Sumgait: An unendurable legacy

On a previous visit to Azerbaijan in 2014, I had travelled from Baku north-westwards to Sheki, and from there on to Tbilisi in Georgia (see entry of 24 March 2015). Along the way I visited towns and villages that illustrated the diversity of the country’s history and heritage, the remnants of peoples and civilisations that had been swept away by the moving sands of history, the migrations of peoples, by conquest or assimilation. A notable recent example had been the abrupt obliteration of the Armenian presence in Azerbaijan amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and the conflict between the nascent post-Soviet states of Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. On this occasion, in February 2020, I travelled to Sumgait, a short distance up the coast from Baku. The town had become notorious for the “Sumgait pogrom” in February1988, when a rampaging Azeri mob had hunted down Armenian residents, murdered them and raped them, forcing the rest of the Armenian community to flee.

The Lonely Planet guide had a very brief entry for Sumgait, describing the city as a “dystopian nightmare”, referring to its Soviet-era chemical industry. Perhaps the most uncomplimentary entry in a guidebook I had ever seen. Sumgait is indeed rather a drab city, but its depiction by the Lonely Planet seems harsh. Long, broad avenues lined with apartment buildings, typical of many Soviet towns, do little to inspire. Perhaps it was even more grim in the Soviet period. But there is a park, and monuments have been erected to give the town a civic identity. There is a long sandy beach that could indeed have been much better framed by more imaginative town planners than the architects of Soviet Sumgait. We found nice places to eat. Notably a restaurant overlooking the beach, where we ate qutab, a speciality of Sumgait, delicious pastries served with a variety of fillings, including meat, herbs, cheese and pumpkin.

Peace Dove, Sumgait

The city’s most famous monument, dating from Soviet times, is the Peace Dove sculpture, a swirling abstract representation of a dove that is the symbol of the town. Given the 1988 events for which Sumgait is famous, the monument seems grimly ironic. In the late 1980s, Sumgait had a population of over 220,000, of whom around 17,000 were ethnic-Armenians. The backdrop of the tragedy of the Armenians of Sumgait was the escalating conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenians had long been aggrieved at the inclusion of the Armenian-majority province of Karabakh in Azerbaijan. As the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, loosened the Soviet regime, Armenians were emboldened to push for its transfer to Armenia. That February 1988, Armenians began demonstrating in Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital, Stepanakert, for their province to be joined with Armenia, and the province’s Supreme Soviet voted to that effect.

Disquiet among Azeris in Sumgait was aggravated by inflammatory statements by some Azerbaijani officials as well as stories told by Azeris from Armenia who claimed they had been beaten and forced out. As demonstrations erupted in Sumgait, some prominent local Azerbaijanis tried to calm the crowds, telling them that the rumours were false. But this message did not go down well. Others called for Armenians to be expelled or killed. Speeches ended with the cry “Death to Armenians.” Violence broke out on 27 February, as Azeri mobs entered apartment buildings seeking out Armenians. Unspeakable acts of savagery were carried out, including gang rapes. Some bodies were so mutilated as to be unrecognisable. Thousands of Armenians were given refuge by Azeri or Russian neighbours, but notably, the local police did nothing. Interior ministry troops tried to restore order on 28 February, but were attacked by the mobs. Some of their armoured personnel carriers were turned over or put out of action with Molotov cocktails. Finally, on the 29th, armed forces with tanks entered the city, imposed martial law and escorted surviving Armenian residents to safety. The official tally of victims released by the Soviet Prosecutor’s office counted 32 dead, of whom 26 were Armenians and six Azeris. Armenian sources claimed numbers in the hundreds.

Trials were held in Moscow. While some of the perpetrators received heavy sentences, many were treated lightly, being sentenced for mere hooliganism. While Armenians were dissatisfied that the main instigators had not been punished, many Azeris felt the punishments were too severe, and even campaigned for the release of the “heroes of Sumgait.” For Armenians the pogrom was quickly linked to the 1915 genocide, and a cross stone commemorating the violence was placed at the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan. But among Azeris a conspiracy theory gained currency that the pogrom had in fact been contrived by Armenians in order to discredit Azerbaijan. In Azerbaijan the pogrom is euphemistically referred to as the “Sumgait events.” There is something particularly distasteful about blaming the atrocities dealt upon the Armenian population of Sumgait on the victims themselves, and the failure of Azerbaijan to face up to this dark moment in its recent history is as shaming as the event itself. The massacre in Sumgait was followed by pogroms against the Armenians in other Azerbaijani cities, in Kirovabad (today known as Ganza), Azerbaijan’s second city, in November 1988, and in Baku in January 1990.

