TASTES | Caucasus: Feasting & Storytelling Across the Caucasus
October 2010 | Written by Daniel J. Gerstle
Republished November 2024. Originally, published in Humanitarian Bazaar (aka HELO Magazine) in 2011.
Ibragim, the fortyish, balding engineer with gold-capped teeth, raised his glass of arakh and hummed an intricate pentatonic scale ballad which originated in the now largely abandoned city of Shusha, Karabakh. His colleagues followed suit, closing their eyes or tilting their heads as they one by one were seized by the tune.
Hans, the manager from Belgium, and I were already completely tanked and stuffing ourselves with salty roasted pork with pomegranate onion marinade, lamb kebab with cilantro and chives, diced tomato and cucumber salad, and a thin flatbread called, lavash. We could do nothing but eat while we witnessed these grown men in their melodic trance…
Suddenly Ibragim’s voice picked up, the words were mysterious and indecipherable—he would later explain that the lyrics told a tale of lovers divided, from the Azerbaijani tradition of his childhood outside the town of Agdam, which he hadn’t seen since the 1988-1994 Azerbaijan-Armenian War for Karabakh.
Just then, the divine humming laced with Ibragim’s voice broke; the men began to pound the table to the song with their thumbs, rhythmically. Ibragim started in again; the volume climbed until the group exploded into laughter. The group called for a grand toast. Ibragim, the sweetest story-teller I ever met in the Caucasus, raised his glass.
For five long minutes, Ibragim held his glass up; so long I couldn’t help but study the three shorter digits on one hand left scarred from the war. He thanked Hans for spending over a year with their team here in the effort to rebuild war damaged houses in Fuzuli District in the deep southwest of Azerbaijan. He wished Hans all the joy, love, and laughter a man could possibly have.
He then turned to me, the new guest, and welcomed me to their neighborhood. He hoped Hans and I would both become part of their families. At last, it was time to down our liquor. “Sa’ol! Sa’ol!” rang the group. We drank. And the arakh lit my throat on fire.
Over cups of sweet tea, lively feasts, and brutal drinking contests with new friends across the North and South Caucasus this past decade, I had the opportunity to hear from Kavkaztsi themselves what their culture was all about.
For them, the hosting table was the canvass upon which they not only portrayed their culinary evolution and let one hear their native tongue. It was also where they shared deeply personal, if not absurd and irreverent, stories about how they survived the many collective traumas their people endured during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Each of the newly independent nations—Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia—along with Russia’s semi-autonomous southern republics—Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, North Ossetia-Alania, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, and Adygea—tended to pop up in Western media primarily in stories of upheaval, body counts, and ethnic enmity.
After I got to know people there, I wanted to tell a different kind of story, a positive one that highlighted what united the Kavkaztsi. What better way to build such a narrative than through a portrait not of battlefields and prisons, but of conversations on farms, in kitchens, and over feasting tables?
My talks with people over tea often began with my perhaps naïve but eternally-returning questions about why so many things united the people of the region while so many groups there disliked, perhaps despised, each other.
There were common Caucasus traditions of feasting, storytelling, and toasting; an unresolved post-Soviet political tension similar to that feeling of walking along the edge of a cliff; and a romantic belief that the future would be grand that was juxtaposed with a dark, pessimistic humor.
But there were seven wars in the last twenty years and five of them—Chechnya and the regional insurgency run by Islamic radicals, the Ossetian-Ingush conflict over Prigorodny, the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict over Karabakh (also known as Artsakh), and Georgia’s breakaway regions of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali (also known as South Ossetia)—were largely won by one group over the other and yet remained politically unresolved.
In the scorching desert of Azerbaijan’s frontline with Armenian-controlled Karabakh, I asked these questions to Fikrat, the loveable self-made internationalist who carried his village in his moustache; his brother Heydar, the lively humorist who served a mean roundhouse karate kick; their mother Hala, who wielded forearms like battle-axes; and Arzu, the rich kid who drove fast and ended up flying through the windshield of his car on the Baku-Tehran highway.
