Journey to Porkland

Having been made jealous by various people I met at our legendarily boring In-Service Training meeting in Ganja (yes, that is the name of a city here), I decided to actually get out of my cave in Ujar and do some travelling. We made a trip to a village called Nij a couple hours west from Ismayilli, a town in the mountains where some friends live. This village is mainly famous for being one of the only predominately Christian areas in a decidedly Muslim Azerbaijan, which means two things for the Western visitor.

Firstly, there are a few very old churches which are quite a sight in their own right but are also a reminder of the once close ties to the peoples of Armenia and Azerbaijan who have since grown to hate one another over long and complicated conflict over the Garabagh region in the southwest of Azerbaijan. Our guide for the trip was a very nice man named Sergei, which I thought rather strange since that is a Russian name and not at all common for ethnic Azeris to have. After a while in the village, though, it became clear that this was not like the rest of the villages of Azerbaijan. While everyone spoke Azeri, the common language was Russian in the town, and also a smaller language called Udi which is only spoken by about 5 thousand or so people in that village and the surrounding areas. The people we met were mainly speaking Azeri for our benefit, because out of the five of us there only I spoke Russian. Furthermore, after a long, high speed and very one-sided conversation between me and Sergei over the history of the region I was reminded that I do not in fact speak Russian so much as stumble around with it in a haphazard fashion, and I was finally able to admit to myself that in only 6 months in Azerbaijan my Azeri skills have far surpassed those I acquired with the equivalent of 3 years of Russian study. Guess it goes to show what living in a country does for language acquisition. Anyways, one thing about this trip to see the churches that struck me is illustrated in the picture of the writing above. This was found above the doorway of one of the churches we visited, and I recognized it as Armenian. However, when asked what language this was (we also thought it might be old Georgian) Sergei claimed he had no idea. We figured out later that he was either embarassed or afraid to admit that there is an Armenian orthodox church standing in his town, while every other remnant of any historical ties with Armenia have been wiped out of the rest of Azerbaijan with extremely extreme prejudice. Also telling was the fact that the church with the Armenian writing lay in decaying disarray while the other church in the region which was devoid of such script had been restored to a pristine condition, complete with gate and visitors rooms. Anyways, it's sad to see that two people who once lived side by side for so many centuries could fall into such a hateful conflict over the posturing of elitist politicians over a small strip of land and some very different notions of right and wrong.

But, this sad moment did nothing to ruin the second (and best) reason to visit the village of Nij. Being Christian, the people of Nij have one thing in great supply that the rest of Azerbaijan is decidedly lacking in: PORK! And due to the recent outbreak of swine flu, we showed up just in time. We learned as soon as we arrived that pork was almost out of supply due to a recent mass slaughter of swine in the area as a precautionary measure. We wandered up to the town restaurant and sat down to the last pork kebabs he had left in the house, and they were D-E-L-I-C-I-O-U-S! Some of the best pork I've had outside of the roadside barbeque joints in the backwoods of my home state, it was melt in your mouth delicious and accompanied by fresh greens and yogurt sauce and a fruit called "alcha".

Alcha is about the size and shape of a large olive, green in color and tastes a lot like a fruit I used to eat off my neighbors' tree as a kid. My mom always told me they were "crab apples", though in truth I'm not sure what they really were. Anyways, I like tart stuff so I consider myself blessed to have a tree full of them growing in my yard (along pomegranate, quince and persimmon which will be in season come late-summer). My teacher pointed out that I'm not really supposed to be picking my landlord's fruit, but I'm paying twice what an Azeri would pay for rent at the place and the landlord moved to Moscow so I'm going to eat as I please.

Anyways, overall our trip to porkland was decidedly awesome in every way. The people in the village were some of the most genuinely kind and caring people I've met in this country, so much so that our tour guide even refused to take money from us, and the guy at the restaurant undercharged us for kebabs because we didn't have change. The only downside was that there were 5 of us travelling and there were no buses that went there, so we had to take a taxi. This means all of us--5 grown men plus a driver--had to cram into a Russian taxi that was about the size of a Civic hatchback for almost 2 hours both ways.