For most Azeris, the narrative is about the heroism and sacrifices of their own people, the hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis driven out of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding districts captured by the Armenians in the war of the early 1990s. Outside a school in Sumgait I saw a memorial to eight former pupils, young men who had been killed in the fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh, “our martyrs” my guide told me, a young woman who had not yet been born in 1988.

On a hill overlooking the city and the Caspian Sea in Baku, the Martyr’s Alley commemorates the Azeri dead of the fist Nagorno-Karabakh war in the 1990s, as well as the victims of the “Black January” crackdown by Soviet forces which followed the pogrom against the city’s Armenian population in January 1990 and mounting disorder in the city amid demonstrations against communist rule. More than 130 people were killed during the Soviet crackdown, which succeeded in largely uniting Azerbaijanis against communist rule and strengthening demands for independence. The Martyr’s Alley had first been established as a cemetery for Muslim victims of the so-called March Events of 1918, during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution, when thousands were killed. Upon coming to power, the Bolsheviks destroyed the cemetery and replaced it with an amusement park, but after the end of the Soviet Union the site was reinstated as a burial site for national heroes. Lines of graves under the trees, many with fresh flowers, and pictures of the young men they contain, mostly casualties of the Karabakh war. At one end of the Alley, overlooking the sea, is the tall domed eternal flame memorial.

The Martyr’s Alley reminds us of the thousands of Azeri casualties of the conflicts with Armenia, not just the young soldiers killed in the war, but the hundreds of thousands of Azeris driven out of Nagorno-Karabakh and the territory surrounding it that was seized by the Armenians. Atrocities had also been carried out against Azeris, notably the massacre by Armenian troops of civilians fleeing the village on Khojaly during the first Karabakh war, in February 1992. Both sides focus on the sufferings and tragedies of their own people, and the crimes committed against them, often barely even recognising that people on the other side were also wronged. What hope that one day Azerbaijan might acknowledge the massacres of Armenians in Sumgait, Baku and Kirovabad, and that Armenia might acknowledge that there was no possible justification for the killing of civilians fleeing Khojaly? More than a hundred years after the Armenian genocide in 1915, such a prospect unfortunately looks far off, and the wounds of conflict look likely to remain open.

Nagorno-Karabakh

I arrived in Yerevan in September 2017, in the warmth of late-summer. I had visited Armenia twice before, in 2006 and 2013. During those visits, the tragic past of the Armenian people had persistently loomed. The 1915 genocide in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, and the deep wound left by the loss of territory in eastern Turkey that Armenians consider rightly to be theirs. And the more recent tragedies in the wars over Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian-inhabited enclave seized from neighbouring Azerbaijan as the Soviet Union crumbled. This time I wanted to visit Karabakh, to try to understand better the meaning of this remote, sparsely-inhabited mountainous region for Armenians.

From Azerbaijan’s perspective, visiting Karabakh was illegal. I would be unlawfully entering Azerbaijan’s territory. When I had visited Azerbaijan in 2014, there was a question on the visa application form as to whether I had ever visited Karabakh? The answer, at the time, was no. Azerbaijan has adopted a similar policy to Georgia and Ukraine with respect to their lost territories in Abkhazia, Crimea and the rebel-territories in Donbas. While entering those territories from within Georgia or Ukraine was permissible, crossing the border from Russia was an offence. Several foreign politicians and performing artists have been banned from visiting Ukraine after they illegally entered Crimea.

The Nagorno-Karabakh border

Since a referendum in February 2017, Karabakh had taken the name Artsakh, for which an ancient Armenian lineage was claimed. I joined a group of diaspora Armenians, led by an enthusiastic guide from Yerevan. Most of them had originally come from Iran or Syria, but now lived in the United States or Canada. We needed visas to enter Karabakh, but while these could be obtained at the Artsakh embassy in Yerevan, our guide picked them up for us at the foreign ministry in Stepanakert, the territory’s capital. Crossing into Karabakh, the border was marked by a sign welcoming us to the would-be state. A little further on there was a border post, with two flags flying, one of Armenia, the other of Artsakh. The Artsakh flag is the same red, blue and orange tricolour as that of Armenia, but with the addition of a jagged white line running from top to bottom. Our guide told me this symbolised that on both sides of the line, the border, were Armenian lands.

