The author and her mom Tatyana Shahnazarova in Baku, 1987
BY YULIA SHAHNAZAROVA
“Life is a like parachute; it keeps you waiting until it opens up, and all the way through you are filled with hope!”
I was a five year-old girl at the time and I didn’t understand the irreversible life changing events that were on their way. I never imagined that I was to become part of a very critical and political reversal of fate. And it all began quite unexpectedly…
We lived in Baku then, in a household that witnessed the tragic fate of ethnic persecution for two generations, just for being born Armenian. A descendant from Artsakh, Shushi, kin of the Meliks, my great-grandfather settled in Baku with his family back in 1890s.
But he had to flee with his family from Baku to escape the waves of the Armenian Genocide that reached Baku in 1918. It was the Baku Armenians’ turn to survive the massacres. After my grandfather was born, my great-grandfather died of typhus leaving his wife alone with four children. My grandfather, a child in exile, was brought up in hunger and poverty in Astrakhan. In 1920 my great-grandmother re-settled in the then Soviet Baku to start life anew. To this day, I vividly remember my grandfather, a man of word and deed and a veteran of World War II. He was a respected professor at the State University in Baku. We were close. He used to tell me: “Yulia jan, whatever happens, keep your faith and hope strong!â€
