Lahij

En Lahij el calor de la calle principal empuja a entrar en la casa de té. La nevera tiene una marca de infusión con el nombre prometedor de Aysberq, y en cada mesa un juego de dominó con un ábaco por jugador para calcular las ganancias.


En la mesa de al lado clientes habituales en traje de domingo echan una partida, pantalón planchado, camisa blanca. Clavan las fichas con fuerza sobre la mesa con un vibrante chasquido, tal como recuerdo hacer a mi abuelo durante mi infancia. Sonrío con el recuerdo. El viejo me mira como disculpándose, como un chaval cogido en falta. Do, vociferan, dos, chahor, cuatro, pendj, cinco. Escucho con sorpresa. Bo otobus-e si soʿati yad, llega en el autobús de las tres en punto, dicen de alguien. Y aunque en los primeros siglos después de Cristo, los soldados persas se asentaron aquí en el Cáucaso, en la frontera norte del imperio, no podían haber llevado consigo un autobús, así que el término hubo que tomarlo de una lengua moderna, pero el resto de palabras es una herencia persa cuidadosamente preservada, aún más o menos inteligible para un oído persa. Estoy en casa.


Hoy el pueblo, ochocientas almas, solo usa la mezquita de abajo porque en la superior han instalado un museo. Aún así, antes de entrar hay que quitarse los zapatos. El joven encargado se alegra de poder practicar inglés con un extranjero pero le pido que nos guíe en la lengua tat. Me mira incrédulo; empieza a decir lentamente, casi sílaba a sílaba: Lahij se compone de siete partes del pueblo… las palabras turcas se mezclan con un arcaico, lapidario persa, como si quisiera gritar al otro lado de una línea divisoria de dos mil años, como si la guarnición perdida quisiera rendir cuentas a un comité de inspección que llega de la metrópolis dos mil años más tarde. El tiempo se despliega ante mí como un panorama montañoso. Bâle, motevadjam, sí, comprendo, digo. La mujer de la taquilla baja sus agujas de calceta y abre mucho los ojos. «Cómo puede saber usted lahiji?», me pregunta. «hablo persa», le respondo. Finalmente, la visita acaba y salimos del museo, un pequeño grupo nos espera delante de la antigua mezquita, tengo que decirles unas pocas palabras a cada uno, las palabras tat y persas se abrazan como un puente sobre la trinchera del tiempo.

Lahij, al igual que Xinaliq, era hasta hace poco muy difícil de visitar. El poblado mira hacia el paso de montaña por donde se esperaba al enemigo. A su espalda, en dirección a la antigua Persia, la fortifica un muro de montañas solo quebrado por la profunda hoz del río Ghidirman. La carretera, excavada hace pocos años en la roca siguiendo el río, es una vía dura, aún difícil de recorrer en coche y solo transitable con seguridad entre el deshielo de primavera y las lluvias de otoño. Es el período en que los artesanos de Lahij, descendientes de los antiguos armeros, hacen su negocio con el goteo de turistas.

En un tiempo hubo doscientas herrerías en Lahic pero tras el colapso de la Unión Soviética quedaron solo ocho. Desde entonces no hay demanda para más, aunque los lugareños ponen todas sus esperanzas en la nueva carretera que cruza treinta kilómetros de tierras montañosas. Es domingo, llegan dos autobuses de turistas desde la ciudad de Ganja, a unos doscientos kilómetros. Estudiantes de inglés de segundo y tercer año que vienen aquí por primera vez. Recorren las calles del pueblo en grupos de cinco o seis, antes o después, todos acabarán acercándosenos, educadamente, como cachorros, quieren fotografiarse con los extraños. Es la primera vez que cualquiera de ellos habla en inglés con un extranjero. Están tan emocionados como antes aquellos otros jóvenes tats. Experimentan por igual que por medio de esa lengua que ahora hablan entran en una comunidad con una gran, pero también remota, cultura, cuya existencia es desde ahora algo cierto y palpable, que les ha enviado hasta allí estos mensajeros de carne y hueso.


Dariush Talaʿi: Hejâz. Mirza Abdollah radifja, Âvâz-e Dashti (1999)

Lahij

In Lahij, the heat chases you from the main street into the teahouse. The refrigerator has a brand of beer with the promising name Aysberq, and at every table, a set of dominoes, with an abacus for each of the two players, to keep track of the winnings.


At the table next to us, old regulars are playing in their Sunday suits, ironed trousers, white shirts. They lay each play down forcefully on the table with a loud slap, like my grandfather did in my childhood. I smile at this memory, the old man sends an apologetic look at me, like a child caught in the act. Do, they shout, two, chahor, four, pendj, five. I’m listening in surprise. Bo otobus-e si soʿati yad, he comes on the three o’clock bus, they say about someone. And although in the first centuries after Christ, Persian soldiers settled here in the Caucasus, on the northern border of their empire, they could not yet have brought an autobus with them, so they had to borrow it from a modern language, but the rest of the words form a carefully preserved Persian heritage, still more or less intelligible for a Persian ear. I’m at home.