During the journey, our guide was most insistent on the name Artsakh. She fervently spoke of the determination of Armenians to hang on to what she saw as their ancestral territories. My diaspora Armenian companions responded with applause. It was not just the territory of Soviet-era Nagorno-Karabakh, or mountainous Karabakh, that she referred to, but to the whole territory that Armenian forces had occupied during the war of the early 1990s, including lands around the former autonomous province. The Soviet-era autonomous province did not even share a border with Armenia, and was completely surrounded by Azerbaijan. We crossed into Karabakh via the Lachin corridor, whose capture by Armenian forces during the war had established a vital territorial bridge between Armenia and Karabakh. But for our guide even all the captured territory was not enough. There was still territory that needed to be ‘liberated’ from Azerbaijani control, she asserted.

Ever since the war in the 1990s, there have been on-off talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan to look for a settlement of their longstanding dispute. They have never got very far. At different times, various concessions have been discussed. Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the first president of independent Armenia, advocated a phased solution, under which Armenia would hand back most of the captured territory around Karabakh, and agreement over Karabakh itself would be deferred. In return, Azerbaijani and Turkish blockades of Armenia would be lifted, aiding Armenia’s economic recovery. But Ter-Petrosyan did not manage to bring his countrymen with him, and he was ousted from power in 1998. Another idea was a mooted territorial swap, by which, in return for giving up Karabakh, Azerbaijan would receive territory in the south of Armenia, to give it a land bridge to its territory of Nakhichevan, sandwiched between Armenia and Turkey. But our guide had no such notions of compromise. Armenians were determined to hold on to all the territory.

Karabakh is a sparsely populated enclave. While the makeup of its population had fluctuated over the centuries, following its takeover by the Russian Empire from Persia early in the 19th century, its Armenian population was boosted by migrants from lands to the south that remained in Persia, while many Muslims left. By the end of the Soviet Union, the population of the enclave was around three-quarters Armenian. To this day there is much controversy over the decision in 1921 by Stalin, the Bolshevik Commissar for Nationalities, to grant Karabakh to Azerbaijan, albeit as an autonomous territory with an Armenian majority. Armenians note bitterly that the decision nearly went their way. But the Bolsheviks were swayed by their desire to establish sound relations with the new Turkish republic to hand the territory to Azerbaijan, according to the wish of Ataturk. To Armenians, this appears one more example of the Turkish determination to wipe all trace of them from their historic lands. After losing so much territory and so many people during and after the First World War, having now won the war over Karabakh in the early 1990s, they are determined to hold on to their gains.

National Assembly and Union of Artsakh Freedom Fighters

Stepanakert is a small town of a little over 50,000 inhabitants, down from 70,000 before the war with Azerbaijan. It suffered severe bombardment during the war, when rockets rained down from nearby Shusha (Shushi in Armenian), which overlooks the town. The population was forced to seek shelter in basements, and many left. But there is little sign of that now. With the help of diaspora money, Stepanakert has been rebuilt. And it has been rebuilt to be a capital of a state. Karabakh may be small, with a population of around 150,000, but the presidential palace in Stepanakert might grace the capital of a large country. Across the main square is the newly built parliament building, and the headquarters of the Union of Artsakh Freedom Fighters.

This impressive new town centre appears to be an expression of confidence in the future of Artsakh. On the outskirts of Stepanakert stands a monument that symbolises the enduring presence of Armenians in Karabakh. Built in 1967, the ‘We Are Our Mountains’ monument, otherwise known as ‘Grandma and Grandpa’, depicts an Armenian man and woman in traditional attire. Hewn from rock, it represents the steadfastness of the Armenian people of the highlands of Karabakh.

We Are Our Mountains

Stepanakert also holds reminders of the heavy price Karabakh’s Armenian population paid for their victory. The Artsakh State Museum contains artefacts going back to pre-history, as well as photographs and exhibits depicting traditional Armenian life and handicrafts. It also has displays about the recent war. Especially poignant is the Museum of Fallen Soldiers, in a modest little building tucked out of sight in a backyard close to the central square. As well as exhibits of weapons and other memorabilia, the walls of the museum are covered with photographs of the mostly young men, and a few women, who died in the fighting. But still, it is a celebration of victory. In one room there is an Azerbaijan flag on the floor, apparently captured in Shusha. It seems to invite people to trample on it.