In the capitol Baku, I asked Gulnara, the seductive pathological liar who took me all the way to Jewish Quba with her just to trick me out of money.
On the Armenian side of Karabakh, I asked two soldiers in Stepanakert, the capitol known by Azeris as Xankendi. And I asked Vito, the veteran with a bullet under his knuckle who showed me the burned Azeri mosque in Shusha before they turned it into a market.
In Georgia, I asked Vano, the humble guy who spoke seven languages and hosted me in his grandmother’s cottage on the alpine hillside overlooking Kazbegi.
In Russia, I brought up the question of Caucasus unity and division to Georgian colleagues on the way to Russia’s war-ravaged south. In Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia, and on trips to the mountains, I asked Oleg, the sweetest guy who would never admit to being on the Russian security service payroll; Rav, the loud-talking driver who played stupid so I didn’t think he understood English; and the Ossetian girl who hated the Ingush ever since the Beslan School massacre.
Over the massive security barrier and through the gauntlet of blast walls, I made it into troubled Ingushetia. I asked Zara, the sweet village girl who married young and wore high heels to refugee camps; Bashir, the humble speed-talking engineer with cucumbers in his yard; and Tatyana, the Russian woman who had not stopped crying since her husband was killed in the Second Chechen War. In Chechnya itself, I found Vakha, the guy who wore shades and was so nice I was convinced never to tell him secrets.
By the end, the closest I ever got to an answer about why the Kavkaztsi were so united in some ways and divided in others was with Liza. She was the slightly older Russian woman who told me she wanted to get revenge on her British oil tycoon boyfriend by kissing me in a dark stairwell during a blackout in Yasamal, Baku.
But before I reveal the answers she and others offered, it will help if I first describe the teatimes and cutting tables of the region where many families forged their identities.
The culinary life of the Kavkaztsi is not only about enjoying a hefty collection of hearty meats, rich sauces, and stuffed breads spiced with stories of survival and absurdity. It is also a release of tension, the grand glorious end of a cathartic battle to tame Earth’s offerings.
Producing food is never an easy chore and while the Kavkaztsi, outside the Azeri desert, celebrate a fertile, giving soil, the struggle to plow land despite feuds and landmine risks, to herd animals among high mountains, to slaughter one’s own animals at home, or to gain access to food with sometimes paltry income, was an arduous one. And yet Kavkaz matrons succeeded with creativity.
Hala, the sixty-year-old matron of the Azeri family I lived with on the dormant frontline of Nagorno-Karabakh in 1999, and visiting again in 2003 and 2004, was a powerful force, a “hero mother” as the Soviets would say, and wielded forearms like battle axes.
“Ye, ye, bala!” (Eat, eat, child!) was her mantra whenever I joined the family on the floor cushions for tea or at the table for a meal. She was rugged and muscular, her hair covered almost ironically with a graceful multi-colored scarf. And she swung her arms with a vigorous, attention-getting body-language.
Her voice woke me every morning at dawn. “Chirp, chp, chp, chp…,” she’d cluck as the geese, ducks, turkeys, and chickens gathered to catch her dustings of seed. They’d respond with noises, “wonk, squawk, gobble, cheep,” which I would absorb into my foggy, waking dream, thinking it the eager debate of Ibragim and the Azeri construction engineers with whom I was working that fall.
Over time, Hala insisted I shadow her to learn the ways of the farm, the unisex tasks, at least. My volunteering to milk the water buffalo was scoffed at and later brought up just for laughs on several other occasions.
After feeding the birds, Hala would corral the fowl to the house gate where one of her daughters, daughters-in-law, or neighbors would watch the multi-familied collection as they waddled out into a collective plot which faced across the Araz River flood plain toward the sandy mountains of Iran to the left and to the right, the snow-capped green rises of Armenian-controlled Karabakh.
