The following are excerpts from a blog Irina Levin wrote for friends and family during her 2008–09 Fulbright year in Azerbaijan.

Irina Levin with 6-year-old Guljan, a Meskhetian Turkish girl from Ahmedabad

September 30, 2008
I do not speak Azeri. It is a Turkic language, which means, among other things, that the verb comes at the end. Even in a long sentence. Or, sometimes, it doesn’t come at all. When I “do anthro,” I do it in a mishmash of Azeri, grammatically deficient Russian, and intermittent English. That is, people may talk at me in Azeri, someone helpfully translates it into Russian or English, I say something in Russian, someone else replies in Russian, I try to say something in Russian but realize I don’t quite know how to say that and slip into English, someone helpfully translates the English into Azeri, and on it goes.

This past Saturday, I left the comforts of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, to go into the regions and conduct two interviews. The first was a group interview of men in their 40s and 50s. The second was more one-on-one, except for my Azeri professor friends, with a community leader. Altogether, I have over two hours of material, in three languages, which I will eventually have to translate and transcribe into accurate and comprehensible English.

Many of you have asked me about my research before, and I probably said something along the lines of “looking at a minority group’s ethnic identity maintenance and transformation in the context of post-Soviet Azerbaijan.” The minority group in question are the Ahiska, often referred to as Meskhetian Turks. In terms of maintenance and transformation, I will not be writing an ethnography lamenting the loss of various traditions — many have been lost over the past 64 years — as this is only one part of the story. I will also be looking at the ways that homeland and a belief system built up around homeland has been incorporated into ethnic identity. For instance, although children learn Azerbaijani history in school, at home they are taught about the history of the Ahiska people and the goal of repatriation. My research is going to involve, eventually, a lot more conversations with a much greater variety of community members.

December 12, 2008
Today I saw the severed head of a ram lying in the street, right next to a dumpster. Last weekend, while we were off gallivanting in Georgia, Azerbaijan was celebrating Qurban Bayram. For this holiday, families who can afford it ritually slaughter a sheep and share the meat with families who are too poor to afford their own sheep. I know that our landlords slaughtered a sheep because of the bloody sheepskin lying in the courtyard the past four days. I wondered about how quickly something sacred can become profane. I saw the ram’s head on my way from school to the pet shop by Fountain Square. I came home with a bag of kitty litter and two cookies filled with sugar and ground-up walnuts. The cookies were to be my reward for making the research-related phone calls that I had been putting off. Basically, I needed to get back in touch with the people I’d met in Ahmedabad, a village in southern Azerbaijan, in order to go there for a few days of participant–observer fieldwork. I felt ready to try out some basic Azeri and am now invited back this Sunday. My informants are both teachers so I’m looking forward to meeting lots of kids.

December 18, 2008
Back from the regions, where I took lots of notes but came to no conclusions. Unavoidably, I left with a number of presents: eggs, xurma (persimmon), a jar of tomato something, and a tiny piece of wood that came from a tree from their homeland in Georgia and will protect me against the evil eye. The eggs and xurma were individually wrapped in pages from an old magazine. How old? 1967. The 50th anniversary of the Soviet Union! I’m still struggling to figure out what this little bit of incidental information means. All over the former Soviet Republics, you can find older people and people who look old from a life of hard work, worry, and terrible dental hygiene who will tell you about how much better life was back then. Many Westerners would like to write this off as nostalgia, misplaced sentimentality, a form of Stockholm syndrome. Coming from Ahiska Turks, the victims of brutal mass deportation followed by 30 years of repression and suspicion, kind words about the Soviet days seem like wilful self-deception. But this, like so much about the post-Soviet era, is only a half-truth. But here is one thing: In Azerbaijan, among Azeris and Turks alike, I’ve met parents who received university educations; traveled the length and breadth of the Soviet empire; spoke two, if not more, languages fluently; worked, studied, and formed lifelong relationships with people of different nationalities; and, as young people, were optimistic about the future. In many cases, these parents are raising children who have no interest in higher education, have never left Azerbaijan, speak only Azeri (or Turkish, in the case of the Turks), have never met people of other nationalities, and see only probable joblessness in their futures. What does this say about the present? about the past?

My three days in Ahmedabad were busy indeed. The day I arrived, I went to a wedding. It was outdoors and very cold. We sat in white lawn chairs and on rough wooden benches. The ground was extremely muddy and slippery. The bride, in a white dress with a red sash, looked completely miserable. But this, as far as I can tell, is not only expected, but required. The Ahiska Turks do two weddings, one for the bride and then one for the groom, 10 days apart. We were at the groom’s wedding. He sat next to the bride at a special table facing the dance floor, but never looked at her and took calls on his cell phone. All of the women were gathered on one side, and all the men on the other. Earlier in the day, during the meal, we were in completely separate tents. Only a few people — mainly men — danced at a time, but a few women who were relatives of the groom danced as well. Of course, as the American guest, I was pulled into dancing and videotaped in my green winter coat, red hat, and duck boots.

