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Life Beyond the Capital: Hardship mixes with hope in Karabakh's villages
http://armenianow.com/karabakh/44284/karabakh_25th_anniversary_village_life
KARABAKH 25: BUILDING A REPUBLIC | 07.03.13 | 22:02
NAZIK ARMENAKYAN
ArmeniaNow
By GOHAR ABRAHAMYAN
ArmeniaNow reporter
Armenian revolutionary Stepan Shahumian's headless mosaic greets
visitors at the entrance to the Karabakh village of Sos. The head on
the hero's Soviet-era image was blown off by Azeri shelling more than
18 years ago, and there seem to be no plans for restoration.
Honoring heroes is a less urgent need than producing new ones. And
with many of Karabakh's 301 villages losing their youth to Karabakh
cities or to other countries, concerns outgrow populations.
As with most villages in Karabakh, the day here ends when it gets
dark. In the evening the village goes into deep slumber as residents
start switching off lights.
Just 40 minutes away in Stepanakert, nightlife begins in bars, discos,
cafes and the broad streets are lit by bright shops inviting strollers
to visit Mango, Sela, Ecco and other foreign brand-name retailers
whose goods once would have seemed a dream on those shell-shocked
streets.
Just as there are `two Armenias' - Yerevan, and all that is outside
Yerevan - so are there stark differences in life and lifestyle between
capital Stepanakert and the villages that make up the self-declared
republic.
Nearly twice as many Karabakhis live outside the capital as live in
it. Stepanakert has some 49,000 of Karabakh's 135,000 residents,
leaving about 86,000 in either the towns of Mardakert (4,200) or
Shoushi (4,100) or in villages that range in size from 2 residents in
Aghbradzor, to Chartar's 2,100. (Numbers are based on the 2005, the
latest, census. Projections put the total population at about 140,000
since the time of the census.)
While in the capital Wi-Fi internet access connects Stepanakert to the
world, in villages communication includes the warning of barking dogs
and the alarm of morning roosters.
And while days begin sooner and end sooner, the hard work goes on and on . . .
Sos: Aging on the vine
Vineyards stretch along a section of the Martuni region's highway,
leading to the village of Sos, which is known for its wine varieties.
The village that has a history of about 150 years, today has around
1,056 residents who went through the crucible of war to continue to
live and build their native village up.
Sos village mayor Hunan Grigorian says that people in the village are
mainly engaged in growing wheat, corn, barley and buckwheat. Sos also
has mulberry orchards. Generally, horticulture, especially
grape-growing, is quite developed in the village. Almost all villagers
have their own vineyards, but many say the wholesale price at which
grapes are purchased from them is not very profitable.
`Agriculture is the most unpredictable sector of the economy. One year
you may have nothing and the next year such bumper crops that people
would have problems selling all their produce,' says the mayor. This
year the price of wholesale grapes was a penny or two higher than
last, and villagers made enough to pay off debts. `But no one knows
what will happen next year,' says Grigorian.
Like other villages in Armenia and Karabakh, Sos' age demographic is a
concern. Young people see little future in village life. Those who
can, leave.
Naira Mangasarian, 58, who has worked as an educator at the Sos
village's kindergarten for 38 years, voices concern about the growing
out-migration of young people. The village is building a new
kindergarten, however, the teacher says the number of children of
pre-school age in the village decreases each year.
The veteran teacher says that even during the years of war the
kindergarten never closed its doors, but today only two kindergarten
groups are functioning, with 46 children attending. Before the war
there were more than 100 pre-school age children in the village.
`Our villagers are very hard-working people, there are many gardens
and orchards, there are privatized lands. But the harvest is not
always good. People don't know what to do to get results from their
work. There isn't any establishment or factory, and young people need
jobs to keep them in the village. That's why young people want to go
to towns and cities,' says Mangasarian.
Sos's secondary school has 175 students, while before the war the
number of students was nearly 300.
The only place for leisure for local young people is a ping-pong hall
recently built near the village administration office. Since 2009 the
village has also had an Internet club with six computers.
But there are also young people in the village who are taking small
steps towards the world of business.
Artsakh State University history department student Artsakh Manasian
has been engaged in grape-growing and winemaking for several years
now.
