We bought them in the late autumn of 2007 in the bazaar of Tabriz, Western Iran. They had been made for an engagement present. The jewels come from the nomadic tribes around Mashad to the east. The carpet – which is in fact a camel bag opened – was woven by Bakhtiari nomads in the mountains above Isfahan to the south. I usually read by leaning against it in the evenings.
In the last week there were elections in Iran. Many call in doubt the authenticity of the official results. There are manifestations all around the country. As I’m writing this, a crowd of several thousand people gathered in Tehran. According to recent news, the militiamen have been authorized to use live ammunition. Yesterday in Isfahan a young boy was already shot dead.
The inhabitants of Tehran for the last days have been praying by thousands “Allahu akbar” – “God is the greatest” – on the rooftops, just like they did during the revolution of 1979. We have also been intensively praying for them. We ask you to pray for Iran.
In the last week there were elections in Iran. Many call in doubt the authenticity of the official results. There are manifestations all around the country. As I’m writing this, a crowd of several thousand people gathered in Tehran. According to recent news, the militiamen have been authorized to use live ammunition. Yesterday in Isfahan a young boy was already shot dead.
The inhabitants of Tehran for the last days have been praying by thousands “Allahu akbar” – “God is the greatest” – on the rooftops, just like they did during the revolution of 1979. We have also been intensively praying for them. We ask you to pray for Iran.
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16 comentarios:
Dear author, I would like to use the photo of Azeri socks for a poster of Azerbaijan Night event we are planning at the University of Maryland. Could you please kindly give your permission and your name, so we could give you a proper credit? Many thanks in advance.
Dear Araz, thank you for your request. I am happy and feel honored that you will use the photos on an Azerbaijan Night poster. I have uploaded here for you the original photos uncut and in the original resolution.
As a copyright holder, it will be enough to indicate “Studiolum • riowang.blogspot.com”. Thank you in advance! And I would be happy if you could send a photo of the final poster, just as a souvenir, to tv@studiolum.com.
Thank you very much, Studiolum, really appreciate it. I will send you the final poster image as soon as possible. The facebook page of the event is here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=336182278024 you can see the draft version of the poster there.
The poster looks really gorgeous and the program sounds very promising. What a pity it is so far from here. Nevertheless, I am proud that through this photo I will also be a little bit of a part of it.
Dear author (I am sorry for still not knowing your name),
It was a busy day yesterday and the night exceeded all our expectations. It was a fantastic event and you can see it from the photos posted at the event page.
Thanks again for the photo and here is the final poster design: http://www.araz.netfirms.com/azeri/Poster-A3-02.jpg
Thank you very much, Araz! It has become a great poster. Thanks again for the honor of choosing our photo for it.
I have enjoyed the pictures, and by adding in the imagination the warm Azeri hospitality I know well, it was a bit like being there personally.
Best wishes from Budapest
Tamás
Thank you, Tamás (now I know your name), it was very nice of you to share your photo.
You could go further to the North a little to see also the Republic of Azerbaijan. Then you would also learn about the same culture which gave birth to the first parliamentary republic and the first opera in the East, the nation who was one of the first to fight for getting back its independence and the first to destroy the borders of the Soviet Empire.
If you know Russian then I would recommend you to read "Letter to friend". Although it is almost two decades old and sounds a bit naive, it still may help to see objective view at the history of the region and its recent past.
Thank you
Dear Araz,
thank you for pointing me to the text of İsmihan Yusubov. I have found it a good text, absolutely not naïve, but reasoned and just as much emotional as its subject and context – a letter to a friend – obviously requires. As I still find it actual, I will translate it to Hungarian and try to publish it in a cultural-political magazine.
I myself having grown up in a region where different nationalities, Hungarians and Romanians, Czechs and Bohemo-Germans, Poles and Ukrainians, Serbs and Croatians, Jews and Goyim live mixed and nurture ancient hatreds against each other, coining their own all-exclusive versions of history and occasionally bursting out and destroying each other’s people, villages, churches and cemeteries and depopulating whole regions, understand the situation of your region and while considering it just as absurd as ours, nevertheless I also see its deeply serious and insoluble nature. Similarly to Yusubov, I also know well and condemn those ideological leaders who try to turn this situation, only resolvable by mutual understanding and compromises, into an unilateral victory, thus causing extreme sufferance to hundreds of thousands. To me, in the final analysis, this sufferance is the most objective output of these conflicts, and when I occasionally touch upon such conflicts, I focus on these sufferances and losses, as I did in some of my posts written on places and cultures disappeared.
I would be grateful to you if you could point me to more detailed literature – at the moment only European languages including Russian, but in the near future I also intend to start to learn Azeri which does not seem that difficult on the basis of Turkish and of my own mother language which is grammatically also near to it. Now I only have Azeri language material from the South, but I hope that the versions of the language spoken in the two regions do not differ that much from each other.
