NAGORNY KARABAGH

As long as I was a volunteer in the Peace Corps, I was not permitted to go to Kagorny Karabagh. The reason was that Karabagh is disputed territory, and to go there might be construed as a political statement. So I thought I would not get a chance to see it, since we are also not permitted to drive a car, and seeing Karabagh by public transportation was simply not practical. But the opportuni9ty arose ;thought one of those happy chance encounters that seem to punctuate my mature years.

I had asked my counterpart Nuneh to meet me at the Post Office xso she could interpret for me the rules about sending a package home. After we got that taken care of, I wanted her to make a telephone call for me, and the most convenient place to make it was in the quiet of the church nearby. While we were sitting there, the priest came in and asked me through Nuneh if I would like to make a pilgrimage to the churches of Karabagh he was organizing for late July. I said I couldn’t go as long as I was in the Peace Corps, which I would be out of the last day of August. He said he could arrange it for early August, and interpreting it as a Sign, I said yes. Nuneh said she would like to go too. I felt it would be better to go with somebody else who spoke English. Father X said the cost would be 10,000 Drams, or about $25, and we would sleep in tents, and he could find a sleeping bag for me.

When I spoke to him later, he said he was having trouble getting 20 people to sign up, because the price for the locals was steep. He said he could get enough of the Spitakians with money, but they were people without much interest in religion, and he didn’t want it to lead that kind of trip. He had only four signed up, but if I could wait till August 15, he might be about to get up a company. He said the past couple of years the trip had been sponsored by an Armeninan-American charity, but they didn’t have the sponsorship this year. They needed 200,000 drams to pay for the bus, the driver, and the gas.

I‘m a slow thinker, and it wasn’t till I was on the way home that I figured that 200,000 drams was less than $600, which was easily less that I might spend on a trip to Karabagh if I went on my own, So I called up Nuneh and told her to contact Father X and tell him I would be the sponsor. So he set up the tour, and said we would be ready to go for a week starting August 3.

When I arrived the morning of August third, I discovered that our group of pilgrims was to consist of myself, Nuneh, Father X, our bus driver, his wife, who would be our cook, their teenaged son, eleven teen-aged girls, two other teenaged boys, and youngerr brothers of three of the girls, aged eight or nine. Most of the kids were residents of the village of Jerashen, about a mile west of where I lived. The first photo shows the group lined up with their parents, preparatory to setting off.

The bus is usually used on the route between Spitak, or perhaps Jerashen itself, The color, common for such busses, reminds me inevitably of an American school bus, and had seen better days. Like may such busses it was owned by the driver. I had seen better days. It was hard to start, particularly in the morning, and made horrible noises when the driver shifted, and the first steep hill we got to, we had to all get out and walk up so that the bus could make it. I will say that the next day while we were m aking a pilgrimage walk to a monastery, the took it to a garage in the village, and eliminated the noise and the problem getting up hills; but starting remained a problem. The motor was in the cab right beside the driver’s seat, and the second day, while he was priming it by pouring gasoline into the careurater, when it caught, flames shot out of the carbauretor which he was hard put to extinguish. The last day it rained, and it took him a full half hour to get the motor We only filled up with gas the first morning, but every day we had to recharge the natural gas tanks.

The second picture shows us filling up the first morning at Vardenis, south of lake Sevan. Our driver asked directions and was directed not to a filling station, but to a truck of tanks outside of town. We all had to get out and wait some distance away. This was the only time we got gas from a tanker truck. Otherwise we stopped at natural gas service stations. For two years I naively thought they were self-service car washes, because that is what they look like, only the stalls are wider and the barriers higher. Passengers always have to get out and stand or sit at places provided some distance from the stalls, for safety reasons, before the vehicle is driven up to the filling stall. I don’t know how much natural gas costs, even though I was usually asked to cough up the money out of the 200,000 drams I had brought. The daily cost did not seem particularly great. Gasoline, by the way, the price of which was posted as in America, was about a dollar a liter, which was much lower than in England.

Our Route to Karabagh took us through the resort town of Dilijan, and a tunnel just north of Lake Sevan, and around the east shore of Lake Sevan. That route at the southern end is only about 5 miles from the Azerbaijan border, but the hills rise steeply from the lake shore, so the border itself is not visible. I was glad to see that side of Sevan, since I had already seen part of the west side. The road on that side is partly unpaved. At 6000 feet, Sevan is one of the highest large lakes in the world, but it is eighty feet lower than its natural state. Soviet engineers decided that the lake lost too much water from evaporation, so they engineered a system to lower the lake level and the area it covers. Most of the shore is faily steep hills except to the south, so I don’t know by how much the surface of the lake has shrunk. The promised improvements did not materialize, since the exposed lake bed is mostly stony and not suitable for agriculture. There are efforts to repair the damage, but the new shoreline is well populated with hotels and summer cabins, so it is now uneconomical to restore the full depth of the lake.

Armenia is well supplied with springs along its highways, as well as public fountains in its towns and villages, and the pictured spring, above Dilijan and just before the tunnel on the highway to Sevan, is one of the most monumental. From Vardenis, we turned east toward the Karabagh border. The road rises, and it was somewhere along here that we had to get out and walk. The government has authorized a gold mine in tha area which the Peace Corps among others worries will cause both air and water pollution in the region. In Armenia, investment money in whatever project talks a lot louder than public sentiment or environmental interests. There is a lot of construction going on along that highway, but I don’t know whether any of it was related to the gold mine. What was obvio0us was a huge earthen dam across the valley toward the crest of the pass. The dam faced east into Karabagh, so that the reservoir backed up into Armenia. There was no barder marking, so I don’t know whether that dame was in Karabach or Armenia. From there we followed a river valley down into Karabagh. It is always deep, and sometimes is a spectacular gorge. Here the distance between the old border and what was originally Karabagh proper is about 20 miles as the crow flies, and no north-south road cuts across it. In Soviet times, there was no need for a north-south route, but the geography makes it clear that when the war for Karabagh started, the Armenians could travel up and down the vally fairly easily, while the Azeris could not easily move troops or material into the area.