Hala would turn back to the kitchen, boiling Darjeeling tea in a basic samovar, pounding flour and slapping dough to the cylindrical clay oven outside, and churning cream which, for some reason she kept in her bedroom. Then she would nudge along her spritely daughter, Gullar, who was preparing for school, or her husband, Gudrat, or son Heydar, who were duty-bound to take turns and deal with neighbors to move the livestock to the grazing area on the border, raise or raze the grapevines, and harvest the beans.
On my days off from the humanitarian project where I worked with Ibragim, Hans, Fikrat and others, I would join Heydar in his daily grind. We would take about three water buffalo, twenty sheep, and five cattle to the border region where there was a pasture beside a rudimentary vineyard.
Along the way, we cut through the gravel paths of the village. In the summer, the foliage hung deep with persimmons, pears, and pomegranates. The village of Birinci Mahmudlu was at times a muddy, backwards setting, and yet at other times, seasonally, it was Eden.
With Heydar and at other times with Fikrat at the grazing lands, that’s when I began to hear my first stories of the Caucasus. The very first one was quaint. Fikrat had met a foreigner who came through to do a humanitarian assessment of the war damage. Later, his family hosted a Swiss visitor who was simply overjoyed to see the culture. Each of them left a few books behind.
Fikrat, the resourceful war veteran who would later tell me his battlefield story, knew no English at the time. Having so many grueling hours with the flock, he brought out those books and taught himself the language, practicing words out where no one could hear him except the sheep. Within two years he was working as a translator for a leading international agency. And so now Heydar, the brother more interested in Karate and weight lifting, had picked up the books and, with less success, was trying to teach himself.
“Milch?” he would say pointing at the water buffalo. “What?” I’d reply having no idea what he was trying to say. He would get angry, leap in the air, and chop an invisible opponent’s head off with his roundhouse kick.
Later, the language games would prepare me to meet Vano, the young man who spent his evening hovering around the new Kazbegi Inn in the highland townlet of the same name in the Georgian Republic. The little town basked in the holy glory of a little hill top monastery, which in turn basked in the glory of the high snow-capped Caucasus mountains, including Mount Kazbegi.
Vano snagged me and a friend once we arrived by taxi. He carried a number of dictionaries with him, claiming that out of sheer curiosity and boredom he had taught himself seven languages. My travel partner at the time was Chinese-American. They immediately began to chat and laugh. Vano said there were three great talents in the Caucasus: Long life, long hikes, and languages.
Nearly every day of my six visits to the Caucasus began with tea. With Hala’s family in Azerbaijan we sipped tea three times a day. The family would meet at the porch table just outside in the crisp morning breeze. In the winter, we’d gather on cushions on the floor beside the wood burning stove.
Heydar, the lively humorist who served a mean roundhouse karate kick, would arrive with a beaming full-bodied smile, even while he was taking his filthy shoes off to come inside. He was in his mid-twenties, an urban intellectual born, raised, and obligated out here on the farm. Within seconds of taking a seat on the floor cushion, he would remember that he needed to feed the chained dog or carry a tub of water buffalo milk, run out and run in again.
Hala arrived with pear-shaped glass filcans of blazing hot tea, with saucers, then return with a bowl of berry jam. Around this time, Gudrat, the father of the family, a modest quiet man who once ran the village collective would come out.
As custom in parts of the Caucasus, Gudrat poured his tea into the saucer, blew on it to cool it, staged a sugar cube on the rim, and sipped the tea through it. Others, like Heydar, tossed a piece of berry candy into a cheek and drank the tea through that. Hala just went ahead and mixed a spoonful of bekmez, their homemade, foot-crushed berry jam, into my filcan.
Perhaps the best story I ever heard over tea among the Kavkaztsi was in nearby southern Russia in 2006. My colleague Bashir, the Ingush engineer from Grozny who talked fast and had cucumbers in his yard, began telling our Chechen co-workers a story in the dense Vainakh tongue they shared.
