To pass time while our Letter of Invitation for the Uzbek visa was being prepared, we visited the village of Xinaliq in northern Azerbaijan. Xinaliq is stuck firmly in ages we no longer remember. The Serkerov family with whom we stayed lives in a small house; the basement is occupied by their sheep, and the floor above by the family which all sleeps together in one room — Rahman, his wife Gulbahar and their three small children. The sheep provide everything in this house: their wool fills the mattresses and the blankets, their milk is made into cheese and their flesh and bones into soup. The cheese and soup, together with bread, are pretty much all the family eats, washing it down with copious amounts of tea made from herbs collected around the village.
We stayed two nights with this family, enjoying their hospitality and marveling at their way of living. Gulbahar, energetic, always on the move, constantly muttering something to herself and bursting in laughter, and Rahman, a relaxed fellow, looking around like he lost something and then found it, forgot something and then remembered. People in this village all seem to have various peculiarities. I don’t know if it’s the distance from civilization, or just a different, rural character, but in this place we felt like we were on a completely different planet.
Rahman, along with his trusty horse, took us on a day trip around Xinaliq. We visited his friends, shepherds who live closer to Baku during the winter but bring their herds here for the summer, when the coast turns yellow and brown, and the hills around here turn green. They live with their families in tents, and they invited us to share their food and tea. The woman was serving quickly and disappearing, while the men were sitting, splitting seeds, drinking tea and discussing the rising costs of living, all the while looking apologetically at us — they speak no language but their own. After passing a tranquil hour like that we moved on to Atesgah, an ever-burning fire on which we prepared yet more tea, and after about 9 hours of hiking we returned back home to Gulbahar’s mutton soup.
On the next day we made our way back to Baku, passing through another unusual place — Krasnaya Sloboda, described in the guidebook as “a unique mountain-Jewish village”. We were very curious to see what that means, conjuring in our minds an 19-th century “shtetl”, in which we would see a bearded rabbi corralling his pupils into the village “cheder” for their afternoon Torah lessons. The reality was quite far from that: beardless characters driving around town in expensive cars that Saturday afternoon; the shopkeepers gazing at them and at us. The population is indeed Jewish, and some even wear kippas, quite an unusual sight for Azerbaijan. To be frank, we did expect at least some excitement about the fact that we’re visiting from Israel; after all I don’t think they get many visitors from our country here. But besides a knowing “aah” our origin elicited not a lot of response. There are two functioning synagogues, and a school for boys; we were invited in by the boys, but their (also beardless) rabbi shut the door to our face and didn’t let us in. The boys themselves circled around us on their bikes as we were walking, chanting “van dolar, van dolar”. We didn’t stay for long and boarded the bus to Baku the same afternoon.
June 25, 2011