Mikhail Vrubel, Lilacs, 1900. Oil on canvas. Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

My sister and I had this conversation today while looking at a tourist map at the Turkish spot in Greenpoint.

Nagorno Karabakh is a landlocked region in southeastern Azerbaijan near the border of northern Iran. Presently, much of the area is controlled by the semi-autonomous republic of Nagorno Karabakh, but is fiercely contested and a hotbed of sectarian violence between its Christian Armenian and Muslim Azerbaijani populations, a situation that has gone unchecked throughout most the past thirty years, much like the Israel-Palestine conflict. The etymology of the name is derived from a hodgepodge of local linguistic influences: Nagorno, from the Russian attributive adjective nagorny, meaning “highland” (lit. “on the mountains”) and Karabakh, a compound of the Turkic kara (“black”) and Persian bagh (“garden”).

To the northwest, directly above Georgia, is the Karachay-Cherkess Republic, another semi-autonomous Caucasian territory home to the Karachay people, a Turkic group with historic ties to the Kipchak and Cuman peoples, who were dispersed across Eastern Europe and Southern Russia following the Mongol Invasion (1237). Like the Chechens, Daghestanis, Circassians and Balkars, with whom they share a dialect, the Karachays are followers of Islam. The name Karachay is another compound, of kara and the Turkic chay (“river”). The Turkish word kuman means “blond,” and in Ukrainian, the Cuman were called Polovtsy, meaning “straw-colored,” suggesting a lineage for the fair coloration of the Karachay phenotype.

Our father’s family, the Khachiyans, come from Nagorno Karabagh and one of our good friends, Derya, whom you may have come across on this blog before, is an ethnic Karachay on her maternal side. It’s very appropriate, auspicious even, that so much in our small region receives this titular of blackness. There is something inherently “black” about the Caucasus, isn’t there? Not only in the sloe eyes and raven hair of pale-faced youths, the modest everyday dress of the elders, or the supple, near-blackness of the the deep green foliage, but in our souls too. We are inherently suspicious and mournful people. And our folkloric traditions seem to suggest a place populated as much by humans and livestock as by unseen and malevolent djinn.

This much is conveyed in the film aesthetic of Parajanov, where trickery and deceit are practically a second language, and in the Caucasian novellas of Tolstoy, which depict a landscape that is at once lush and unforgiving. It is especially evident in Lermontov and Vrubel’s shared history of the demon, who dwells in the mountains of the Caucasus. In Vrubel’s vision, everything is overcast with a somnolent veil of black.