Ruzanna Tsaturyan is a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. In Summer 2022 she undertook a secondment with the Borderland Foundation in Poland, where she discovered a wealth of approaches to public remembering and policies of forgetting – while also having two unexpected encounters that brought up some very personal reflections.

Public memory is constructed in complex ways. The DisTerrMem project seeks to further our understanding of the potentially positive power of memory, with specific reference to disputed territories. While I was in Poland, the project’s research team enjoyed three days of intense discussions on the issue, as part of an internal conference held at the University of Warsaw University in June 2022. The main concern shared by us all was the need to rely on concrete cases and fieldwork rather than purely theoretical speculations, while at the same time discussing the potential (and limitations) of a theoretical framework rooted in concepts of agonistic memory.

To my surprise, my own fieldwork in Warsaw was supplemented by an unexpectedly personal turn of events, on which I’ve found it interesting to reflect.

It was raining heavily on the night that I and my colleague, also from Armenia, arrived at Warsaw Airport, so we opted to take a taxi to our accommodation. During previous trips to Warsaw I had noticed that most taxi drivers seemed to be either Polish or Ukrainian, so that was my expectation as we got into the car and did our best to explain our destination. The driver was initially curious and conversational, asking the usual storts of questions – about the purpose of our visit to Poland and other such things. But then he turned on some very loud music. The melody wasn’t familiar and so I asked about the language of the song. The answer was short and sharp - Azerbaijanian. At that point our conversation stopped, leaving the three of us in the car to mull over our current experience, which was not a comfortable one. This was my first time travelling outside Armenia since both the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 Artsakh war, and so my feelings right now were quite intense.

After a while, the taxi driver changed the music to a Georgian melody which I recognized. He explained that it was Georgian music and added that he was from Shulaver in Georgia. As a researcher, I know Shulaver to be a Georgian village in the southeastern Kvemo Kartli region, which is inhabited mostly by Azerbaijanis - while the neighboring Shulaveri/Shahumian was Armenian-populated. From this, I understood that the driver would probably have been able to recognize and even understand our Armenian speech, since most Shulaveri Azerbaijanis do.

All three of us were now silent, because we ‘recognized’ each other. We kept quiet and continued to listen to the loud Azerbaijani music that the driver had now turned on again. I don't know whether he did so as some kind of gesture of resistance, or if he was simply enjoying the music. Either way, for myself and my colleague it was an uncomfortable experience. It also wasn’t the last one…

The next time we found ourselves needing to call taxi in Warsaw was again late at night, having found ourselves lost in an unfamiliar area. We were at a bridge junction with several crossings, there were lots of youngsters ready for Friday night, and Google Maps was showing us the wrong directions! To make matters worse, the taxi we called - via the taxi app Chatbox - was waiting for us at the wrong pick-up place and so we struggled for a while to find him. On Chatbox we had noticed that the driver had a Slavonic name so we messaged him back in Russian trying to explain our location. Finally, we found each other and we were very grateful to the driver for waiting for us. As we got into the car and got settled, he suddenly asked in Russian:

“So, to Yerevan?”

Immediately, we felt hat same feeling of discomfort and insecurity.

“How did you guess?” I asked him. “I can easily recognize you guys among the millions,” was the answer.

This response left us feeling even more worried since, again, the driver was from Azerbaijan. An interesting conversation then followed. Having presenting himself with a Slavic name in Chatbox, the young man now started to tell us his story about his mandatory military service near Kharabakh some years ago. He said that he was then tired of the ‘closedness’ of his country and so he moved to Ukraine seeking a new and freer life. There, he got married and had a job until the start of Russian-Ukrainian war, at which point he fled to Poland and began working as a taxi driver.

As part of his narrative, the driver recounted and compared our respective countries’ histories and painful experiences. This was, he said, the first time he had met Armenians who were still living in Armenia, having previously only met Armenians who were living in Russia and Ukraine. At times he asked us about Armenia but still, it was for the most part a somehwat uncomfortable conversation in which we felt we were ‘being told how it is’ rather than having a dialogue about different perspectives.

The driver said that state officials from Azerbaijan found him here in Warsaw and told him to stay available in case they needed him in the army. He said, “I was neither afraid nor escaping, as in our country it is the same: if you were born a man, you have to fight. But I do not know how long this can be continued… and how it will eventually be decided whose Karabakh is?”

At this point I felt that I had to intervene in the conversation, and offered, “You know, historically Armenians were living there, and they’re still living there, it’s their home, their homeland and they want to live in their homeland.”

“Yes, but the people who were living in the territories later taken by Armenians also considered these places as their home,” he replied. “How long the mothers’ eyes will be in tears, my neighbours were killed, wounded, we lost more than 3,000 people[1], you lost even more[2]. No sons from wealthy families were served or killed, only us. Ordinary people are serving as weapons in wars, and the worst thing is that I am sure, even if the situation will be normalised, that Armenians and Azerbaijanis cannot live in peace with each other, they may not fight each other for a while, but it won’t last for long….”

After we arrived safely at our desitnation, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about history and micro-histories over conflicts, about the huge human sufferings that are erased from official narratives and data, about political manipulations and skillful strategies applied by politicians on our collective remembering and forgetting. There is nothing like a direct, personal experience to bring such reflections to front-of-mind.

A few months later, when I was back in Yerevan, Azerbaijani forces launched another large-scale military attack against sovereign Armenian territory, along the eastern and southern borders of the Republic of Armenia, using artillery and large-caliber rifles in the direction of Goris, Sotk, and Jermuk. Armenia officially announced 206 soldiers killed and missing. Azerbaijani sources reported 79 soldiers killed.

This whole experience, and these examples, shine a light on a fundamental question of our research project – namely, how can we talk about agonism as long as voices remain unheard, and in a context in which conflict and aggression have not ended but are being further expanded, with a view to conquering new territories and inevitably taking even more lives.

[1] According to public data, Azerbaijan announces about 2,906 deaths. mod.gov.az

[2] Armenian officially announced about 3,822 deaths both servicemen and civilians. 187 Armenian troops still MIA, 21 civilians missing in 2020 Nagorno Karabakh war | ARMENPRESS Armenian News Agency

Ruzanna Tsaturyan is a Research Fellow at the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia’s Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography. Her main research interests are in the scope of cultural heritage, nationalism, gender studies and food anthropology. She has several publications on transformations of Armenian food ways, ethnic perceptions of food, connections of food and memory, and food and migration. She is also an expert in educational and gender policy and has issued policy papers on education, gender and school governance in Armenia.

"The conflict that keeps chasing us"