As Zara, the sweet village girl who married young and wore high heels to refugee camps, sat down with us before a meeting, the others began to chuckle. I insisted they translate.
During the Second Chechen War, a Katyusha rocket landed at the base of the porch of Bashir’s neighbor’s house in Grozny. For two or three years, the neighbor, his wife, and kids delicately went on with their life, climbing around, and avoiding this explosive hovering under their house. Finally, a demining crew came to see if they could remove the rocket. The neighbor immediately began arguing with the officer.
“What are you doing?” The neighbor yelled. “Seeing if we can remove this rocket,” the officer replied. “Just leave it there,” the neighbor responded. “After all that we’ve lost in this war, we don’t want to lose our house, too.”
At this, all the Chechen men laughed darkly. It took some time to decode, but I found the tale revealed so much more about the Chechen conundrum than any news story.
Another incredible tea time tale from the Caucasus was when Zara and I returned from an abandoned factory in Ingushetia. For Bashir and the others, we described Tatyana, a woman in her sixties who lived in a plastics factory drainage basin which had become partly submerged with water. From the moment we arrived to the moment we left, and the same when we returned again, the woman sobbed continuously. It was as if the place had flooded with her tears.
Zara asked Tatyana why she was living in a water-filled drainage basin room. Tatyana explained that during the First and Second Chechen Wars she and her husband sustained the bombings, raids, more bombings, and hunger. Finally, her husband was killed and their apartment flattened. Like thousands of others, she fled to neighboring Ingushetia where she had no choice but to house wherever the government and refugee agencies instructed her.
The cooking oil factory had shut down, so the empty space was made available. Like dozens of others she took a room. It was a lucky sized room. In the summer’s heat and dryness it must have looked large and cool, if moldy. But then the rains came. The room filled with water while she was sleeping, coming to the edge of her bed. She tried to escape, but she was so hysterical, traumatized, and sobbing that even her similarly doomed neighbors would not help her. Soon she came down with tuberculosis, so no one would talk to her and she had no where else to stay.
Her voice became like fingernails on slate. When winter came her shoes, footwear, and anything else which had fallen under the fetid water froze. All alone, she had wanted to die.
Finally, her requests made it to the aid agency, to Zara, and to Bashir, and a simple plug was made to the roof; the room was drained. And she survived. After that, she was a completely different person. Two years of additional suffering, simply because the neighbors thought she was mentally disabled, when really she was muted by fear.
“My first day in the Caucasus,” I said at one of my first teas with Hala and her family in Azerbaijan, “I saw a man shot to death.” I rolled it out like a coin to see who would pick it up. As a testament to what they had seen living on the frontline, they shrugged it off as if it were nothing.
“Azeris are peaceful people,” was a common reply. “We don’t shoot each other.” Sure, while living in east Fuzuli, we still heard landmines detonating across the valley and rare gunshots along the front. But in the capitol, Baku? I sometimes brought my news scraps and maps to tea just to learn from them more about local motivations.
The killing in question, I told them, happened just as my taxi from the airport stopped at a light in downtown Baku. Across the street, two men with rifles blasted their way out of a jewelry store past two other men with pistols—pop, pop, pop—then disappeared around a corner, leaving one of the pistoliers clutching his chest.
The man did not fly back or scream. He just sat down holding his heart, then laid down. Just then, another car arrived, special police, and two more armed men chased the killers. By then, I had alerted the cab driver and we sped away. It was my welcome to the Caucasus.
Hala, who only knew Azeri, no Russian, waited for the translation. Each of my hosts, shrugged, partly disbelieving. Why were visitors like me so obsessed with stories of violence? was the consensus. Heydar later pointed to the house beyond their land, explaining that during the war, this was the deepest Armenian artillery reached. The roof had been repaired just before my arrival. We began talking instead about the farm and about weddings and about grandkids.
