The Secret of Karabakh: A compelling story of self-discovery and stolen heritage by Fidan Bagirova

Author:Fidan Bagirova [Bagirova, Fidan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2022-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

23

Togrul stooped before a chest with a dozen long, shallow drawers. “In here I keep my most precious documents,” he said, opening a drawer and taking out a large, illuminated parchment. Setting some books carefully to one side, he cleared the sloped surface of his scribe’s desk and laid the parchment on it. Alana could now see that it was an elaborate painting in a medieval Islamic style. At first, she thought it was a horseback hunting scene, but then realized it depicted a battle, rendered in green, scarlet, cobalt blue, and silver, with details picked out in gold leaf.

“This was made around 1520,” said Togrul, and glanced over his spectacles at Alana. “It is only a copy, you understand, but a very exact one. It shows a battle before the city walls when Azerbaijan was invaded by Shah Ismail the First in 1501.”

Under a sky of gold leaf and swirling clouds, knights in plumed turbans and gorgeously decorated blue and green tunics rode plump horses against one another, wielding huge scimitars and bows. On the city walls, soldiers in pointed helmets banged drums and blew trumpets at the combatants.

“The battle was a terrible, bloody defeat,” said Togrul. “Baku fell, and the Shirvanshah dynasty, Sunni Muslims who had ruled eastern Azerbaijan for over seven hundred years, eventually gave way to the Shia Safavids from the Safavid empire that ruled Persia. Safavids, by the way, were of Turkic origin, they were Iranian Azeri Shia Muslim, not Sunni, and this difference created a lot of conflict between the Sunni Ottomans and the Shia Safavids, even though they both spoke the same language – ancient Turkish. Despite living on both sides, the Azeri form a single group. However, northerners and southerners differ, due to nearly two centuries of separate social evolution in Russian Soviet-influenced Azerbaijan and Iranian Azerbaijan, which today is part of Iran.

“All of these languages can be traced to the Turkish Oghuz, who moved into the Caucasus from central Asia in the eleventh century. Following the Russian–Persian wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Persian territories in the Caucasus, some under merely nominal control, were ceded to the Russian empire. This included parts of the current Republic of Azerbaijan. The treaties of Golestan in 1813 and Tukmanchai in 1828 finalized the border between Russian and Persia, now Iran.”

Togrul laid his bony hand on the image. “I show you this because it is emblematic of Azerbaijan’s history. Like European nations, the lands between the Black Sea and the Caspian, between Asia Minor and Persia, have been shaped by war and migration. Peoples have moved and spread, religions and civilizations have come and gone, nations have been created, and the boundaries between them have been conjured out of soil and culture and language; the borders have expanded, shrunk, and blown away on the wind.

“The one thing that has remained constant is the land. And that is bound up with the human need to possess it. To live on the land, to work it, to spill blood for it, is to be at one with it.

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