`I have two hectares (about 5 acres) of vineyards, and I supply some
of the yield to Stepanakert's brandy factory, and I use some to make
wine myself,' says the 23-year-old villager. He adds that soon he is
going to make a 3.5-million-dram (about $8,500) business plan for the
construction of a wine cellar that he says even at the initial stage
will create two news jobs.
Drmbon: 320 residents; 1,340 employees
The village of Drmbon, sits near the Tartar River and about 20 miles
to the southwest of the Martakert regional center. It is there that
during the first days of the Karabakh Liberation Movement volunteer
militia groups were formed and beginning from September 1992 they
participated in defense and liberation battles in Martakert and
Askeran as part of the Martakert defense units.
Drmbon has about 320 residents, some of whom raise cattle. But the
majority of the local residents are employed by Base Metals of Valex
Group, founded in 2002, at a copper and gold mine not far from the
village.
While deposits in the Drmbon mine are running low now, the company
continues to remain one of Karabakh's largest taxpayers, accounting
for up to 15 percent of tax revenues (in 2007, some 45 percent of tax
revenues in Karabakh were ensured due to the company).
The company works on a 24-hour basis, providing employment not just to
Drmbon residents and other residents of the Martakert province, but
also to many from Armenia.
Environmentalists in Armenia and Karabakh often voice concerns about
damage caused by the mining industry to the local environment, however
those issues are weighed against the more pressing matter of
employment.
Base Metals Technical Control Division head Ararat Ghardian says that
the company today employs 1,340, with average monthly salaries of
180,000 drams (about $450) - nearly double the average Karabakh
salary.
`We have employees from every district in Artsakh. Ninety percent of
the [working-age population] from nearby villages work at Base
Metals,' says Ghardian.
Lusine Barseghian, a 20-year-old resident of Kochoghot village,
Martakert province, has worked in a Base Metal laboratory unit for two
years. She combines work with her studies.
`I get a monthly salary of 70,000 drams (about $170), I can pay the
fee for my studies and also have some money left for daily expenses. I
wouldn't be able to work or study if I remained in the village,' says
Barseghian.
Goghtanik: From five families to 23
Goghtanik is a happy, if slow-growing exception, to the trend of
villages getting smaller.
The village, founded in 1995, is situated about 18 miles from Berdzor,
the regional center of the NKR district of Kashatagh, on a slope of
one of the three gorges stretching northward.
The current village mayor, Lusya Baghdasarian, is from Yerevan. Along
with her family she moved to Karabakh in 1996.
`My husband participated in the war and he always used to say that the
important thing wasn't only liberating those lands, but also keeping
them by living there,' says Baghdasarian, adding that she has already
forgotten the hardships of the years when there was no transportation
from the village towards the regional center and, if absolutely
necessary, they had to go on foot to get to the town.
`When we had just moved to our new place there were only five families
in the entire village, but now we are 23 households, and five of them
are large families, some raising even as many as eight children,' says
the village mayor.
Some of those large families participated in a mass baptismal in
Berdzor in October, where more than 50 children from surrounding
villages were baptized.
Today Goghtanik is home to 108, and the village's secondary school has
27 students, while just three years ago, it had only six. The
community leader says that the number of students in the village will
increase soon as the birthrate is now on the rise.
However, the village doesn't have a kindergarten, a community club or
a health center. There isn't even a proper village administration
office in Goghtanik.
`For the village administration office we are using part of our house
until we see what other space we can get. All issues will be solved in
the course of time. In the meantime it is important to keep the
village,' says Baghdasarian, adding that a majority of Goghtanik's
population are young people, who earn their keep from raising
livestock.
Chartar: Making culture a priority
The largest village in Karabakh, Chartar, is only a few kilometers
from Sos in the Martakert province. The village with more than 2,000
residents has the appearance of a military regiment, as most of its
adult males are contract military men. Chartar residents say proudly
that their village has produced the highest number of senior military
officers.
A part of the cultural house in the center of Chartar, which looks
like a smaller model of the Soviet-built Aram Khachatryan Philharmonic
Building in Yerevan, has served as an art school since February, 2011.
Five departments of the school are attended by 170 students both from
Chartar and surrounding villages. Classes at the school are free.
