ESSAY

We met Aslan by chance in Baku, July 2026. Having been to Georgia and Armenia, my brother and I were interested in the final major piece of the puzzle: Azerbaijan. Meeting Aslan was the product of a serendipitous impromptu same-day city-tour booking, and began with a man sprinting towards us at full speed. No words were exchanged, just a breathless gesture to follow, and a surprisingly elegant spin on his heels. (It quickly transpired that he’d ground a highway of traffic to a halt with a questionable parking job.) Once safely in our getaway car, and having all silently agreed to pretend nothing happened, our small talk quickly subsided after I asked the simple question: “Where are you from?” . He patiently responded to a confetti of questions, finally stopping me in my tracks with his response to “When did you last go back?”

“I go every weekend.”

Having only known of the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh through news reports, I had assumed it was still highly militarised and inaccessible. To learn that his family make a 10-hour round trip in convoy each weekend to barbecue in the rubble of their old village astounded me. He agreed to take us.

While driving there, with one finger on the wheel and an extraordinary ability to maintain eye contact with me in the back seat, he chirpily narrated sepia-toned memories of fishing in rivers, running between villages to trade oranges, and of how the excuse of tired legs was sufficient to stay the night in another village on his walk home. Everyone knew each other (and I sensed that Aslan’s tired legs were famous in households with enthusiastic cooks).

As we passed through the newly renamed “Return” village flanking the militarised zone, cameras were instructed to go down, passports produced and windows rolled down. The mood changed dramatically on the other side of the checkpoint. The golden-hued stories seemed to desaturate. We drove past signs warning of unexploded weapons and landmines and white unmarked vans decorating the horizon - bomb disposal units. Vineyard posts with reinforced barbed wire lay wearily on their sides - installed to slow tanks rather than yield grapes. As our car slowed down a dirt track, it became apparent that this beautiful village of Aslan’s childhood had had its guts of stone and mortar strewn unceremoniously across a hill.

Aslan, a polyglot and now a postdoctoral researcher on the wider Caucasus region, explained that the only way he could carry the weight of generational sadness was to understand it happened - from both sides. With both sorrow and empathy in his eyes, he told me:

“Karabakh is not a place, it’s a person, and that person is suffering. No one can build happiness on the tragedy of others.
Hate doesn’t give anything to anyone. Hatred is something where by the end you look like the person you hate.”

We walked down an overgrown winding path until it opened up onto a picnic table which felt more like a scene from the Mary Celeste than Karabakh. A knuckle of fresh bread lay on a plastic pale blue chequered tablecloth. A dirty knife with a residue of cheese lay beside an apricot pit that was being mauled by ants. Two conical cups of black tea sat half-drunk on oddly formal saucers. From behind a free-standing stone wall (once the boundary of a home), a man floated towards us. A firm, familiar handshake with Aslan and a nod of his head backwards invited us to the other side of the structure. Muhammad had been offered a place to stay outside of the militarised zone, but insisted on remaining. Only he and his son are left, and now sleep side-by-side on a small platform in what once was the bathroom of a grander building. During the day, they tend to their bees, weed the cemetery, and shepherd goats and a few chickens. Deep grooves in Muhammad’s face and indifferent hospitality nod to the fatigue of this tragic situation.

Aslan’s words stayed with me as we drove on. Three years earlier, the displacement had run the other way: in September 2023, after a swift Azerbaijani military offensive, more than 100,000 Karabakh Armenians - almost the entire population - left for Armenia in little more than a week. The villages being rebuilt for families like Aslan's stand in a region that has now been emptied twice.

Aslan then brought us to visit those of his family who had recently moved back. A new government development project has begun to repatriate internally displaced Azerbaijanis to the ex-conflict zone, providing all of the needs of a small community - from dentist to pizza parlour. His elderly aunt spoke of being part of a lost generation: leaving when she was 21, and returning in her late 60s. Her husband didn’t survive to join her. As she welled up while responding to my translated questions about optimism, her 12-year-old grandson walked into the room. Everyone’s faces softened at this polite, self-assured boy dressed in an Argentinian football shirt. The family teased him warmly for the bravado he put on about his English before the real test: his first chance to speak to a native speaker. I asked through Aslan if he felt a sense of responsibility:

“I see that everyone is looking to me with hope. I will do my best to make them proud.”

I left with a sense that he was too young to fully understand the reason for their hope, nor the existential need for it.

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