It just might be my favorite memory from the whole trip, because I finally got to break away from the group, do my own thing, and experience Artsakh in my own way.  It is something I am glad I did. Particularly now that Shushi has been taken by Azerbaijan.

Some Final Pictures 

The Armenia/Artsakh border. These flags likely aren’t here anymore.

Me in front of the statue, just to prove I was there.

A picture our group took at a military base we visited; one of the areas we got to go to that normal tourists wouldn’t. We also got to see the ruins of the city of Aghdam, destroyed during the war, and were even taken into a border trench. This was a relatively safe stretch of the border. But I can say I have been to an active warzone.

A picture of me wandering the area around Gandzasar. When I see these pictures again, it takes me back to my wanderings in Artsakh...which are now only a memory. I was there once, and a part of me will be there always.