`At the art school, we emphasize developing the village's cultural
life,' says the art school's director Apres Margarian. `The children
attending the school will not necessarily continue their education in
this profession, but studying arts will help them a lot in life.'
Khnushinak: Hard conditions, but no emigration
Next to Chartar is the Martuni region's Khnushinak village, where the
scars of war haven't healed even more than 18 years after a ceasefire
that brought fragile peace to the region.
Khnushinak's 35-year-old resident Senorik Sargsian's ancestral house
was destroyed in a bombing during the war. For more than ten years now
together with his wife and four children he has rented homes from his
relatives and friends.
`Although the house was destroyed with a Grad missile, in the initial
period we still could live in it, but a strong wind ripped its roof
off, and we narrowly saved the children out of the wreckage,' says
Sargsian, who adds that he has repeatedly applied to relevant state
bodies for help getting a home, however he hasn't heard back yet.
In Khnushinak, which has 645 residents, the Sargsian family is not the
only one that remains without their own home and has lived in
difficult social conditions after the war, but the village mayor says
that there is almost no emigration from the village. Wheat and grape
cultivation are the main livelihoods.
`In 2012 we harvested more than 570 tons of grapes, while in previous
years the harvest did not exceed 470 tons,' says village mayor Hamlet
Tevosian as he pours home-made bubbly champagne-like wine into
glasses.
Khnushinak's school is attended by 100 students, who also participate
in different interest and activity groups.
In the evening in the renovated gym of the school the village youth
gather for volleyball games to prepare for regional competitions.
As the sun goes down, men in villages such as Khnushinak usually
gather in some central location, such as near a store, to exchange
news of the day and talk about other developments, enjoying the last
evenings of the ending velvet autumn.
Nor Maragha: Making life `new' again
When on the night of April 10, 1992 the Markosian family was fleeing
their village, barely escaping death at the hands of advancing Azeri
forces, little did they know that years later they would settle down
in a new village, tens of kilometers away from their native one, but
named after it.
Misha Markosian, now 72, was one of the last residents of Maragha who
managed to escape almost unscathed from what was a massacre of
Armenians, with his last glance at his native village and house
imprinted in his mind till today.
That night, Azeris entered the village of Maragha, in the Martakert
province near the border between Karabakh and Azerbaijan, slaughtering
more than half of the 118 people who remained there by that time,
while subjecting the rest to various forms of violence. (A 1989 -
pre-war - census found 6,500 residents in Maragha.)
`We owned a two-storey house with everything in it; four rooms
upstairs, four rooms downstairs. We left all our property and
belongings there and ran for our lives,' says Misha Markosian's
63-year-old wife Susanna as she wipes tears from her cheeks.
`At first we stayed for a few days in an abandoned Azeri village where
we found a bed and a map of Baku. We spread the map over that bed, I
was wearing soft slippers, and we used them as pillows and slept
somehow. We kept axes next to us all the time to defend ourselves if
Azeris came,' remembers Susanna.
A majority of re-settlers in Nor (`New') Maragha, a village founded in
1995, share similar fates and bear a heavy burden of pain and the
feeling of refugees who had lost everything.
Most of them came from Maragha, Margushevan, Leninavan and other
villages that fell under Azeri control during the 1992-1994 Karabakh
war.
In 2000, as part of the Karabakh resettlement program, new residential
houses were provided to residents in Nor Maragha, while several houses
left by Azeris had been rebuilt.
`When we were running away, by night, with my grandchildren in my
arms, under missiles flying over our heads, without even a hope of
surviving, little did we imagine that one day we would have a home
again. But in 2000 we celebrated the New Year in a new house, with new
hopes and expectations,' says Misha, whose house is in what is called
the upper district of Nor Maragha which now has 400 residents.
Misha and Susanna live in a two-room house with a balcony. The
Markosians' children (they had three, but one died in an accident),
like many, left for Russia immediately after the war and have remained
there.
The Markosians say they have a good life. From time to time the
children send money from Russia, but the couple's needs are met mostly
by living off New Maragha's fertile land. They also have four cows,
chickens, and more than two dozen sheep.
Not far from the Markosians' house is a one-storey school that was
built in 2004.
The school in Nor Maragha, which was establishment as an institution
in 1997, today has 22 teachers and 71 students. Until 10 years ago the
number of students was no more than 35.