Gudrat eventually shared, though he didn’t have details, that their village, Birinci Mahmudlu, literally “the first place of the Mahmud family,” was linked not only to the neighboring villages but to a second set across the Araz River in Iran.
Late at night one could see from the porch the twinkling of the lights in the Azerbaijani village across the border. While herding animals, Gudrat had wondered what it was like over there, within eye shot, almost within shouting distance.
But to cross the fenced Soviet Union frontier which had been carefully plotted here, dividing the Azerbaijani populated areas between the Soviet Union and Iran, was not easy. As head of his collective farm, which in his youth was doing much better than northern Iran, Gudrat never made it over there. Yet he still wondered if he had cousins. Would they look like him?
Later, Fikrat, the middle son of the family who carried his village in his mustache and later led teams removing landmines along the front, took me on my first trip out to the edge of Karabakh. He explained what happened to the family in the early 1990s.
Armenian rebels took over upper Karabakh, the highlands, relatively quickly. Azeri families began flooding down the valley to places like Fuzuli, the district capitol. While Gudrat and Hala took Heydar, Gullar, and the others to stay at a school further west, Fikrat was left to herd the livestock down to the border area and camp out there with them for weeks as the sound of explosions rose in the valley to the east. Eventually, he had no choice but to join the defense forces.
He arrived on the frontline in Fuzuli city. Despite having already won upper Karabakh, the Armenian rebels, supported by Armenia and external funders and volunteers followed the momentum and pushed down out of Karabakh and into Azerbaijan-proper.
When Fikrat arrived in the city, it was in mayhem. And there weren’t enough rifles to go around until the casualties started returning and handing their weapons to fellow Azeris. At this point, Fikrat decided not to tell me anymore.
Not so innocently, I asked him to clarify at least whether and to what degree the war between political groups backed by soldiers had descended into hatred of people based on ethnicity. In the Balkans and Georgia, there were many stories of soldiers killing each other, then meeting for drinks later to talk about it, civilians of either side mixing and blaming the divisions on certain politicians.
But Fikrat described the Azeri-Armenian divide as so deep that there was little hope of recovery. Unlike other frontlines, the one between Azerbaijan and Armenia has not been open since the fighting. As Tom de Waal once wrote, the two populations are “hermeutically sealed” off from one another. Many had either forgotten their commonalities or were simply too young to have ever met someone from the other side.
Everywhere Fikrat and I and the others who joined us traveled through the post-war Araz valley the matrons brought us hot tea and spoonfuls of jam. And at each table the patrons would tell their stories.
From Mahmudlu, we drove to the crossroads village of Ahmadbeyli where the agency office was. From there, we drove the Baku-Nakhchivan road straight along the north side of the border with Iran. On the right, we passed several large settlements where families who fled down from upper Karabakh now lived in the squalor of mud-walled temporary houses, many with satellite TV dishes blooming from their little roofs.
Then on the left rose the gorgeous orchard village of Boyuk Bahmanli, which had been split in half during the war. As we closed in on the frontline area at the border town of Horadiz, two changes evolved on the horizon.
Westward, the Karabakh mountains grew closer, and larger, and higher. And in the foreground, the green summer pasture faded into a bitter desert. By Horadiz, nearly all the fruit trees and vines were in tiny plots behind gates or along the river’s edge. The rest of the valley was barren.
Finally, Fikrat showed me the frontline at Ahmadallar. This sub-district was the only part of Azerbaijan where displaced families had returned. The walk up to each house inside the gate was a beach of gravel, broken roof tiles, cinder chunks, twigs, and stray pieces of metal. I often looked out at the fallow desert, still furrowed but barren under the red hot summer sun and asked: “How are you sure this area is clear of landmines?”
Fikrat and the others’ answers were inconclusive. We aren’t sure, but you can see where the livestock walked so that is probably the most safe. After greeting the head of the house, we would sit in the shade of the cluster of cherry trees or the porch, depending on whether the returned family had been successful in moving water from the ground to their plots now that the infrastructure was smashed.