Today the village, eight hundred strong, uses only the lower mosque, for in the upper one they have installed a museum. Nevertheless, before entering you still have to take off your shoes. The young attendant is glad to practice his English with a foreigner, but I ask him to guide us in the local Tat language. He looks at me in disbelief, he starts to say slowly, almost syllable by syllable: Lahij is composed of seven village parts… Turkic words are mixed with some archaic, lapidary Persian, as if he wanted to shout across the divide of two thousand years, as if the lost garrison wanted to report to the inspection committee arriving after two thousand years from the capital. Time unfolds before me like a dazzling mountain panorama. Bâle, motevadjam, yes, I understand, I say. The cashier lady puts down the knitting needles, her eyes open wide. “How do you know Lahiji?” she asks. “I speak Persian”, I say. By the time the visit ends, and we exit the museum, a small group is waiting for us in front of the former mosque, I have to say a few words to everyone, Tat and Persian words cling together into a bridge over the abyss of time.

Lahij, just like Xinaliq, was until recently not easy to get to. The settlement looked toward the mountain pass, from where the enemy was expected. Behind its back, in the direction of the former Persia, a mountain wall towers, broken only by the deep gorge of the Ghidirman river. The road, carved a few years ago into the rocks along the river, is a dirt road, still difficult to cover by car, and you can safely travel on it only between the spring thaw and the winter rains. This is the period when the craftsmen of Lahij, the descendants of the former armourers, must collect their income for the whole year from the thin trickle of tourists.

Once there were two hundred blacksmith’s shops in Lahic, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union there were only eight left. For the time being there is no demand for more, although the locals cherish high hopes about the new road crossing thirty kilometers of mountainous land. It is Sunday, two tourist buses arrive from the city of Ganja, lying two hundred kilometers away. Second and third year college students of English, they are here for the first time. They roam the streets of the village in groups of five or six, sooner or later each of them stalks us, gently, like kittens, and they let themselves be photographed with the foreigners. They all speak for the first time in English with a foreigner. They are just as excited, like the Tat boys were before. They experience in the same way, that through the language they speak, they enter into a community with a great, albeit remote, culture, whose existence is from now on a certain thing, fot it has sent to them its living messengers.


Dariush Talaʿi: Hejâz. Mirza Abdollah radifja, Âvâz-e Dashti (1999)

Lahij

Clouds squeezed between the mountains, directly underneath the narrow road carved into the rock, high above the river valley. Perhaps a taciturn taxi driver, who does not turn on the light even after dark, claiming in all seriousness that it consumes gasoline, and who tries to localize your country by asking you who your traditional enemies are. Perhaps a good friend, who quotes by heart the passages of Azerbaijani literature and movie on the region, but travels here for the first time with you, two hundred kilometers from his hometown Baku.

Baku-Lahij on full screen

In the post of yesterday we mentioned the Tat villages in Azerbaijan, about whose Iranian dialects the young Gruenberg-Cvetinovic wrote his doctoral thesis. Now we present the largest one, Lahij, also in pictures. The photos were taken by Aleksandr Cheban on his 2011 tour in Azerbaijan.


The southern Caucasus became part of the Persian Empire from the 6th century BC, and the ethnic groups speaking dialects related to Persian started to migrate up in the mountains. The process accelerated under the Sassanians (3rd-7th c. AD), when Persian garrisons and villages providing for them were settled on the northern border region.

From the 11th century Turkish tribes, the ancestors of modern Azerbaijanis began to populate the region, but the Iranian ethnic groups have survived to this day in the isolated valleys of the mountains. The Turks called them Tats, settled farmers, but they have no unified name for themselves. Some villages call themselves Parsi, Persian, others Daghli, highlander, while the inhabitants of Lahij simply refer to themselves as Lohijan, Lahiji, since in the wide region there is no other settlement with which they could have a common identity. A barrier of the common Tat identity is also the fact that some of them are Shiite, others Sunni, still others Armenian Christians, and what is more, the Mountain Jews also speak in Tat.

Lahij is one of the oldest inhabited settlement in modern Azerbaijan, with several hundred years old, earthquake-resistent stone houses, and a thousand years old sewage system, one of the oldest in the world.

Since the Middle Ages Lahij has been one of the most important centers of Azerbaijani arts and crafts. The village is divided into three parts by crafts, each of them having its own main square, mosque, hammam and cemetery. Beside the leatherworkers and carpet weavers, the most important craft is that of the copper-smiths, still pursued today by many masters with the traditional techniques. Sometime they delivered to the whole region, up to Georgia and Southern Russia, and down to Persia. According to unverifiable legends they made Monomakh’s Cap, the oldest crown of the Russian Tsars. Now they wait in the shops established on the ground floor for the resolute tourists willing to travel this far on the arduous roads.

In the syncretic Muslim belief of the village the mummified cat wards off evil

A fifteen-minute long film of the Belarusian TV (in Russian) about the village, in which the above images unexpectedly come to life