The school's 56-year-old principal Lyuba Grigorian moved to Nor
Maragha from the Armenian town of Metsamor in 2000. She went there as
part of an Armenian government program that provided housing and
salaries for teachers who would relocate to Karabakh.
Grigorian says that the village expands from year to year and its
conditions are improving.
`The position of our village is very good. It stays green 12 months a
year. In general, there is no better place than Artsakh. We feel very
good here, our only concern is that there is no war again,' says
Grigorian.
According to the school principal, Nor Maragha's children are very
smart and every year's graduates manage to enter colleges or
universities. Some have returned from university to teach in the
village school.
Until 2003, Nor Maragha was still considered to be a `danger zone'
because of landmines left after the war. Villager founder Vazif
Hambartsumian was killed by a landmine in 2000.
But by 2003, the village had been completely cleared of mines thanks
to British charity Halo Trust's de-mining projects.
In the middle of Nor Maragha there are two village stores arranged
side by side. One of them, however, shut down recently because of
failing to make a profit. Retailers in this Karabakh village, just
like in villages in Armenia, have several thick copybooks called `debt
lists' with names of villagers who owe money to the shop.
Behind the shops is an old building that had survived a bombing. Now
it serves as a village administration office. And in the distance
there is a small area occupied by the village cemetery, the resting
place, so far, of about two dozen villagers.
There are more than 50 children of pre-school age in Nor Maragha, but
the village has no kindergarten. And young people are mainly engaged
in farming, while some are contract-based military servicemen.
And although life in Nor Maragha continues to move forward, local
residents still deeply feel the sorrow of the past events imprinted as
wrinkles. The same wrinkles cover a cherished hope that one day they
could return to their native villages and see their original homes
again.
`Today, in Nor Maragha, we have very good conditions. Our house is
very good, I like it very much. Thank God, we have everything, the
house, the land... We started everything from scratch, now we keep
livestock, cultivate land, but like swallows we still want our old
nest,' says Nor Maragha's 52-year-old resident Violeta Dumanian. She
is originally from Leninavan, which is now under Azeri control. She
then starts counting out how many graves of relatives they left behind
in their native village . . .
http://armenianow.com/karabakh/44284/karabakh_25th_anniversary_village_life
KARABAKH 25: BUILDING A REPUBLIC | 07.03.13 | 22:02
NAZIK ARMENAKYAN
ArmeniaNow
By GOHAR ABRAHAMYAN
ArmeniaNow reporter
Armenian revolutionary Stepan Shahumian's headless mosaic greets
visitors at the entrance to the Karabakh village of Sos. The head on
the hero's Soviet-era image was blown off by Azeri shelling more than
18 years ago, and there seem to be no plans for restoration.
Honoring heroes is a less urgent need than producing new ones. And
with many of Karabakh's 301 villages losing their youth to Karabakh
cities or to other countries, concerns outgrow populations.
As with most villages in Karabakh, the day here ends when it gets
dark. In the evening the village goes into deep slumber as residents
start switching off lights.
Just 40 minutes away in Stepanakert, nightlife begins in bars, discos,
cafes and the broad streets are lit by bright shops inviting strollers
to visit Mango, Sela, Ecco and other foreign brand-name retailers
whose goods once would have seemed a dream on those shell-shocked
streets.
Just as there are `two Armenias' - Yerevan, and all that is outside
Yerevan - so are there stark differences in life and lifestyle between
capital Stepanakert and the villages that make up the self-declared
republic.
Nearly twice as many Karabakhis live outside the capital as live in
it. Stepanakert has some 49,000 of Karabakh's 135,000 residents,
leaving about 86,000 in either the towns of Mardakert (4,200) or
Shoushi (4,100) or in villages that range in size from 2 residents in
Aghbradzor, to Chartar's 2,100. (Numbers are based on the 2005, the
latest, census. Projections put the total population at about 140,000
since the time of the census.)
While in the capital Wi-Fi internet access connects Stepanakert to the
world, in villages communication includes the warning of barking dogs
and the alarm of morning roosters.
And while days begin sooner and end sooner, the hard work goes on and on . . .
Sos: Aging on the vine
Vineyards stretch along a section of the Martuni region's highway,
leading to the village of Sos, which is known for its wine varieties.