Yes, I would like very much to cross the Araz – which gave name to you – some day and to visit Northern Azerbaijan as well. In Southern Azerbaijan I had so good experiences and received so much warmth and hospitality that I look forward with great hopes to this visit.
Best wishes
Tamás
Dear Tamás,
I really appreciate your sentiments and enthusiasm in regards of disseminating the Letter. Here is The Letter to Friend with Post Scriptum as it was published in 2002. The Post Scriptum is more sentimental, but it covers the situation in early 1990s.
You did not agree with me that it is naive. But the author (Ismikhan Yusubov, who is my father by the way) wrote that the Truth is with us and this is the reason why all evil happening around is not successful. Isn't it naive? Palamedes said once (before he was accused and executed) "The Truth has died before me". It turned out that Truth has been trampled down under the caterpillar tracks of the evil propaganda machine. At that time we haven't seen yet the black January of 1990, the Khojaly tragedy of 1992, former KGB general coming to power in 1993 and almost a million Azerbaijani refugees living in unthinkable conditions in tent towns in 1994.
Tamás, you are right that it is still actual. One of the tragical reasons is that I don't know what to offer you as a more detailed literature. Although there are many articles around, few books might be Black garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through peace and war
By Thomas De Waal and The Azerbaijani Turks: power and identity under Russian rule
By Audrey L. Altstadt but I didn't really read them.
I was hurt to read ...Azeri Turks who, inspired by the 1915 Armenian genocide in Turkey, also launched pogroms against them. Then in 1920 the new Soviet power annexed the territory from Armenia to Azerbaijan as an autonomous province... in your blog, but as my father I can blame only myself. I hope that this accidental encounter will help you to see the tramped down, profaned Truth.
Thank you,
Araz
Dear Araz,
thank you for this more recent version of the Letter. I have downloaded it but I wanted to first reply to you and then take time to read it.
What Palamedes intended to tell to Ulysses was that this latter killed Truth before killing him. I, however, agree with your father that Truth cannot be killed, and as long as I stick to it, I also remain largely intact and independent of the evil trying to destroy it and me altogether. This is both my faith and my personal experience.
Thank you for the books recommended. I have read De Waal’s Black Garden, the best, most researched and balanced literature I know on the Karabagh conflict. The book of Altstadt I have not known, but it looks like a very promising one and I will soon read it, too.
I am very sorry that while I was writing my post on the Julfa cemetery not as an attack against anyone but as a necrolog about something precious that went definitely lost, I have unintentionally hurt you and possibly some other readers, too.
First of all let me say as an apology that in the phrases quoted, as in all the post, I tried to be objective and stick to historical facts as much as they were available to me. Concerning the pogroms, I relied on Robert Hewsen's Armenia: A Historical Atlas (Chicago, 2001) which writes on p. 266 that in June 1919, after the Caucasian offensive of the Turkish army, an extensive ethnic cleansing took place in Nakhichevan which claimed the lives of several thousands of Armenians and destroyed forty-five villages. Hewsen is generally regarded objective, but as an Armenian author I can imagine he was biased here, and I would be really grateful to you for more exact historical facts. The other point, the annexation of Nakhichevan from Armenia, to which it had administratively belonged since the Turkmanchay Treaty of 1828, to Azerbaijan, was described in detail precisely in De Waal’s book in the same terms that I borrowed from him.
Nevertheless, an Azeri reader can point out with right that I did not mention the atrocities committed by the Armenians at the same time, the crimes of the Dashnak against Azeri villages, the forced “Armenification” of Zangezur, and so on. The reason I did so was that I only focused on Nakhichevan and only wanted to give a very sketchy outline of how Nakhichevan lost its Armenian population. But now, as I re-read it, I see that these facts, torn out of their historical context, can give an one-sided impression which was not my intention. So I will re-write or simply omit them, as much as the rest of the text can do without them. And I ask you to forgive me if I unintentionally hurt you.
Sağ ol ساغ اول
Tamás
Thanks a lot for your understanding, Tamás
First of all I would like to thank you again for your interest in the Letter. In fact the PDF file is not really a "recent version", it should be the same with the webpage just with additional chapter - Post Scriptum.
I can't agree more that the Absolute Truth is the source of eternal life. But it seems that its reign will be established only in the age of Absolute Justice. Until then here and there the Truth will be killed. Crafty and guileful Odysseus is a Hero of Our Time, not artless and straightforward Palamedes.
How many times I felt sorry that I am not a historian, hence I can not direct you to a literature. But I hope you will agree with me that annexation of Nakhichevan from Armenia, to which it had administratively belonged since the Turkmanchay Treaty of 1828 sounds a bit far-fetched, at least because for 1828 there was no Armenia as a state, as well as there was no Azerbaijan. What were there are Nakhchivan khanate ruled by Kangarly khans and Iravan (Yerevan) khanate ruled by members of Gajar dynasty, both Turkic (Azeri). For my knowledge Armenians were a minority there at that time, but they enjoyed some level of self-governance under the Melikdoms.
