Ongoing Projects: Artsakh: Between War and Peace: NKRWP_026

Late fall is persimmon season in Karabakh. In the aftermath of the war, the trees are heavy with the ripe, unpicked fruit. Since the end of the First Karabakh War in 1994, the self-proclaimed republic has remained unrecognized by any other country: status-less, a no man’s land to all but the people who inhabit its mountains, who till its fields, plant and harvest its orchards. Owing perhaps to the absence of an internationally recognized political status, and undeniably to the fact that so many Karabakhi Armenians live off the land, their connection to the soil runs deep. They live by a motto derived from the name of an iconic statue on a hilltop just outside of Stepanakert: We are our mountains. Now, with so many of those mountains within plain sight but out of reach, they are left to wonder: Without our mountains, what are we? What is left of us?

Late fall is persimmon season in Karabakh. In the aftermath of the war, the trees are heavy with the ripe, unpicked fruit.

Since the end of the First Karabakh War in 1994, the self-proclaimed republic has remained unrecognized by any other country: status-less, a no man’s land to all but the people who inhabit its mountains, who till its fields, plant and harvest its orchards. Owing perhaps to the absence of an internationally recognized political status, and undeniably to the fact that so many Karabakhi Armenians live off the land, their connection to the soil runs deep. They live by a motto derived from the name of an iconic statue on a hilltop just outside of Stepanakert: We are our mountains. Now, with so many of those mountains within plain sight but out of reach, they are left to wonder: Without our mountains, what are we? What is left of us?