The village that has a history of about 150 years, today has around
1,056 residents who went through the crucible of war to continue to
live and build their native village up.
Sos village mayor Hunan Grigorian says that people in the village are
mainly engaged in growing wheat, corn, barley and buckwheat. Sos also
has mulberry orchards. Generally, horticulture, especially
grape-growing, is quite developed in the village. Almost all villagers
have their own vineyards, but many say the wholesale price at which
grapes are purchased from them is not very profitable.
`Agriculture is the most unpredictable sector of the economy. One year
you may have nothing and the next year such bumper crops that people
would have problems selling all their produce,' says the mayor. This
year the price of wholesale grapes was a penny or two higher than
last, and villagers made enough to pay off debts. `But no one knows
what will happen next year,' says Grigorian.
Like other villages in Armenia and Karabakh, Sos' age demographic is a
concern. Young people see little future in village life. Those who
can, leave.
Naira Mangasarian, 58, who has worked as an educator at the Sos
village's kindergarten for 38 years, voices concern about the growing
out-migration of young people. The village is building a new
kindergarten, however, the teacher says the number of children of
pre-school age in the village decreases each year.
The veteran teacher says that even during the years of war the
kindergarten never closed its doors, but today only two kindergarten
groups are functioning, with 46 children attending. Before the war
there were more than 100 pre-school age children in the village.
`Our villagers are very hard-working people, there are many gardens
and orchards, there are privatized lands. But the harvest is not
always good. People don't know what to do to get results from their
work. There isn't any establishment or factory, and young people need
jobs to keep them in the village. That's why young people want to go
to towns and cities,' says Mangasarian.
Sos's secondary school has 175 students, while before the war the
number of students was nearly 300.
The only place for leisure for local young people is a ping-pong hall
recently built near the village administration office. Since 2009 the
village has also had an Internet club with six computers.
But there are also young people in the village who are taking small
steps towards the world of business.
Artsakh State University history department student Artsakh Manasian
has been engaged in grape-growing and winemaking for several years
now.
`I have two hectares (about 5 acres) of vineyards, and I supply some
of the yield to Stepanakert's brandy factory, and I use some to make
wine myself,' says the 23-year-old villager. He adds that soon he is
going to make a 3.5-million-dram (about $8,500) business plan for the
construction of a wine cellar that he says even at the initial stage
will create two news jobs.
Drmbon: 320 residents; 1,340 employees
The village of Drmbon, sits near the Tartar River and about 20 miles
to the southwest of the Martakert regional center. It is there that
during the first days of the Karabakh Liberation Movement volunteer
militia groups were formed and beginning from September 1992 they
participated in defense and liberation battles in Martakert and
Askeran as part of the Martakert defense units.
Drmbon has about 320 residents, some of whom raise cattle. But the
majority of the local residents are employed by Base Metals of Valex
Group, founded in 2002, at a copper and gold mine not far from the
village.
While deposits in the Drmbon mine are running low now, the company
continues to remain one of Karabakh's largest taxpayers, accounting
for up to 15 percent of tax revenues (in 2007, some 45 percent of tax
revenues in Karabakh were ensured due to the company).
The company works on a 24-hour basis, providing employment not just to
Drmbon residents and other residents of the Martakert province, but
also to many from Armenia.
Environmentalists in Armenia and Karabakh often voice concerns about
damage caused by the mining industry to the local environment, however
those issues are weighed against the more pressing matter of
employment.
Base Metals Technical Control Division head Ararat Ghardian says that
the company today employs 1,340, with average monthly salaries of
180,000 drams (about $450) - nearly double the average Karabakh
salary.
`We have employees from every district in Artsakh. Ninety percent of
the [working-age population] from nearby villages work at Base
Metals,' says Ghardian.
Lusine Barseghian, a 20-year-old resident of Kochoghot village,
Martakert province, has worked in a Base Metal laboratory unit for two
years. She combines work with her studies.
`I get a monthly salary of 70,000 drams (about $170), I can pay the
fee for my studies and also have some money left for daily expenses. I
wouldn't be able to work or study if I remained in the village,' says
Barseghian.
Goghtanik: From five families to 23
Goghtanik is a happy, if slow-growing exception, to the trend of
villages getting smaller.