For the next two days I spent a lot of time at the school where my host teaches 1st and 2nd grades. The school was a crude concrete structure. The heating in the classrooms is provided by an oil-burning oven in each room. Oil is poured in, and then the end of a long stick is lit and lowered into the oil. In the older classes, this is all done by the children themselves. I think the kids were pretty shocked to meet an adult who could barely talk. They were, of course, adorable. Some the boys wore miniature business suits; one wore a black velveteen suit. Some of the girls wore black-and-white pinafore and apron uniforms that looked a lot like the ones my sister wore when she was a schoolgirl in Minsk. Their shoes and boots were caked in mud, and many had mud splatters on their clothes. The teaching style was unabashedly authoritarian. The little boy in the velveteen suit went up to the board to complete math problems. Every single answer was wrong, and the entire class, including the teacher, tittered as he wrote. In the other class, I noticed a little boy who didn’t have a notebook. All the other children were writing, but he was not. I asked my host about him, and she said that they always put one crazy child in her class and that his father drank. At the end of the day, she asked me to do an English lesson with the class. I went around the room doing call and response, and I refused to skip him. Later on, my host told me she was shocked that he got up and did his best to answer my questions.

The beauty of Samskheti-Javakheti, homeland of the Ahiska Turks, in southwest Georgia

February 5, 2009
One of the Azeri TV networks has a show that focuses on social issues. A few weeks ago, they did an episode on the repatriation of Ahiska Turks to Georgia. I watched the show and, with my increased knowledge of Azeri, was able to understand a respectable 20%. As an added bonus, I was watching it at the home of one of the star panelists while dining with his family. I recognized many audience members as well. One of the other panelists was a member of the Azeri Parliament and a holder of several other prominent positions. She talked a great deal about the government’s support for the Ahiska Turks and their efforts to repatriate. One of the issues was whether young Ahiska Turks would even want to go to Georgia. This is something I am also very interested in and have been asking informants, young and old. My host was the panelist who answered this question, translating his answer for me: “In our culture, the children follow and obey the parents. They will come.”

March 10, 2009
We needed proof that things actually happened in Baku, so we decided to venture out on the night of the Novruz holiday. There were many bonfires, but the one on our corner was huge and had a big audience. The boys loved talking to us, practicing their English and trying to get us to say bad words in Azeri. We ran home in the middle to get candy. Our Azeri teacher had explained that kids leave their hats at your front door, knock, and then run away on Novruz. While we were getting the candy, there was a knock at the door and, when we opened it, four little hats! We put candy in them. When we ran out of candy, we gave some American change, which was very popular and even caused a temporary home invasion. At about 10pm, long after things had settled down, there was a knock at the door. I looked through the peephole and saw no one. I opened the door a crack and saw a lone black papaq (hat). I put three candies in it.

June 18, 2009
Over the past two weeks, I’ve had to say goodbye to Ahmedabad and Tbilisi, not forever, I hope. In Ahmedabad, my best moments were hanging out with my little friend Guljan and eating cherries from the trees in her uncle’s orchard. Everyone in Ahmedabad seems to be waiting for something. Some wait for their first child, others wait for their hair to grow back so they can wear the clips that were presents from an American guest, still others wait for a reconciliation between a daughter and the father she defied. And many are waiting to return. They worry about who will buy this land, and they dream of the house they will build on their land, their real land, and how different it will be from this ramshackle 19th-century mess. It will have an enclosed garden with birds and speakers tucked away in the corners so that one can sit with guests and enjoy all the beauty of life. I wonder if their time will ever come.

My own time comes very quickly. In the morning I am on a marshrutka (taxi), speeding away from Ahmedabad, and by 10pm that same day I am on a train inching toward Tbilisi. This time, my trip is all business. I conduct 12 interviews with people from the community, NGOs, and international organizations. Over the weekend, I finally visit Samskheti-Javakheti. I’ve been hearing about this place, the vatan, the rodina, the historic homeland, ever since 2005 when the first refugees from Krasnodar Krai began arriving in St. Louis. Most of those who had described it to me had never actually set eyes on it, but all spoke with almost-religious fervor of its beauty and perfection. I thought they might have set the bar a bit too high, but I was wrong. It was more beautiful than I expected. A million different shades of green, purple wildflowers punctuated by bright red poppies, and a background of mountains and clear blue sky.

Of course, this is not the whole story. I visited a few houses; the living conditions weren’t any better than in Azerbaijan and possibly worse. And everything in Georgia was very, very complicated. People I spoke with expressed a strong disdain, even loathing, for other people I’d met. A graduate student writing his dissertation on Meskhetians (he wouldn’t call them Turks) told me that I had to be objective; only then would I come around to see things his way — which is an interesting take on objectivity. And then I was saying goodbye to Tbilisi, a city I’ve really come to love. It feels so fragile and not just because of the protestors camped outside of Parliament, or the cookie-cutter houses of the IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) along the road to Gori, or even the powerful and power-hungry neighbor to the north. There’s just something romantic and ill-fated about the whole country.

There is a proverb about Georgia that I’ve heard several times: God was distributing territory to all the peoples of the world, but the Georgians didn’t turn up. After he’d given everything away, the Georgians turned up drunk and out of breath from running. “It’s too late,” said God, “There’s nothing left.” “But God!” exclaimed the Georgians. “We were feasting and toasting in your honor! Oh, you should have been there, it was a wonderful feast!” “Well,” considered God, “I do like a bit of feasting and toasting. You know, I saved the best little bit of land for myself, but you’re my kind of people so, I tell you what, you can have it!”

Irina Levin, AB 2005, graduated with majors in anthropology and psychology. She began graduate studies in anthropology at New York University this fall.