http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/09/a-mountain-village-beckons-in-nagorno-karabakh/?_r=0
Anahit Hayrapetyan,
an Armenian photographer, makes sure that wherever she is in the world
she Skypes daily with her grandmother. It’s her way of staying connected
with their ancestral village, Khtsaberd, nestled in the mountains of
the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in the South Caucasus. They
talk about everything from how much milk the family cow gave that day to
tales of family members who lived in the same village centuries before.
“If you go there, you
know who I am and why I’m like this,” Ms. Hayrapetyan, 34, said. “It’s
not a beautiful resort. It’s a small village of 40 families with old
houses too close to each other. The church burned down and was never
rebuilt. But I look like me in that place.”
The residents of
Khtsaberd are ethnically Armenian, as are most of the people in
Nagorno-Karabakh, which lies within Azerbaijan. In 1988, ethnic
Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh voted to secede from Azerbaijan, and
fighting broke out between the mostly Muslim Azerbaijanis and Christian
Armenians. More than 20,000 people were killed and about a million
people were displaced before a cease-fire in 1994.
Since then,
Nagorno-Karabakh has been governed independently with significant
support from Armenia. Fighting over the territory broke out again last
month between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and 20 people were killed in a few
days of battles. There have been minor skirmishes since.
Ms. Hayrapetyan was
born near Khtsaberd but grew up mostly in Abovyan, Armenia. She spent
summers and school vacations at her grandmother’s house, listening to
her stories, wandering the fields and milking the sheep. It was an
idyllic time.
She had been in the
village during the 1988 war, which included massacres on both sides and
left about a million people, mostly Azeris, displaced. Many houses were
destroyed and seven of Khtsaberd’s young men were killed. The villagers
were consumed by grief.
“For five years nobody
played music, even during a wedding,” Ms. Hayrapetyan said. “Every
Saturday, all of the village would go to the graveyard and all you could
hear was the sound of women wailing.”
Ms. Hayrapetyan
started photographing Khtsaberd and a few surrounding villages in 2006
while studying at a World Press Photo workshop in Yerevan, the Armenian
capital. Although she knew almost all of her subjects, it was at times
difficult for her.
“There was so much loss and pain in every family’s story,” she said.
A decade later she is still photographing and collecting stories there.
Ms. Hayrapetyan helped start 4plus, a collective of Armenian women, along with Anush Babajanyan and Nazik Armenakyan.
They hold exhibits, lectures and workshops to develop documentary
photography. Her photographs of domestic violence in Armenia were published on Lens last month.
She splits her time
between Yerevan and Frankfurt, Germany, where her husband works. Her
three children are with her most everywhere she goes.
She made an open-air
gallery in Khtsaberd to show her images to the villagers. It was her
first solo exhibition, and people enjoyed seeing photographs of
themselves. Unfortunately, the show ended early. That evening some cows
wandered over and started to eat the photographs.
If she had her choice,
Ms Hayrapetyan said she would live in Khtsaberd, where she knows the
names and stories of relatives going back seven generations.
For example, her
grandmother’s grandfather Hambardzum was widely known as the biggest and
strongest man in Khtsaberd, although someone claimed another man from a
neighboring village was even tougher. Once, they were both cutting wood
in the forest and ran into each other. A fight ensued.
“Hambardzum won and
cut the beard of the smaller man,” Ms. Hayrapetyan said. “But then he
had to stay inside his home for a while to avoid the other man.”
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