We visited Shusha the following day. A short drive up into the mountains above Stepanakert, its strategic importance is clear. Perched on a clifftop, it had repeatedly defied would-be attackers. Shusha’s origins are disputed, but in the middle of the 18th century it became the capital of the Karabakh Khanate, under Persian suzerainty. Following the region’s incorporation into the Russian Empire in the early 19th century, many Armenians settled in the town, and by the time of the Russian revolution they made up slightly over half of the inhabitants. But the town retained its importance for Azeris, and was known as a cultural centre. In the struggle for territory at the end of the First World War, the Armenians of Shusha were among the victims. In March 1920, Azerbaijani forces sacked the Armenian quarter of the town, massacring several hundred and expelling the rest. Shusha’s much diminished population (thousands of Azeris left as well) was predominantly Azeri throughout the Soviet period, an Azeri centre in mainly Armenian Karabakh. In a daring assault in May 1992, Shusha was captured by Armenian forces. We stopped on the road from Stepanakert to Shusha to see one of two tanks that the Armenian attackers used in the attack, now standing as a monument to the victory.

Shusha ruins

The Armenian capture of Shusha relieved Stepanakert from bombardment. But it also brought a new tragedy, the expulsion of the Azeri population and the widespread destruction of the once fine town. Almost all the destruction was caused after the town’s capture. It ensured that Azeris would not be able to return to their homes. I took a walk around Shusha. While there has been a lot of rebuilding, much of the town remains in ruins. The population, which had reached over 15,000, mostly Azeris, at the onset of the conflict (it had been over 40,000 before the First World War), had recovered to getting on for 5,000 by 2015, all Armenians. At a high point in the town, Ghazanchetsots Cathedral has been restored.

Mosque under reconstruction, Shusha

One of the ruined mosques in Shusha was in the process of being restored when I visited. However, this was not necessarily a portent of reconciliation with Azerbaijan. Iranian experts were invited to carry out the restoration. In his book on the Caucasus, Thomas de Waal described how Armenians and Azeris have carried their war over territory into the realms of history, as each has sought to assert prior claims. Thus nationalist Armenian historians denied the historical presence of Azerbaijan. Shia Muslims speaking the Azeri dialect of Turkish had lived in Karabakh and in Armenia for centuries, and Muslim-ruled Khanates had held sway over much of the southern Caucasus. But as the name ‘Azerbaijan’ was not commonly used until the 20th century, Armenians denied there was any Azerbaijani history in the region. Thus Armenians claimed that mosques in Shusha and in Yerevan were Persian, not Azerbaijani. Our guide told me in Shusha that Azerbaijan objected to the restoration of the mosque by Iranians, as if it were a part of the Persian rather than the Azerbaijani heritage.

Blue Mosque, Yerevan

I visited the one remaining mosque in Yerevan before my trip to Karabakh. Yerevan had been a small, predominantly Muslim town before the incorporation of the southern Caucasus into the Russian Empire. Baku and Tbilisi had both been more important Armenian population centres. Yerevan’s Blue Mosque had been built in 1765, and, following the end of the Soviet period, in the 1990s, it too was restored by Iran. Yerevan’s Iranian information centre is at the same site. As well as a religious centre, it is also an Iranian cultural centre, and offers Persian language courses.

Another mosque that has been a subject of contention is in the ruined town of Agdam, north-east of Stepanakert. Agdam was an overwhelmingly Azeri town, situated outside of the territory of Soviet-era Nagorno-Karabakh. Early in the war, it had been used as a military base by the Azerbaijanis. In July 1993, Armenian forces captured it, sending the entire Azeri population fleeing eastwards. While the town was captured mostly intact, it was afterwards wrecked by people seeking booty. As in Shusha, the destruction meant that Azeris would have nothing to return to. We drove alongside the ruined town, now a ghostly place, almost no building left standing, gradually being reclaimed by nature. This was surely an uncomfortable sight for Armenians, testimony to the injustices suffered by Azeris, a challenge to the notions of Armenian triumph and righteousness. Our guide told us Agdam had been a notorious centre of criminal activity, a criminal town. Thomas de Waal described Agdam as a black-market centre. No doubt it was so. But it is a big step from that to declaring a whole town to be criminal, as if in some kind of justification for its inhabitants’ fate at the hands of Armenian conquering forces. Our guide’s characterisation of the tragedy of Agdam left a distinctly bad taste in the mouth. The mosque in Agdam is still standing. Our guide stressed that Armenians respected religious buildings, although visitors had previously reported that the building had become derelict, and that its floor had been strewn with cow dung. More recently it had been cleaned up, and Karabakh’s authorities announced it was being renovated.