The valley seems never to have been more than sparsely populated. We saw a few ruined buildings, but nothing that could be called a village. We saw cattle grazing, but I have no idea where they could have gone at night. What few inhabited buildings we was were new constructions. We came to a military checkpoint well into Karabagh territory. A soldier look into the bus, but all he said when he looked in was, “Girls!” I was ready with my pasport, but he did not check any documents. The priest and driver talked to the soldiers briefly outside of the bus, but I have no idea what was said.

At one point along the road, we came to the wreck of a tank. I don’t know which side the tank fought on. Here I should say that astoundingly to me, we did not have a road map. Father X and the driver had a general knowledge of the layout of Karabagh, but we wasted a lot of time going back and forth when places on two routes were in fact close to each other by a third route. My little map whowed the present de facto borders but not the original borders. On the other hand, one of the kids camer up with a French language guidebook that showed the original borders, but not the present de facto borders--which would be awkward for a traveller, since some of the sites and some principal connecting roads were in land taken from Azerbaijan proper.

In the valley, toward evening, we came to the first of our pilgrimage sites, Dadivank, perhaps the mose important medieval Armenian monastery In Karabagh. Since the war, it has been considerably restored with Diaspora funds. Most projected peace settlements entail Karabagh giving up all the captures Azerbaijan lands outside the original Karabagh except for the narrow Lachin Corridor. But it would be very hard for Armenians to give up this important monument in their history, purely aside from the difficulties of the terrain. It was sundown by the time when we had seen Dadivank, and I assumed we would camp there, but the plan was to camp at another campsite, at Vank, near the monastery of Gandzasir, which we would visit the next day. Vank was not very near. We had to go down the valley and then up another valley to the south. The roads in Karabagh are not very well marked, and we had to stop a couple of times to ask directions, but we finally found the village with the floodlit monastery above it. We drove up through the village and past the monastery until we came to a gap in a fence. (Actually we drove past it for some distance and had to come back.) By then it was well past sunset. (I should mention that Armenia seems to be in a time zone farther west than natural time, and with Daylight Savings Time, sunrise was at seven, and sunset correspondingly late. )

We pitched the tent in the dark, and I found that a comfortable canvas-covered sleeping bag had been provided for me, since I didn’t have one. I elected to sleep out under the stars rather than in the tent. I was awakened by Father X in the middle of the night when a light rain began to fall. I was just as content to pull the flap of the sleeping bag over my head and stay where I was, but he made me get up and crawl under the bus. As it turned out, it did not rain very much.

In the morning, I discovered we were in a beautiful meadow beside a fast running stream which served for our morning ablutions. This was primitive camping with no toilets, as, it turned out, were all our campsites. I never found out how the rest managed, but that first day I wasn’t psychologically prepared for the primitive life and decided to take my chances on finding something in Vank.

My major criticism of Father X was that though he was the authority figure, he was not a take-charge sort of guy, and every morning we were a lot longer in camp than seemed to me necessary or even reasonable, since we were on a tour. It was 10: 30 before we were ready to set out, and that turned out to be one of our earliest departures

Since this was a pilgrimage, we were going on foot to the monastery. It was a couple of miles down hill to Vank, and another mile uphill to the monastery. Not far from camp, we passed a restaurant beside which was a natural grotto which someone thought looked like a tiger’s mouth, because as the picture shows, it was turned into a roaring tiger with claws.

Outside the restaurant on the other side, we came upon a public restroom with flush toilets, so my problem for that day was solved. When we got down to the edge of the village, I decided I wasn’t up to a long tramp uphill, so I asked for a taxi. Father X went onto the village about a block and came back with a taxi for me, and for Nuneh His agreement with the driver was that we would be driven up, given fifteen minutes to do the tour, and be driven back. But I thought walking down would be no problem, so we dismissed him at the top.

Gandasir has been completely restored and new buildings added and is now a seminary of the Armenian Church. Nuneh and I were there about 20 minutes before the rest of our group began to arrive on foot. Meanwhile other tourists began to arrive, both in private cars, taxis, and busses, including a busload of soldiers. A monk came out--a teacher in the seminary, I presume--and told us about the monastery. He showed us a mortar shell imbedded in the wall from the late war.

We walked back down to the village of Vank. A native son of Vank, one Levon Hayrapetian,Has invested a lot of money into turning Vank into a tourist destination. Besides the paved road up to the monastery, he had built a restaurant, hotel, casino, and other amenities. Right in the center of town is a new ship-shaped hotel, with a restaurant incongruously named the Van Gogh. Beside it is a swimming pool with a stage behind it and bleachers in front of it for water shows.

While we were on pilgrimage, our driver took the bus into town to a garage and worked on it, so that the horrible noises it made while shifting, and the problem that made us have to walk up the hill the first day were eliminated--though the bus was still mighty slow on any ascent.

Back in the village, I didn’t feel up to a long walk back up hill to the campsite, so we found the taxi driver again. He drove us back, passing many of our company, and then made at least two trips back to pick up stragglers and bring them to the camp. We had barbecued chicken for supper, cooked, as is traditional in Armenia, by the cook’s husband, the driver. Here is should say that and American might be intimidated taking a busload of 14 teenagers and three younger boys on a week-long bus pilgrimage, but the the kids were always responsible and helpful, and the three youjnmger boys partricularly so. They were always very solicitous of me, bar far the oldest, as well as their patron, bringing me a chair if I looked the least bit weary.

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