The patron of one home in Ahmadallar, an old scruffy curmudgeon, threw out a board to play nard, a kind of backgammon. Jafar, the man who drove that day, challenged him to a game.
The matron eventually returned with a filcan, a saucer, a pot of tea, and a container of jam. As Fikrat and the patron both pour their tea into their saucers and sip it through a sugar cube, I decided finally to do the same. And I spilled it all over me.
We can’t grow anything, the matron complained to me as the men played nard. There are no jobs. The water is too little. Our market is empty. But we come back because it’s our land. It’s all we have. What else are we to do?The land was fallow because there were too many mines to risk farming it, but even the orchards and village lands were dry because during the war Armenian rebels had allegedly stolen water pumps, broken pipes, and diverted one of the major canals funneling the snow-cap run-off into a system on the Armenian-controlled side of the line.
Two years later I saw Ahmedallar made the international news. An Azeri military patrol, preparing for a massive campaign to remove the mines from the field, a campaign which Fikrat will help lead there, ran over an anti-tank mine on a path beside the one we used that day. At least two of the soldiers were killed. There, on the dormant front families can barely put tea and bread on the table.
Whenever I describe the Azeri side of why, despite so many traditions they have in common with the Armenians, they still do not speak to them, I like to portray the other side as well.
After visiting dozens of families all along the Azeri side of the dormant fighting line, I did make a special trip via Turkey and Armenia into Armenian-controlled Karabakh.
While the Azeris watched much of their irrigated farmland turn back into desert, the Armenians had rich, black hill soil to grow whatever they wanted. The Armenians faced another problem. While Azerbaijan had oil revenue and an open trading space, Karabakh was trapped like a coastless island with only one little road leading out.
The capitol, Stepanakert (Xankendi, to Azeris), was a classy but economically-frozen hill town. Dozens of taxi drivers stood around smoking cigarettes with nothing to do. The streets had very little traffic at the height of the summer days. The only business which seemed to be booming was the military.
Soon enough, I ran into Armin and Savash, two teenage Armenian soldiers, and shared coffee with them. Armenians were unique in the Caucasus for their solid preference for intense coffee over tea; there was even a tradition of fortune telling based on the patterns left when one turned over a dry cup. Armin and Savash admitted they had never met Azeris, but when they were little they heard stories about how they murdered civilians. So I found Vito, a veteran cab driver who still had a bullet wedged between his knuckle. I asked him despite the war why Armenians and Azeris wouldn’t get together for tea or a meal to talk about their common values.
As Vito drove us out of Stepanakert up the mountain side, around a bend, and finally to the largely abandoned, formerly Azeri paradise of Shusha, I told him that I had been working on the Azerbaijan side of the front with people from Shusha. Vito shook with nervous discomfort.
He took me to the central mosque of Shusha, which at the time was completely burned, empty, and yet swept clean. Across the street a few of the only people visible on the streets of the destroyed city were selling huge quantities of watermelon, but there was no one there to buy it.
He showed me inside then, when I began to ask more questions, rather than respond, he showed me the bullet in his hand. In his eyes there was a long, painful story. The thought of having tea with his fellow Kavkaztsi neighbors troubled him deeply.
When Fikrat and I returned to Birinci Mahmudlu that first trip, half of the family was on hand to prepare a feast. Hans was there, as well. Fikrat encouraged me to sit with Gudrat. Now Gullar, the eighteen-year-old sister of Heydar and Fikrat, darted past again, red in the cheeks. As the house door closed, the smell of the water buffalo butter stored in the bedroom wafted out over everything; a rancid stench but a vital ingredient.
Once I stood right here on this same place watching Heydar press a knife to the throat of a chicken. As I had eaten a great deal of meat in my lifetime, I thought I should learn to slaughter. Heydar was glad to let me do it.