Gandzasar Monastery

Christian churches have also been the subjects of fierce historical dispute between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Azeri historians have sought to portray churches that had served the Armenian community in Azerbaijan as having been, in origin, Caucasian Albanian. The Caucasian Albanians had, before the arrival of Islam, ruled a territory that included much of present-day Azerbaijan. Little trace of them remains today. Probably many of them converted to Islam and were assimilated by the Turkic Azeris, while others who retained their Christian faith came under the sway of the Armenian Apostolic Church. But Azeris see them as part of their heritage. The Christian churches around Azerbaijan are for them Caucasian Albanian churches that had been usurped by Armenians. We visited Gandzasar monastery, north-west of Stepanakert. Monasteries are the of glories of Armenia. During this trip, I visited several in Armenia itself. Gandzasar, with the 13th century church of St John the Baptist, is a fine example, and important evidence for Armenians of their historical presence in Karabakh. In 2015, a manuscript centre was opened at Gandzasar, a museum and library containing old illuminated manuscripts and early printed books. Siting such an important cultural repository in Karabakh was another affirmation of the permanence of the Armenian presence in the region, in the past and the future.

Close to Agdam is the archaeological site of Tigranakert, which was discovered in 2005 and is in the process of being excavated. Armenians assert that this is one of four cities of that name honouring Tigran the Great, who ruled a vast Armenian empire in the 1st century BC. For Armenian nationalists, the boundaries of that empire, including swathes of today’s eastern Turkey, remain legitimate. The site of Tigranakert in the territory of Artsakh (but outside Soviet-era Nagorno-Karabakh) is an important affirmation for Armenians of their historical right to this land. Our guide thanked God that the site had been found while the territory was under Armenian control, as she was sure that if the Azeris had found it, they would have claimed an altogether different history for the town. Thus the history of archaeological sites, as that of mosques and churches, has become a tussle between competing nationalisms. Walking through the site’s museum, I could not see any concrete evidence for this being Tigranakert rather than some other town. I raised the point with one of the researchers who worked there. The answer was essentially that it made sense that this should be Tigranakert. Maybe it is. But when history is misused for modern political ends, truth is too often lost in the murk.

Karabakh, or Artsakh, remains precarious. De jure, the territory remains part of Azerbaijan. Even Armenia has not officially recognised its independence. What are the chances that a change of borders based on force and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people will be recognised? The viability of this remote land with its tiny population is open to question. Efforts have been made to boost the population. A native of Karabakh, Levon Hairapetyan, who had made a huge fortune as an energy sector tycoon in Russia, sponsored hundreds of mass-weddings in Karabakh, and became the godfather of hundreds of children in an effort to promote population growth. Hairapetyan died in a Russian prison in October 2017, shortly after my visit, where he faced charges of embezzlement. But in his native Karabakh, he was a hero. He had invested huge sums in his home village of Vank, close to Gandzasar. As we approached Karabakh, in the strategic Lachin corridor, I saw an attempt to draw Armenians to settle in the disputed territory. Newly-built houses built in rows, which our guide told me had been built for Armenian refugees from war-torn Syria. It looked a barren, lifeless place, just houses with no sign of how new settlers were supposed to make a living there.

Armenians are determined to hold on to this land, dependent on support from Yerevan and from the Armenian diaspora. After 25 years of economic blockade by Azerbaijan and Turkey, they appear willing to continue to pay the price for it. Even the most reasonable, most moderate Armenians and Azeris practically never agree on Karabakh. And by no means all of them are at all reasonable or moderate. Most Armenians see little reason to compromise over a land they see as rightfully theirs. For now, they think they have won. But a small, isolated country, in a hostile region, they cannot but feel uneasy.

