Letter from Karabakh. Quarrels in stone

[HOB]

SECTION: Arts, Books and Sport; Pg. 95

HEADLINE: Letter from Karabakh. Quarrels in stone

The Economist

November 8, 1997, U.S. Edition

GANDZASAR

History and identity in Nagorno-Karabakh are shifting concepts

On the drum of a famous Armenian church two bearded benefactors,

squatting oriental-style with their legs folded beneath them, hold aloft models of a church. It is a touching image of pride in what they have built. Who were they? Very recently, men were fighting over this question.

The church at Gandzasar (see picture) is built on an outcrop looking over the central valley in the north of Nagorno-Karabakh. When the woods below are gilded with autumn colours, it is a breathtaking spot, as though you are floating in space. But the situation is also strategic. As recently as 1992 a battle was fought here between Azerbaijanis and Armenians for control of disputed territory in a war the Armenians eventually won. Sitting on the churchyard wall Artur Agaranyan, a soldier-turned-deacon, describes with pride how they fought off the attackers from the opposite hill. The church at Gandzasar, finished in 1238, illustrates how the Armenians rolled their secular, religious and military life all into one. Made of two connected parts, it is the size of a large parish church. The western section, a kind of nave, is a fine example of a gavit, a dark and bare chamber with stalactite carvings in the vault that served as a burial-place-cum-assembly-hall, a space for worldly business.

The eastern part is the sanctuary, a spiritual inner chamber, its gloom now lit by clutches of candles. The outer facets of the dome express the union of the two spheres.

Those oriental stone potentates holding up the model churches are

probably Hasan Jalalian, who built the church, and his son Vakhtang. The Jalalian family were as often bishops as princes at Gandzasar; when it came to defending their hilltop against invaders or fighting their neighbours, they were also generals. Karabakh, a Turkic-Persian compound meaning "Black Garden" because of its rich soil (the Armenians call the region Artsakh), is also fertile ground for myth-making and the two combatant sides have fallen into a somewhat grotesque argument about who lived here first. The Azerbaijanis point to a massive influx of Armenians after Russia annexed the region in 1813 to suggest that their enemies are recent interlopers.

But how can this be squared with all the old medieval churches like

Gandzasar?

Well, say historians in Baku, up until the 19th century the church at

Gandzasar was the seat of one of Christendom's more obscure bishoprics, the "catholicosate of Albania". In the first millennium, Albania was not only a Balkan country but also a realm in the eastern Caucasus. Those sculpted men who built the church and hundreds of others like it were not Armenians at all, the Baku scholars have argued, but Albanians. And the Albanians, they add, were the ancestors of the Azerbaijanis.

This is nonsense. According to most historians, the Albanians, a

Caucasian people first recorded by the Romans, simply disappeared around the 10th century and became assimilated with their neighbours. All that remained was a territorial name, which the eastern branch of the Armenian church took for its diocese. Not that the Azerbaijanis have it all wrong.

They would do better to focus on some of the Armenians' own selective

telling of history. Many Armenians barely acknowledge that there were

Azeris here until this century--an easy trick because most of them were

shepherds living in one place in summer, another in winter.

The Muslim population had only two notable monuments in Karabakh, both

elegant 19th-century blue-tiled mosques in the town of Shusha, which are now half-ruined from the war. The Archbishop of Karabakh overreaches when he says that they were built by Persians--traditional allies of the Armenians.

"We say to the Persians come and restore them. We don't say that to the

Azeris," he sayswith a laugh. But an Armenian architectural historian,

Shagen Mkrtchyan, attributes them to Azeri architects and points out their borrowing of local Armenian elements.

The truth is that this has always been frontier land, and Armenians and

Muslims have co-existed locally for centuries. Both nurtured Karabakh's

reputation for good wine, sheep, churches, music and dour hospitality.

Exact borders did not matter because both were in a larger empire: local government was commonly Armenian, with local "meliks" who ran their own affairs but paid tribute to their Persian, Ottoman or Russian overlords.

Only since 1994 have the Armenians had an ethnically homogeneous territory, unusually and for the first time, once its contours were drawn in blood.