“But I’m not a Muslim,” I replied. “Doesn’t it need to be slaughtered in the Islamic way, halal?” The chicken was scared but not really paying attention. It just bobbed and wiggled under Heydar’s tan fist.
“You can do it the Muslim way,” Heydar told me, offering me the knife. I couldn’t understand why it was so difficult for me, except that I had lived with this chicken, listened to it, and kicked it out of my path. I told him to go ahead.
He calmed the chicken. Petted it. Talked to it. Then made a quick, small cut. He calmed it as it bled out. Only then did he behead it. Later at a neighbor’s son’s circumcision party, I watched as brawny men with fat hands took down a sheep and a water buffalo. I marveled at how men in rural areas were rarely squeamish about blood. Killing animals for food had become so normal for each one of them. I often wondered if that made it easier to kill a man.
At long last, Hala, the matron with forearms like battle axes, followed tea with a healthy buttered green bean dish, a plate of green onion, cilantro, and parsley, and the universal Kavkaz salad of diced cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions.
Gudrat finished roasting skewers of lamb steak seasoned only with pomegranate soaked onion, parsley, and salt. It was called tika kabob or shashlik in Russian.
As if not enough, Hala brought out minced-lamb-stuffed cabbage dolma and when all was done, cold glasses ofdovga, a drink of yoghurt, mint, cucumber, and onion.
In Georgia, I would learn feasts were even more dramatic. The family would designate a formal host, who would lead long toasts, longer even than Ibragim’s beautiful song, praises, and best wishes. Where Russians had a tradition of toasting which often applied pressure on guests to enjoy what the hosts wanted them to do, Georgians and Azeris smothered their guests with generosity and unearned compliments.
Georgian meals were somewhat different from the other Caucasus groups. but all of the Kavkaztsi celebrated a beef borscht soup, tomato-based as opposed to the Russian beet-based soup, and both a small dumpling and large dumpling stuffed with minced lamb or potato or cheese and topped with sour cream.
All of the groups relished grilled lamb steak fresh from the kill, touched with salt and onion, or a pork steak marinated in pomegranate or vodka. Only the Chechens to some extent had come to adhere strictly to Islamic avoidance of pork and alcohol. The others savored these things.
Later, on a French-Georgian cinema restaurant set on the veranda of one of those classic wooden houses in the old city of Tbilisi, and again with Georgian colleagues at a palatial hosting spot in Moscow, I had the chance to see what Georgian food was really about.
There was a red bean pkhali, made with walnuts, garlic, clove, coriander, and celery. The grilled lamb steak came with a sweet and sour plum sauce called, tkemali. Finally, there was chicken in a creamy walnut cinnamon sauce.
In Ingushetia, there was a powerful lady cook who performed miracles in an office kitchen in which I could barely light the stove or get water from the faucet. With the morning’s groceries, she would whip up a Vainakh Khinkal dumpling dish with a bean soup served with a red pepper sauce.
When I finally completed my visits to the rural areas of Azerbaijan, I returned to the capitol Baku and lodged in Hala’s older son’s flat in the hilltop neighborhood of Yasamal. There in Baku, I found Gulnara, the seductive pathological liar to help me understand the Caucasus mind set.
We met in a bar off Fountain Square where she spent time with her male friend; it was a sanctuary of sorts for them as she was a social rebel, thus viewed as unmarriageable among most Azeri men, and he was an outed gay man. I rarely came to bars, but before Hans left to go back to Belgium, he had asked me there for a beer. Almost immediately, I fell for seductive Gulnara.
She told me her name was Leila and that she was a college student. Her friends at school called her Deva. And so I wasn’t sure in the end what her name really was, whether she was really Azeri, which she denied, or part Armenian or Jewish, which she denied. I sought to help her understand the motivations of men in exchange for her teaching me about why the people of the Caucasus, her people, had so much in common and yet remained hopelessly fragmented.