As a result of Turkmanchay both khanates passed to Russian Empire, more than a hundred thousands of Armenians were moved there, khanates were abolished (the last Iravan khan and his family were actually killed in 1827 while defending the city fortress) and Armenian Region (Армянская Область) was created on these territories (which stayed until 1840) with an administrative center in Iravan. Armenian sources do not deny that even after this Azeris were almost the half of the population of the city, but they tend to omit this fact.
Well, even if Nakhchivan was annexed, what would it prove? "Absolutely nothing" I would say as my father. But what are the intentions of those, who are glorifying the perpetrators of the Dashnak crimes, you mentioned above. You may think that I am paranoiac, but I wonder who is the next Palamedes?
Köszönöm szépen
Araz
Dear Araz,
you are right. I was superficial in identifying the Armenskaya Oblast' and the Erevan Government following it with the future Armenia. It would have been more exact to say that after the disintegration of Russian state power in 1918 and the birth of the new Caucasian republics, the disputed region was finally annexed to Azerbaijan, as I write now. “Annexed” in the sense of “united/adjudged to” and not in the sense of “taken from”. I hope it is unambiguous now and you agree with it.
I also agree that even if the region was annexed “from – to”, it would not prove anything. I know too well the reality of this, living in a country of which two third (!) was annexed “from - to” in 1920. My aim was absolutely not to seek or support any legitimacy rooted in historical claims. I hope this is clear to you. As I wrote before, in these stories of places and cultures disappeared I am a chronicler of losses as the most objective results of historical conflicts. I wanted to tell, in a necessarily sketchy way, about the process of the disappearance of a population until there was left but their cemetery. My focus was this cemetery, and I wanted to relate the story of its tragic destiny, as a medieval aşık sang about the fall of a brave hero independently from which people it belonged to.
Xudahafiz
Tamás
Dear Tamás
You are on a very noble mission and I can only wish you every success. Your blog is an absolute jewel and I quite enjoyed reading it. I hope you will visit Azerbaijan North to Araz sometime. Although I am in the US right now, we would love to host you in Baku.
Viszontlátásra,
Araz
P.S. As you see I make some progress in learning Hungarian thanks to a Hungarian Online Language Course website
Dear Araz,
thank you very much for the invitation. I gratefully and happily accept it. Please tell me when you will be in Baku, and I will try to find time to go to see you. This will be a good excuse to start my Azeri studies the sooner possible (even if my manuals are in Arabic script, from the South, but the sound, I hope, will be the same).
That Hungarian course is really good. It was already recommended by other non-Hungarian friends as well. If you proceed a little bit further in it, you will see how much Turkic languages and Hungarian are similar both in grammar (vowel harmony, suffixes, agglutination etc.) and in words. Would have you imagined that the phrase “Cebimde çok elma vardır” sounds in Hungarian the same: “Zsebemben sok alma van”? where each word and suffix has the same meaning and function. This helped me to learn Turkish not as a foreign language but as a far away dialect of my own mother tongue.
Uğurlar olsun
Tamás
P.S. For a further possible common word, you are invited to read this report from southern Azerbaijan.
Dear Tamás
Thank you for accepting my invitation. I will be mainly in the US during the summer, so it may be autumn, the best season to visit Baku. I will definitely let you know when I am back.
The phrase you mentioned sounds like Cibimdə çox(lu) alma var in Azerbaijani, which is closer to Hungarian. So I am pretty sure it must be easy for you to learn it, considering your knowledge of Turkish and Persian. There are differences between Azeri spoken in Iran and the state language of Azerbaijan. It seems that since Azeris, who are the largest "minority" (more than 20% of population) in Iran, are not granted the right of formal education in mother tongue, although they speak it they don't write it much. As a result their language fades into nonexistence slowly becoming more and more Persian. I hope the Azeri will not be a topic of your blog one day.
As for Genj there is a city in Azerbaijan - Ganja, which was a capital of few kingdoms during the history. It is also famous because of XII century poet - Nizami Ganjavi. His poems in Persian are highly regarded by many nations.
In 2004 when we were flying back from the UK with a group of school children - winners of the First LEGO Robotics Tournament in Azerbaijan I was sitting next to a gentleman who was traveling to Uzbekistan (?) to provide language training for the US military. He was a US citizen of Afghan background. We had an interesting conversation and he was surprised to hear that Nizami Ganjavi actually was named after the city he lived and died in. "I was thinking it is just a pseudonym meaning treasure" he said. Then I showed him an Azerbaijani 500 Manats banknote with Nizami portrait on it and invited him to visit his mausoleum in Ganja whenever he has got a chance. I would not be able to do so now, because the banknotes were changed in 2006 to not portray anybody.
It reminds me a drawing I have seen in a restaurant in Berlin with Bach, Gauss and other famous Germans crying at a table with money coins on it. First I didn't get the meaning, then I noticed that all these famous people were those portrayed on the late deutsche mark... Yet another story for your blog, I am afraid.
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