Heritage and identity in Azerbaijan

While the large majority (over 90 per cent) of Azerbaijan’s population are Azeris, the country’s heritage is diverse and complex. Like so much of the Eurasian continent, the modern population of the country has been formed by waves of migration, layer upon layer each making its contribution and leaving its mark, often assimilating those that were already there, and in turn being assimilated themselves by the next wave. The Azerbaijani language is part of the Turkic family, and is close to Turkish; the two languages are mutually intelligible. Turkic speakers first migrated into the region during the 11th century. Before then, the territory that now comprises Azerbaijan had been inhabited by people speaking a variety of Caucasian and Indo-European languages, some of whose traces can still be found today. Religious and cultural influences included Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam; Persia and Byzantium.

Main street, Lahic

Travelling north-westwards from Baku, I left the main road at Ismailli, and boarded a rickety old marshrutka for the journey up to the mountain village of Lahic (or Lahij). This picturesque little village, nestling among the mountains, has become famous for its handicrafts, notably metalwork and leather, and also for its language, Lahiji, a dialect of Persian. Persian influence in the region goes back millennia. This little outpost of less than one thousand inhabitants in Lahic, plus a few hundred more in surrounding hamlets, has held on for centuries in the remote mountain fastness. But what chance do they have of surviving in the modern world of mass education, television and the internet? My genial host was optimistic. They all speak Azerbaijani (he also spoke Russian and English), and he seemed confident they would continue to speak their own language among themselves. Yet while I stayed there, his wife’s relatives were visiting. The children did not speak Lahiji, and conversation was in Azerbaijani. As people travel and marry outside the community, the already vanishingly small pool of people who speak their native tongue will surely shrink. As to their identity? My host was clear; they were Azeri. They just spoke a different language. I wandered along the stone-paved streets, looking into the workshops, with their pots and pans and leather goods. The houses are built with thin layers of wood in the stone walls, as a protection against earthquakes. The village has become a popular destination for Azeri weekend trippers, who have their photos taken in traditional mountain costumes. Lahic’s isolation is over, and the distinctiveness of its people and language seems unlikely to survive much longer.

Back in Ismailli, I continued my journey north-westwards. There was no bus from there to my next destination, Oguz. My host in Lahic had told me I might be able to flag down a bus coming from Baku, but that I could not count on it. But I was in luck. I asked a man for directions, and he told me that in ten minutes he would be driving to Gabala, a town on the way to Oguz, and he would give me a lift. From Gabala I could pick up a marshrutka for Oguz. So a short journey, trying to communicate in my broken Russian with the cheerful driver. Oguz was perhaps a strange place to choose to stop. There were two or three hotels there, the best of which was fully booked. My main reason for choosing to stay in Oguz was the presence of a well-preserved church, now a museum, which is described in guidebooks as having been Caucasian Albanian.

Among the peoples that make up Azerbaijan’s heritage, the Caucasian Albanians, no relation to the Albanians in the Balkans, are a cause of particular controversy even today. For centuries, prior to the arrival of Islam, they ruled an area encompassing much of present-day Azerbaijan and part of Dagestan, to the north (in the present-day Russian Federation). Gabala was their capital. In a region beset by national conflicts, the heritage of the Caucasian Albanians has been a matter of fierce dispute.

Nic

While staying in Oguz, I made the short trip to the village of Nic (Nij), halfway back along the road to Gabala. Nic is home to the Udi minority, whose language is believed to be a direct descendent of the principal language of the Caucasian Albanians. Just a few thousand strong now, they have retained their linguistic and cultural distinctiveness, as well as their adherence to the Christian religion. I visited a tumbledown church in the centre of the village, with trees sprouting out of the roof. The cavernous interior, with its dirt floor, was evidently little used, but there were some votive candles on the altar, indicating that some continued to pray there. Over the entrance was a plaque, giving the date of the church as 1890. The plaque was in Armenian, indicating the church’s adherence to the Armenian Apostolic Church. Most Caucasian Albanians who had remained Christian after the arrival of Islam gradually assimilated as Armenians. The Udi clung on to their language and heritage, but as the church in Nic bore witness, their religious needs had been met in the Armenian church. Perhaps there had not been an Armenian priest there for many years.