The village, founded in 1995, is situated about 18 miles from Berdzor,
the regional center of the NKR district of Kashatagh, on a slope of
one of the three gorges stretching northward.
The current village mayor, Lusya Baghdasarian, is from Yerevan. Along
with her family she moved to Karabakh in 1996.
`My husband participated in the war and he always used to say that the
important thing wasn't only liberating those lands, but also keeping
them by living there,' says Baghdasarian, adding that she has already
forgotten the hardships of the years when there was no transportation
from the village towards the regional center and, if absolutely
necessary, they had to go on foot to get to the town.
`When we had just moved to our new place there were only five families
in the entire village, but now we are 23 households, and five of them
are large families, some raising even as many as eight children,' says
the village mayor.
Some of those large families participated in a mass baptismal in
Berdzor in October, where more than 50 children from surrounding
villages were baptized.
Today Goghtanik is home to 108, and the village's secondary school has
27 students, while just three years ago, it had only six. The
community leader says that the number of students in the village will
increase soon as the birthrate is now on the rise.
However, the village doesn't have a kindergarten, a community club or
a health center. There isn't even a proper village administration
office in Goghtanik.
`For the village administration office we are using part of our house
until we see what other space we can get. All issues will be solved in
the course of time. In the meantime it is important to keep the
village,' says Baghdasarian, adding that a majority of Goghtanik's
population are young people, who earn their keep from raising
livestock.
Chartar: Making culture a priority
The largest village in Karabakh, Chartar, is only a few kilometers
from Sos in the Martakert province. The village with more than 2,000
residents has the appearance of a military regiment, as most of its
adult males are contract military men. Chartar residents say proudly
that their village has produced the highest number of senior military
officers.
A part of the cultural house in the center of Chartar, which looks
like a smaller model of the Soviet-built Aram Khachatryan Philharmonic
Building in Yerevan, has served as an art school since February, 2011.
Five departments of the school are attended by 170 students both from
Chartar and surrounding villages. Classes at the school are free.
`At the art school, we emphasize developing the village's cultural
life,' says the art school's director Apres Margarian. `The children
attending the school will not necessarily continue their education in
this profession, but studying arts will help them a lot in life.'
Khnushinak: Hard conditions, but no emigration
Next to Chartar is the Martuni region's Khnushinak village, where the
scars of war haven't healed even more than 18 years after a ceasefire
that brought fragile peace to the region.
Khnushinak's 35-year-old resident Senorik Sargsian's ancestral house
was destroyed in a bombing during the war. For more than ten years now
together with his wife and four children he has rented homes from his
relatives and friends.
`Although the house was destroyed with a Grad missile, in the initial
period we still could live in it, but a strong wind ripped its roof
off, and we narrowly saved the children out of the wreckage,' says
Sargsian, who adds that he has repeatedly applied to relevant state
bodies for help getting a home, however he hasn't heard back yet.
In Khnushinak, which has 645 residents, the Sargsian family is not the
only one that remains without their own home and has lived in
difficult social conditions after the war, but the village mayor says
that there is almost no emigration from the village. Wheat and grape
cultivation are the main livelihoods.
`In 2012 we harvested more than 570 tons of grapes, while in previous
years the harvest did not exceed 470 tons,' says village mayor Hamlet
Tevosian as he pours home-made bubbly champagne-like wine into
glasses.
Khnushinak's school is attended by 100 students, who also participate
in different interest and activity groups.
In the evening in the renovated gym of the school the village youth
gather for volleyball games to prepare for regional competitions.
As the sun goes down, men in villages such as Khnushinak usually
gather in some central location, such as near a store, to exchange
news of the day and talk about other developments, enjoying the last
evenings of the ending velvet autumn.
Nor Maragha: Making life `new' again
When on the night of April 10, 1992 the Markosian family was fleeing
their village, barely escaping death at the hands of advancing Azeri
forces, little did they know that years later they would settle down
in a new village, tens of kilometers away from their native one, but
named after it.
Misha Markosian, now 72, was one of the last residents of Maragha who
managed to escape almost unscathed from what was a massacre of
Armenians, with his last glance at his native village and house
imprinted in his mind till today.
