If someone asks what the fastest way to understand a country is, one of the first answers that would come to mind would be taxi drivers. States explain themselves through official statements, politicians through speeches, and television through headlines. Their world is the world of macro-politics, grand decisions, and cold border lines. Countries, however, speak through taxis. Beneath those grand narratives, people are left alone with their own small sorrows, and it is often behind the steering wheel that they whisper the real story.
In recent years, I have frequently come across taxi drivers from Karabakh in Yerevan. Realizing from my accent that I am not from there, they ask, "Where are you from?" I reply, "I'm from Istanbul." "I'm from Karabakh too. So both you and I are living far from home," they answer. Every time, the same objection crosses my mind. I chose to live here. In fact, I do not even feel like I am living in exile. They, on the other hand, were forced to leave the place where they used to live. Then I ask, "How are you? Have you gotten used to living here?"
Most of the time, I receive a similar answer: "People here don't like us."
The first time I heard this, I was surprised. Apparently, the sentence did not make much sense. The people of Karabakh were Armenian, and so were the people of Armenia. So, who did not like whom?
I do not know how widespread this feeling is. Perhaps it was simply something shared by the people I happened to meet. But over the years, in different taxis and from different people, I heard similar sentences. Gradually, I began to reflect on what they meant.
Perhaps the issue was less about who liked whom than about how displaced people saw themselves in their new lives. Sometimes it is impossible to understand an entire society, but when the same sentence is repeated over and over by different voices, one cannot help but follow where it leads.
Solidarity and disappointment
In the autumn of 2023, tens of thousands of people arriving from Karabakh became part of Armenia's everyday life within just a few days. The city changed. More people were looking for housing. Rents increased. Schools became more crowded. For the first time, people began hitting with one another's lives on the same buses, in the same supermarket queues, and in the same apartment buildings.
The issue was not only about the economy. When people from Karabakh spoke, they were immediately recognized by their accent. Although they seemed to speak the same language, the marks left by years and different histories became apparent in the very first sentence. Language does not always bring people closer; sometimes it reminds them who belongs and who does not. Perhaps, for many people from Karabakh, the feeling of alienation had not begun when they crossed the border. It continued even after they had crossed it.
But that was not the whole story. I remember the first days after the people of Karabakh arrived. I saw those who opened their homes, organized aid campaigns, and tried to find jobs for the newcomers. Everyone was doing whatever they could in a remarkable display of solidarity. Perhaps that is why the expressions of resentment I hear today strike me even more deeply. It seems that solidarity and alienation can coexist in the same city.
Alienation twice
Sometimes a person is alienated twice: once in the place they left behind, and once again in the new home they expected would welcome them. As I listened, I realized that at the center of the Karabakh story stood the same ancient question: What remains when a person loses his/her home?
From outside, what happened may appear to some as nothing more than a story of relocation. Armenians of Karabakh came to Armenia—that is, to their own state. But home is also our childhood, our street, our neighbors, the cemetery where our loved ones are buried. When people lose their home, they lose not only a place but also the continuity of their lives.
As Thomas de Waal, one of the leading scholars of Karabakh issue, has argued for years, the Karabakh issue has never been only about territory; it has always been about the places to which people belong. Because Karabakh was never simply a question of who would possess which land. It was a question of where people felt they belonged, which place they called home, and what they truly lost when they lost it.
Name of the loss
Moreover, the memory awaiting them in the place they arrived was not a single one. The people of Karabakh had lost their homes. Thousands of families in Armenia had lost their children.
After the 2020 war, Karabakh was no longer merely the name of a place. It had become the name of a loss that had touched almost everyone's life in one way or another. There were very few people who did not know someone who had lost a son, a brother, a student, or a neighbor. The war had ended on the battlefield, but its consequences had settled into everyday life. In many homes there was an empty chair; in many families, an unfinished life.
For three years after the 2020 war, uncertainty continued. Karabakh lived under a blockade that lasted for months. Negotiations were held; hope and disappointment followed one another. Finally, in the autumn of 2023, nearly the entire Armenian population of the region left Karabakh.
May no one die again
I got very close to a mother who lost her son in the 2020 war. I did not observe her grief from afar; I witnessed her passing through it.
It was in the months after the war had ended. Those were the days when peace and the opening of the borders were being discussed. Imagining myself in the place of this woman, who spent fifty days going from one morgue to another to identify her son's burned body, was deeply painful. I found it unbearably difficult that peace was being discussed so soon after the war, especially for those who had lost children they had sent to fulfill compulsory military service.
One day, I asked her hesitantly, "They are talking about a peace agreement. What do you think?"
Her answer surprised me: "Let peace come and let the border be opened. Let them open, so that no one dies ever again."
Then she added: "Besides, my son did not die for his own country; he died for Karabakh."
Two wounds of the same war
The complaint of the taxi driver from Karabakh—"People here don't like us"—and the words of this mother were, in fact, part of the same story. Both were wounded. One was mourning the child she had lost whereas the other was mourning the home he had lost. The problem was that whenever one spoke of a home, the other remembered a graveyard. That is why people who had lived through the same war sometimes found it difficult to hear one another. Wars do not only take away land but also shatter a society's shared memory.
Perhaps one of the greatest challenges Armenia faces today is enabling people who have paid different prices in the same war to hear one another again.
Neither the home lost by the taxi driver from Karabakh nor the son lost by the grieving mother appears on any map. Maps can show where people live, but they cannot show what people have lost. Maps divide countries. The borders that divide people, however, cannot be drawn on maps.