The absence of Armenians in today’s Azerbaijan, where they had until the break-up of the Soviet Union and the terrible war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, been a substantial minority, has left a raw wound, as had the expulsion of Azeris from Karabakh and surrounding areas of Azerbaijan occupied by Armenian forces. Signs of the historical presence of Armenians jar with the official version of Azerbaijan’s history promoted by the regime. Yet, as Thomas de Waal pointed out in his excellent book on The Caucasus, Baku had a stronger Armenian heritage than Yerevan before the population upheavals of Russian and Soviet rule. I had visited an Armenian church in central Baku, ringed by a stout fence, its entrance blocked off. There are almost no more Armenians left to use it anyway. Oguz was called Vartashen until 1991, when its name was changed in a bid to eradicate the heritage of the departed Armenian population. The museum church, now labelled as Caucasian Albanian, had surely served the town’s erstwhile Armenians. Oguz does, however, have a handsome, well maintained synagogue.

Kish

From Oguz, I continued north-westwards to Sheki. Close-by Sheki is the mountain village of Kish, which is known especially for its church, which is thought to date from around the 12th century. A beautiful little chapel, it was restored in 2000-03 by a Norwegian-funded project. Azerbaijan has particular links with Norway, notably owing to the rather eccentric claims by the adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, of Kon-Tiki fame, that the roots of the Norwegian people were in Azerbaijan, and that Norwegians and Azeris shared a common ancestry. He based his claims on the similarities between cave paintings in the two countries, as well as Norwegian mythology, which he believed pointed to a Caucasian origin. The church is now a museum, and among the displayed texts about the history of the church, and the links between Kish and Norway, is one expounding Heyerdahl’s theory.

This church also could not escape the controversies about the Caucasian Albanian heritage. I chatted with a lady who runs a café opposite the church and doubles as a tour guide for English speaking visitors. While Armenians had worshipped there in more recent times, she vehemently denied the Armenian heritage of the place. The Armenians had taken it over only in the 19th century, she said, and had trashed the documents demonstrating the Caucasian Albanian origins of this and other churches. This is part of ‘our heritage’ she hotly asserted, meaning Azerbaijan’s, her indignation at the perceived Armenian usurpation of her country’s past boiling over. Some have asserted that there were Udi speakers in Kish when the region was taken over by imperial Russia at the start of the 19th century. Perhaps they were subsequently assimilated as Armenians; perhaps there had been Armenians there already; perhaps other Armenians had migrated there from elsewhere. I did not have enough information to resolve these conundrums. Complicating matters further is the claim that the church had originally been Georgian. Surely the clearest conclusion to all this is that in the shifting sands of Caucasian history, no one people can lay an exclusive claim to the heritage of the Caucasian Albanians or the remains of their once great civilisation.

Sheki palace

Sheki itself also has a notable heritage, and it is in the process of being spruced up, its monuments renovated for the increasing numbers of visitors. Sheki’s origins go back to antiquity, and it had been one of the most important towns of Caucasian Albania. But it was moved to its present position only in the 1770s, following a devastating flood at the nearby earlier site. The town was the capital of the Sheki Khanate, in its day one of the most important of the Caucasian Khanates. Its glory is the Khan’s palace. Built as a summer palace, it was restored in the 1950s and 60s, and again in 2002-04. In size, it is relatively modest, and not particularly palatial. But its splendour is in its décor, placing it among the finest and most beautiful buildings I have visited. Stained-glass windows known as shebake are formed of a delicate lattice work made out of wood, put together without nails or glue, and fitted with coloured glass in geometric patterns. The craftsmanship is superb, and like nothing else I had seen before. The interior walls are decorated with intricate paintings of flowers, birds, hunting scenes and battles. In the palace it is an enchanted world of harmony and beauty, so appealing in the art and architecture of the Islamic world, whose vision of paradise, unlike the pomp and bombast of so much western architecture, is of quiet harmony and simplicity.

Tradition and Modernity in Baku

I arrived in Baku in the morning, tired and dirty after a long day at Kyiv airport and a night-time flight. Flying up from Odessa early the previous day, my onward flight to Baku was cancelled, and I was re-scheduled on a later flight. But then came the news of the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine that afternoon, and all flights heading eastwards were delayed. I sat in the airport departures area, struggling to communicate with the other three Baku-bound transit passengers, and texting my friend in Odessa about the horrifying news. But eventually we got under way. Do you like the airport, my young Azeri travelling companion asked me when we arrived at the shiny modern terminal building? Very nice, I replied. The city too, he added.

