Rods and Cones

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

Armenia | Sunday, October 17, 2010 | 5 photos

The highly disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh has been responsible for blood shed, federal budgets spent, and years of difficulty for the rest of the Armenian nation. On my trip to Karabakh my challenge was to understand what was in this piece of land that was worth four years worth of sacrifice.
As we drove through kilometers and kilometers of mountain ranges, I started to feel lost. Fog and clouds huddling in the mountain tops, green stretching as the eye can see, roads seeming unnatural and uninvited; I felt like an intruder breaking some timeless energy.
Past Karabakh and towards the Azerbaijani border, one can see the scars of war. Skeletons of buildings and entire ghost towns telling the stories of bloodshed.
As we approached our next destination, we drove further into the clouds, unable to see just a few meters in front of us. The old capital of the Karabakh region, Shoushi, sits at an altitude of 1800 meters. This once great city is also war torn, with crumbling buildings faces, bullet holes, and poverty. But then I saw the Shoushi church; hugged by a thick layer of fog, like a perfect piece of architecture made to protect its beloved Shoushi people.
In fact, religion is very relevant in this region, and especially in Armenia, the first Christian nation. Similar to Shoushi, Armenian monasteries are located far away from humanity, nestled in mountains where they are protected and where they can also protect.
What I learned about Karabakh was that life persists. Wandering through endless kilometers of untouched nature, you begin to feel the rhythm of life. It is slower, more powerful, more grounded, but closer to the heavens. As far as we would go down bumpy roads to seemingly away from civilization, we would always find traces of life.