On the way to Ilisu, Azerbaijan. Part 3: Shamakhi.
Passing through the Shamakhi region on the way to Ilisu always takes me back to my adolescence, which makes me smile with nostalgia.
My extended family owned some little summer dachas in one of the villages outside the city of Shamakhi. These were built closely together along the street, which ruled out boredom and solitude, and personal space was reduced to zero. But, unless you consider yourself a hopeless misanthrope, you would find beauty in the collective joy and shared experience.
Our dachas were unlike the solid Soviet dachas of the time, and in the most unimaginable basic conditions in this down-at-heel village — whose main attraction had to be its beautiful, natural location — we thoroughly enjoyed our joyful and life-affirming days. It occurred to me, as a teen eager to pull herself out of Soviet misery, that the joie-de-vivre, which we enviously attributed to the West, could also be found in simple surroundings filled with the sincerity and warmth of family.
Our daily routine involved quite a bit of physical exercise for city kids like me and my cousins, such as going up and down the hilly tracks to the bulaq (spring/well) with cans and buckets to fill with spring water and returning out of breath from laughter and physical exertion. Teased but helped on our way by local girls and boys with far greater skills at carrying water buckets, the dust of our city snobbery soon settled and brought us down to earth.
Years later, my sister and I understood and appreciated our parents’ encouragement that we should communicate and engage with the locals to get to know them and better understand our roots. At times, it was challenging for us to fully immerse ourselves in the local landscape, having been brought up in Moscow and having predominantly visited the Russian-speaking Soviet Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. On the one hand, our broken Azerbaijani was jokingly mocked; on the other, we were treated warmly as guests.
Shamakhi is very rich in vegetation. While it is primarily known for its vineyards and wine production, it also has a variety of trees and plants like mulberry, blackberry, cherry, apple, pear and peach — to name a few. The juicy yellow of the meadows alternated with the lush green trees of the hills and the mountains. Our daily strolls and play with our cousins took place in surroundings, not unlike postcards or landscape paintings.
Today, when I pass Shamakhi, having travelled around Europe, I think of the Shamakhi natural landscape along the lines of the Tuscan hills of Italy; but back then, I likened our strolls to a scene from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Mirror, with one of the main characters played by my favourite actress Margarita Terehova. This contrast with other typical Russian landscapes, for some inexplicable reason, meant something to my teenage mind.
Our main companions were horses, cows, sheep, geese, goats and dogs. Each of my cousins had an amusing story to tell about who chased whom and in which field or on which hill. In the evening, we would plan how to hone our skills to eject stray cows from our gardens.
We had a choice of dacha gardens to visit, each with its own unique activity. In one garden, we would happily join my uncle in a bid to master traditional winemaking, giggling and stomping the grapes barefoot in a basin. We liked to pretend to be Adriano Celentano from The Taming of the Scoundrel, an Italian movie from the 80s, as we danced and pressed the grapes and imagined that we were taking part in a performance. We were allowed to taste, but not drink, the homemade wine because of our age, and while I announced that I would never drink wine in my life, that didn’t stop the adults from enjoying my uncle’s vinegary brew.
Another uncle’s garden offered a big apple orchard, where we either solemnly drank samovar tea with traditional Azerbaijani mürəbbə (conserves/jams) and felt ourselves to be right in the middle of a painting, or we climbed the trees and munched apples — it all depended on the mood of the day.
My house was a meeting point for playing cards, nardi (backgammon) and chess in the late afternoon under our enormous mulberry tree, where we could watch the sunset. Unlike other gardens, ours was quite hilly with lots of fruit trees on the boundaries. The centre was left empty to retain the mesmeric view over the hills. To fully enjoy the vivid sunsets, my sister and I decided to place a very old couch outside next to a hammock, and we called it our ‘sunset corner’. We too wanted a special feature in the garden to show off.