The Maiden's Tower, Baku

Baku is indeed a fine looking city, at least in the city centre. Further out, it resembles a vast building site, with clouds of dust whipped up by the strong winds for which the city is notorious. For Baku has been thoroughly revamped and reinvented in recent years, oil money poured into the transformation of the former Soviet town. Swathes of Soviet-era apartment buildings have been cut down. The old city centre has in part survived the changes of the 20th century. Wandering in the old walled city, narrow, shady streets overhung with balconies retain their charm. But it is quite different from so many other old Muslim towns, such as one sees in Central Asia, with the dusty streets of windowless walls hiding the secret lives of the families behind them. In Baku’s old town the houses are open to the world, with windows and balconies. It is an eclectic mixture, reflecting Azerbaijan’s complex history, influenced by east and west. Previously part of Persia, modern-day Azerbaijan was conquered by Imperial Russia in the early 19th century. The city centre also boasts impressive mansions built with the oil wealth of the early 20th century.

The tension between Baku’s eastern roots and western influences was poignantly portrayed in Kurban Said’s marvellous novel ‘Ali and Nino’. Coming from a wealthy Baku Jewish family, the author moved to Germany at the time of the Bolshevik revolution, and converted to Islam. The hero of the novel, Ali, is a sophisticated product of Russian education, speaking French and English, and with a modern, educated bride, Nino. But Ali is also the scion of a notable Persian Azeri family, and is drawn to his eastern heritage.

Old town and flame towers, Baku

Baku also boasts interesting modern architecture. Beyond the old city, the wavy, pointy tips of the flame towers shimmer and flick at the sky. But the iconic building of Baku is the mysterious, bewildering Maiden’s tower. No one knows for sure for what purpose it was built? Only that its shape, with the long projection jutting out from its cylindrical core, is unique and unfathomable. It appears to have been built in the 12th century, although its foundations may date back several centuries earlier. Popular legend attributes its name to the story of a King’s daughter who threw herself to her death from the tower rather than marry an unloved suitor. Another explanation links the name ‘virgin’ to its never having been taken by force. Some experts think it may have been designed as an astronomical observatory, although it also for a time formed part of the city’s defences.

Baku’s story for the past 150 years has been dominated by oil. Vast fortunes were made here, for the Nobel brothers and the Rothschilds among others. The young Stalin cut his revolutionary teeth as an agitator among the oil workers. Hitler’s drive against Stalingrad was aimed towards the oil wells of Baku, which he considered critical to the German war effort. In the middle of the 20th century almost half the world’s oil production came from Baku. While the city’s wells contribute far less proportionately nowadays, oil has again been central to the country’s efforts to rebuild itself since independence and the disastrous war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s.

Absheron peninsula

Much of today’s production is offshore, from rigs in the Caspian. But the land around Baku, on the Absheron peninsula, is cluttered with wells, the derricks like some kind of giant, demented birds bobbing their heads up and down, stretching for miles across the flat, dust-blown landscape, pecking away at the oil-soaked earth. It is a forlorn and hideous scene.

For thousands of years oil has oozed, and gas has seeped out of the ground on the Absheron peninsula. In places, once ignited, the ground literally burns. At Yanar Dag (Burning Mountain), a short bus ride out of Baku, flames lick the blackened sandstone of a ten-metre long strip of hillside. It is said it was accidentally ignited by the dropped cigarette of a careless shepherd in the 1950s. Not far away, at the Baku suburb of Surakhani, is the temple of fire, or ‘Ateshgah’. Thought to have been built in the 17th century, it consists of a courtyard, with an altar in the middle, and cells around the perimeter where holy men once lived. On the altar, a fire burns. The shrine was once a Hindu place of worship, and has also been a place of pilgrimage for Zoroastrians, followers of the pre-Islamic religion of Persia. Some have speculated that the site may have been a Zoroastrian place of worship much earlier. The fires at the shrine used to be fuelled by natural gas vents of the type that proliferated around the Absheron peninsula. But the commercial exploitation of the gas wells caused the flames to go out. They are now fuelled by the Baku mains supply.

Ateshgah temple

As in the time of Ali and Nino, modern Baku still has a face to the west and a face to the east. The city centre, outside the old-town walls, has a modern brash feel. On the central square, a statue of a sassy young woman in jeans and a skimpy top holds an umbrella in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. In cafes and bars around the square perimeter evening revellers sip cold beer and tuck into kebabs and pizza. Yet it was Ramadan when I visited, and at restaurants away from the city centre tables were prepared well in advance for the diners who would sit in front of their plates waiting for the signal that it was time to break the day’s fast. Conservatism and modernity exist side by side.