Twice Gulnara missed our dates. At last, after her insistence that we try again, we met at the Jazz Club near the old city. We ascended the steps to the war monument and made out on the crest of the hill. And yet I still had gotten no answers from her about who she was. To assure me, she invited me to go away for the weekend, to the northern town of Quba where there was a Jewish settlement and a Lezgin minority area.
Just as we arrived to Quba station, we discovered the famous north Azeri halva, a kind of saffron and pistachio baklava. It was so orange it glowed, so popular it was for sale at nearly every stall in town that spring.
Gulnara and I caught a driver and soared off into the mountains where we found a cabin. The owner grilled meats and cut bread special for us, his only lodgers. And just when Gulnara and I really started to share, she came down with pains in her side, appendicitis, she said, and we had to return to the city. I gave her money for the surgery, and then she was fine, acting as if nothing happened.
Broken hearted, confused, and nearing the end of an otherwise tough visit to Baku, I decided I wasn’t through learning about the culture. Finally, I met Liza, the slightly older Russian woman, who would tell me she wanted to get revenge on her British oil tycoon boyfriend by kissing me in a dark stairwell.
We had an instant intimacy. Vodka helped. At long last, we made it to my apartment on the hill in Yasamal, Baku. As soon as we passed the rotisserie chicken stand and entered the dungeon-like stairwell of the building, a blackout fell on the neighborhood.
For minutes, very sweet minutes, we listened to each other breathe and laugh while we searched for matches or anything which would keep us from ramming our heads on something. I had been telling her about how I had stayed with a wonderful Azeri family on the Karabakh front, how I had plans to see Georgia and southern Russia, and how I couldn’t get it out of my head how the people of the Caucasus have so many reasons to enjoy life together and yet many chose instead to fight.
She kissed me in the darkness. We finally made it upstairs. And over candlelight she told me why the Kavkaztsi behaved the way they did toward each other.
Liza was Russian, but had lived her whole life in Baku. Her husband was a jerk. So proud he was, he left her and her son alone. She had high hopes for an international career; she was brilliant. But having a child alone at a young age, she could barely find work as a tutor.
Eventually, Baku welcomed the great oil boom of the late 1990s. Foreigners of all shapes and sizes flooded the city either for oil, the service industry, or the post-war humanitarian cause. A British oil executive found her, saved her and her son, and despite convincing her that she belonged to him continued to sleep with every girl he could find, then return to his wife and kids in England.
Like Azerbaijan, she felt a kind of angry pride. She needed her British oil tycoon and so she had to suffer being exploited by him. And yet when she needed to lash out, to establish herself, her identity, she could not lash out at him.
The people of the Caucasus, I came to understand through her stories, were filled with the most powerful pride, the pride of a people who conquered mountains, dug elbow to elbow in the discovery of oil and the evolution of the carbon fuel industries, who fought shoulder to shoulder in the defeat of the Nazis, who brought the finest sturgeon and caviar to the tables of Europe, who were equals among giants of the world, and yet were historically treated as the millers, shepherds, and butchers of empires.
Often the Caucasus pride and passion manifested in campaigns for independence–the Georgians and Chechens, but in other cases–the Ingush, Dagestanis, Ossetians, Abkhaz, Armenians, and Azeris–their futures were intertwined with their dominant clients. Those who continued to fight or despise their neighbors did so perhaps out of misplaced pride and a yearn for control over their fate.
Although I regretfully had to let Liza go back to her oil executive, and have had trouble keeping up with my friends in southern Russia where email traffic with an American journalist is not always safe, I did cultivate a long, sturdy correspondence with Fikrat and Heydar. And so I hear about the village of Birinci Mahmudlu.
The latest story is that both Fikrat and Heydar married women named Sevda, which means love. Both had kids. Fikrat rose in the ranks of his aid agency, led mine removal efforts in Azerbaijan, and then got a chance this winter to take an arduous journey to Afghanistan.
We are all waiting anxiously for the next time we can gather together for another meal and hear the latest round of stories from the Caucasus.