Cooking was a big deal for our mothers, and as we were blessed with rich Azerbaijani cuisine, every woman of the house took turns to make a feast. Our fathers, in their quintessential Caucasian manner, found themselves busy cooking kebabs out of the best Azerbaijani lamb on the mangal (BBQ) to go with shots of vodka or homemade wine. Everyone was jolly and chatty, told anecdotes and gave traditional lengthy toasts, which combined deep philosophy with humour. Some evenings were even more lively than usual when our relatives’ friends from Baku arrived with even more food and drink.
Our busy days would come to a crescendo at night. The nights in Shamakhi are not like anywhere else. We owe this to the enchanting Shamakhi sky, which is akin to a Middle Eastern fairy tale — a sky full of stars. It is in Shamakhi where, owing to the clean atmosphere and the high number of clear days per year, one of the biggest astrophysical observatories, called Shamakhi Astrophysical Observatory, in the Soviet Union was built. We would stay up till late at night, not able to drag ourselves away from the flamboyant stars and dreams that came with them. Occasionally, despite the troublesome mosquitoes, we would convince our parents to make us beds for the night on the open upper terrace so that we could stay close to the stars and lose ourselves in blissful eternity. We would pretend ‘the Shamakhan queen’ from the Russian literary father Pushkin’s Tale of the Golden Cockerel and the Shamakhi ladies of old times, distinguished by their originality and refined taste which also led artists like G. G. Gagarin to reflect that in his paintings Shamakhi Bayadère (Dancer from Shamakhi), Scenes, Paysages, Moeurs et Costumes du Caucase and La Caucase Pittoresque Dessine D’après Nature (Paris, 1847).
Located at the intersection of the caravan routes of the Silk Road, Shamakhi was one of the largest trade and craft centres in the Near East specialising in silk crafts, miniature paintings and carpet weaving; its famous Shirvan-Absheron school of architecture was another attraction and a benchmark for masons of the time. Trade links with Venetia date back as far as the 16th century. Shamakhi is home to the biggest mosque of Azerbaijan — the Juma Mosque, built following the Arab occupation of the Caucasus. Arabic writings reflected on the walls of the mosque show the construction year as 744 AD. The most tragic page of its 1200 years long history came in 1918 following the massacres of 17,000 Azerbaijanis by armed units of the Armenian nationalist party “Dashnaktsutiun”. General Thompson- Commander in Chief of the Union Army located in Baku noted: “Armenians destroyed the city completely, and then burned, none of the mosques could escape destruction”.
The city has become famous as the birthplace of many prominent Azerbaijani philosophers, architects, scientists, writers and poets such as Khagani, Nasimi and Sabir. The latter, the poet Mirza Alikbar Sabir, is directly connected to one of my ancestors, Omar Faig Nemanzadeh, a mastermind of the first satirical magazine in the Muslim East, Molla Nasreddin, on which they both collaborated over the years. During our last trip in 2021, we decided to pay a visit to the poet Sabir’s home museum, which is yet to be open to the public following renovation works. It was only because of our ancestor’s links that we were allowed to take a look, but we were not permitted to take photos. We were truly moved to see our ancestor’s portrait in the museum. The same ancestor was involved in educational activities and taught in the city of Shamakhi, but had to leave it following a devastating earthquake in 1902.
It was in Shamakhi where we all were with relatives to receive worrisome news over the Soviet coup d’etat on 18–21 August 1991; there was a sudden change of mood when my father rushed over the hills to reach my uncle’s place to announce the coup — putsch in Russian. Our parents’ desperate hope of seeing an end to the totalitarian communist regime, at the hands of which they and their parents had suffered so greatly, was put on hold for days as they tried to get news from the radio. Our futures were put on hold once again. To our relief, following the failed coup, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union collapsed and the full dissolution of the USSR took place four months later.
Today, 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we pass through the far more developed Shamakhi region, stopping at the Meysari vineyard to taste the excellent wines and at local restaurants to sample the exquisite Azerbaijani cuisine, we can also take in the panoramic views as far as the eye can see.
We also remember with nostalgia our old breaks in Shamakhi with our parents, uncles and aunties, most of whom we have now lost but who made this place truly special and memorable. May they all rest in peace. Perhaps it is time for us and our children to revive, restore and reinvent our Shamakhi of the old days.