That night, Azeris entered the village of Maragha, in the Martakert
province near the border between Karabakh and Azerbaijan, slaughtering
more than half of the 118 people who remained there by that time,
while subjecting the rest to various forms of violence. (A 1989 -
pre-war - census found 6,500 residents in Maragha.)
`We owned a two-storey house with everything in it; four rooms
upstairs, four rooms downstairs. We left all our property and
belongings there and ran for our lives,' says Misha Markosian's
63-year-old wife Susanna as she wipes tears from her cheeks.
`At first we stayed for a few days in an abandoned Azeri village where
we found a bed and a map of Baku. We spread the map over that bed, I
was wearing soft slippers, and we used them as pillows and slept
somehow. We kept axes next to us all the time to defend ourselves if
Azeris came,' remembers Susanna.
A majority of re-settlers in Nor (`New') Maragha, a village founded in
1995, share similar fates and bear a heavy burden of pain and the
feeling of refugees who had lost everything.
Most of them came from Maragha, Margushevan, Leninavan and other
villages that fell under Azeri control during the 1992-1994 Karabakh
war.
In 2000, as part of the Karabakh resettlement program, new residential
houses were provided to residents in Nor Maragha, while several houses
left by Azeris had been rebuilt.
`When we were running away, by night, with my grandchildren in my
arms, under missiles flying over our heads, without even a hope of
surviving, little did we imagine that one day we would have a home
again. But in 2000 we celebrated the New Year in a new house, with new
hopes and expectations,' says Misha, whose house is in what is called
the upper district of Nor Maragha which now has 400 residents.
Misha and Susanna live in a two-room house with a balcony. The
Markosians' children (they had three, but one died in an accident),
like many, left for Russia immediately after the war and have remained
there.
The Markosians say they have a good life. From time to time the
children send money from Russia, but the couple's needs are met mostly
by living off New Maragha's fertile land. They also have four cows,
chickens, and more than two dozen sheep.
Not far from the Markosians' house is a one-storey school that was
built in 2004.
The school in Nor Maragha, which was establishment as an institution
in 1997, today has 22 teachers and 71 students. Until 10 years ago the
number of students was no more than 35.
The school's 56-year-old principal Lyuba Grigorian moved to Nor
Maragha from the Armenian town of Metsamor in 2000. She went there as
part of an Armenian government program that provided housing and
salaries for teachers who would relocate to Karabakh.
Grigorian says that the village expands from year to year and its
conditions are improving.
`The position of our village is very good. It stays green 12 months a
year. In general, there is no better place than Artsakh. We feel very
good here, our only concern is that there is no war again,' says
Grigorian.
According to the school principal, Nor Maragha's children are very
smart and every year's graduates manage to enter colleges or
universities. Some have returned from university to teach in the
village school.
Until 2003, Nor Maragha was still considered to be a `danger zone'
because of landmines left after the war. Villager founder Vazif
Hambartsumian was killed by a landmine in 2000.
But by 2003, the village had been completely cleared of mines thanks
to British charity Halo Trust's de-mining projects.
In the middle of Nor Maragha there are two village stores arranged
side by side. One of them, however, shut down recently because of
failing to make a profit. Retailers in this Karabakh village, just
like in villages in Armenia, have several thick copybooks called `debt
lists' with names of villagers who owe money to the shop.
Behind the shops is an old building that had survived a bombing. Now
it serves as a village administration office. And in the distance
there is a small area occupied by the village cemetery, the resting
place, so far, of about two dozen villagers.
There are more than 50 children of pre-school age in Nor Maragha, but
the village has no kindergarten. And young people are mainly engaged
in farming, while some are contract-based military servicemen.
And although life in Nor Maragha continues to move forward, local
residents still deeply feel the sorrow of the past events imprinted as
wrinkles. The same wrinkles cover a cherished hope that one day they
could return to their native villages and see their original homes
again.
`Today, in Nor Maragha, we have very good conditions. Our house is
very good, I like it very much. Thank God, we have everything, the
house, the land... We started everything from scratch, now we keep
livestock, cultivate land, but like swallows we still want our old
nest,' says Nor Maragha's 52-year-old resident Violeta Dumanian. She
is originally from Leninavan, which is now under Azeri control. She
then starts counting out how many graves of relatives they left behind
in their native village . . .