by David Zenian
When Ernest Balayan was diagnosed with cancer and told by his doctors that he had only a few months to live, he gathered his family around him and said, "I don't want to die here. Take me back to Stepanakert."
That was in 1989, and more than eight years later, his wife, Hasmik, still remembers the smile on Ernest's face as their car entered the war-torn capital of Nagorno Karabakh, his birthplace.
He died a few months later at the age of 49 and was buried in the city where he was born.
Hasmik returned to Samarkand to raise her three daughters and son on her own. None of her children were able to learn Armenian, but that has not changed their ethnicity.
"We could not have stayed in Armenia or Karabakh because of the prevailing conditions at the time. We had already settled in Samarkand since 1974. We tried to move back to Armenia in 1984, and in fact stayed there for 18 months, but it did not work. My children did not speak any Armenian and were very unhappy at school because they were made fun of.
"One of my daughters came home one day crying because other children at school called her a Uzbek. I did not like to see my children being treated as foreigners-especially in Armenia. We do not have that problem here," Hasmik said.
Her children have grown up now. One daughter has married an engineer from New Zealand, another is an English-language teacher. "We are a proud Armenian family despite the sad fact that my children do not speak Armenian, but they are as Armenian as anyone living in Armenia," she said.
"Is language the only defining factor to decide who is an Armenian? I don't think so. It's what you feel inside, and all my children feel very strongly about their Armenian heritage," she said. Andranik Baghdasarian is an 83-year-old widower-and blind.
"I have been through a lot, but one of the happiest moments of my life was to see the re-opening of the Armenian church in Samarkand two years ago-before losing my eye sight," Baghdasarian said.
Their stories and experiences reflect the feeling of generations of Armenians, young and old, who live in Uzbekistan-their adopted home away from home.
Both were Soviet-era Armenians, who had left their birthplace in search of a better life. They prospered under a system of government which was color-blind toward their ethnicity.
"Being an Armenian in Uzbekistan has never been a problem. There was no persecution or segregation. We were all Soviet citizens and enjoyed the same rights and privileges," Baghdasarian said in an interview at his small house in central Samarkand which has an estimated Armenian population of more than 12,000.
Born in 1914 in the small village of Khndzor near Goris, Armenia, Baghdasarian lost his father at the age of five.
The family was poor, and had no choice but to join an uncle who had already moved to Samarkand in 1903, the year the Saint Hripsimé Armenian church was built.
"At that time, there were two Armenian schools in Samarkand and a large Armenian community. I entered one of the schools, and after completing my early education, my uncle sent me back to Goris to continue at a teacher training academy," Baghdasarian said.
With a diploma in child education, he returned to Samarkand in 1933 and began teaching Armenian language and literature. But his career as a teacher lasted only until 1940 when the communist authorities began cracking down on all ethnic educational institutions.
"The Soviet authorities shut down our church in 1937 and sent our priest, Father Soghomon to Siberia after accusing him of embezzlement. We did not see Father Soghomon again.
"In 1940 the Soviets closed the two Armenian schools and a year later converted them to Russian schools. At that time there were several hundred Armenian children in these schools, and all were deprived from learning their mother tongue," Baghdasarian said.
But all was not lost.
The Soviet authorities, always ready to use art forms to spread their communist ideology, set up an ethnic Armenian theater group in Central Asia and appointed Baghdasarian as its manager.
"This was an all new career for me which gave me the opportunity to keep the Armenian culture alive in the region. I wrote several plays myself and translated many others into Armenian from Russian. We performed to large audiences across Central Asia," Baghdasarian recalls.
With the Second World War in full swing, Baghdasarian was recruited in the Soviet armed forces and was sent to the Leningrad front as a First Lieutenant and then to the Ukraine, Crimea, and Lithuania. After the war, Baghdasarian returned to Uzbekistan and was soon assigned to an "important position" with the Uzbek National Theater.
"My previous experience with the Armenian Theater was of great help, but what they really wanted me to do was to organize a communist group within the Uzbek National Theater.
"My job was to produce plays based on communist ideology. This might sound bad now, but that was the only way. There was no other choice," he said.
Baghdasarian later moved on to head the Uzbek Academy of Music and helped set up at least ten music schools across the country until he retired in 1980.
"The Soviet-and more specifically the Russian-influence was overwhelming in this country. Everything was Russian oriented. We lost generations of young Armenians during the communist era. We could not teach them Armenian, but through culture and music, we kept the Armenian spirit alive. We never stopped being Armenians," he said.
"Before the Second World War, more than 25,000 Armenians lived in Samarkand. Now the number is close to 12,000, but the majority, especially those born here after the war, do not speak Armenian as we know it. The Armenian more commonly spoken is the Karabakh dialect because the majority of the Armenians here trace their roots to Karabakh," he said.
Baghdasarian is convinced that the future for Armenians is not bleak. "All we need to do is get better organized. We are all Uzbek citizens, but Armenians as well. We need to revive our schools and strengthen our church. We need to energize our youth and enhance their pride in their ethnicity, culture and language. In a free Uzbekistan, all this is possible now.
Both the Baghdasarian and Balayan families have integrated into the Uzbek society. "Uzbekistan is our home just as the United States, France or Lebanon is the home of other Armenian communities. We are here to stay," Baghdasarian said.
