Slaves of God

If the traveller heads from Armenia toward Karabakh or Iran, upon reaching Syunik province—which stretches like a long corridor down to the Persian border—the 3000-meter Zangezur mountain range rises before them like a wall.   Here, at the 2347-meter Vorotan Pass, the troops of Generals Andranik and Nzhdeh stopped the Bolsheviks in November 1920. Here they defended, for eight months, the border of the last bastion of Armenian independence, the Republic of Mountainous Armenia. Here also ran, for half a century before, the border of the Zangezur uyezd, which Stalin later split between Armenia and Azerbaijan after the western part had been “cleansed” of its hundreds of thousands of Muslim inhabitants by Andranik’s forces. Since the Karabakh war, the eastern part has also been under Armenian control, while the Zangezuri Muslims who fled there in 1919 now live in refugee settlements around Baku.

Beyond the Vorotan Pass rises the river known by the former inhabitants of Zangezur, each in their own language, as Vorotan, Bazarçay, or Bargushad—“wide land” in Persian. The river, flowing through Syunik and Karabakh before joining the Aras, the border river with Iran, began to be developed in 1954 as part of the Vorotan cascade hydroelectric system. The cascade, completed in 1989, reduced Armenia’s oil import needs by half and consists of three hydroelectric plants and five reservoirs. The first of these, just beyond the Vorotan Pass, is the Spandaryan Reservoir, which is only seven kilometers long and three kilometers wide, yet reaches a depth of seventy-three meters. The Vorotan River, still a thin stream up here, once ran at the bottom of a dramatically deep valley.

 Today only the highest part of that valley rises above the lake. A hill whose summit down to the shore is lined, like forgotten old soldiers, with ancient gravestones. All of them face toward the lake, as if waiting for an order that will never come again. On the graves, as if overtaken by a wildflower meadow, stone blossoms, tree-of-life motifs, and star-like fruits wind and climb. Only one motif is missing: the cross. Yet those who erected them must have been deeply religious people. Almost every tomb begins with the same formula introducing the name of the deceased, from the 1840s in Old Church Slavonic, and from the 1920s increasingly in Russian: Здѣсь пакоитсѧ тела раба Божіѧ…, “Here rests the body of the servant of God…”

What could this Old Church Slavonic–language village have been here in the remote Armenian–Tatar region? Spandaryan, after which the reservoir was named, lies fifteen kilometers away, where there is only the dam today. The other three nearby villages—Sarnakunk, Tsghuk, and Gorayk—are all outside the rim of the valley, so their cemeteries could not have been located here. I turn for help to the strictly secret 1947 edition of the Атлас офицера, a Soviet military atlas I bought at the flea market in Lviv. Although it contains only a small-scale map of the Caucasus, which at the beginning of the Cold War was not considered a primary operational theater, it still marks here a settlement that no longer exists: Базарчай.

And the obelisk standing on the hilltop by the lakeshore, with the date ԿԱՌՈՒՑՎԵԼԷ 1968, karrutsvele 1968, “erected in 1968” carved on its back, proclaims in its inscription facing the water:

ՀԱՎԵՐԺ ՓԱՌՔ
ՀԱՅՐԵՆԱԿԱՆ ՊԱՏԵՐԱԶՄՈՒՄ ԶՈՀՎԱԾ
ԲԱԶԱՐՉԱՅ ԳՅՈՒՂԻ ՌԱԶՄԻԿՆԵՐԻՆ

Haverzh p’arrk’
Hayrenakan Paterazmum zohvats
Bazarch’ay gyughi rrazmiknerin

“Eternal glory
to the soldiers of Bazarchay village
who fell in the Great Patriotic War.”

The name of the village Bazarchay is identical to the Azerbaijani-Turkic name of the Vorotan River, which at first sight could be translated as “market river.” However, the suffix chay in this case does not mean “river,” as it does in other Turkic geographical names, but “tea.” The village was in fact a center of tea trade in the southern Caucasus, hence its name “Tea Market.” Tea was brought here from Georgia and then distributed to the Muslim population, who used the strong brew as a painkiller and even as a narcotic. The trade was organized by the ethnic group that had small communities scattered everywhere from Georgia through the Armenian lands to Karabakh: the Russian-speaking Molokans.

Russian sources mention the Molokans from the 15th century onward. They call themselves “spiritual Christians,” advocating a return to the teachings of the early Church and a direct personal relationship with God. In a society where everyone from the ruler downward is a servant, they seek freedom by placing themselves outside this hierarchy and considering themselves directly “slaves of God.” They reject many rules of the Orthodox Church, the mediating role of the clergy, as well as icons and even the depiction of the cross. Their name derives from the Russian молоко, “milk,” meaning “milk drinkers,” since during fasting periods—when the Orthodox Church also forbids dairy products—they abstained only from meat. Because of their disciplined communal life and work ethic, they are sometimes called “the Protestants of the East.” Fleeing persecution by the Russian state church, they moved to the empire’s borderlands, which the state itself encouraged, as they played a major role in cultivating new lands. From 1825 onward, more than a hundred thousand of them migrated to the Caucasus. Their history is described in detail by N. B. Breyfogle in Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (2005).

Molokan settlers on the Mughan steppe in the Caucasus. Photo by sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1905–1915), via the Library of Congress.

In Zangezur—both in Bazarchay and the neighboring village of Borisovka (today Tsghuk)—as well as in Karabakh and in Kars, which belonged to the Russian Empire until 1917, the “Jumpers” (прыгуны) charismatic branch of the Molokans settled. In their gatherings they enthusiastically praised the Holy Spirit with singing and dancing. A group of about five hundred who emigrated from Kars to America in 1902 settled San Francisco’s “Russian Hill,” where even Ilf and Petrov encountered them in 1937, as they describe in their American travel book. On the Molokans of the Kars region, Murat Saraçoğlu made a successful feature film in 2009, and a year earlier Yalçın Yelence made a documentary that helps us imagine what life once looked like in the Bazarchay valley.

The history of the Bazarchay Molokans was summarized by Hamlet Mirzoyan in issue 2012/8 of Noev Kovcheg (Noah’s Ark). His main source was a handwritten booklet titled History of Our Ancestors by local V. N. Telegin, written around 1910 and published in transcription by the molokans.ru website. According to it, the first Molokan settler, Gurey Petrovich Petrov, arrived here in 1831 with his wife from Tambov, the traditional center of the Molokans. In 1836, more families arrived from the Karabakh villages of Dudakchi and Aladin, and in 1877 another fifty families from Bolludza in Karabakh.

According to Ghevont Alishan (1820–1901), the Venetian Mekhitarist monk and ethnographer, who published his detailed description of “Sisakan” (present-day Syunik province) in 1893, the local Molokans were industrious and prosperous. Every house was built of stone; every family owned at least fifty cows, four or five mules, and a hundred sheep, and they also farmed trout in reservoirs along the river. Their oxen were well-fed, and their carts were enormous. According to the 1886 census, 469 inhabitants (241 men and 228 women) lived in 78 solidly built houses here, not counting children under ten. Unlike neighboring villages, they baked their bread not in a Caucasian tonir, but in Russian ovens. Because of the strong mountain winds blowing from the pass, their houses had small windows, all facing east.

The American traveler George Kennan explored the Caucasus in the 1870s. He compiled (not from his own photographs, but from images purchased locally, including those by Dmitri Ermakov) the collection Caucasus: An Album of Photographs, preserved in the New York Public Library, which includes three photographs of Caucasian Molokans. The first, perhaps, and the second and third for sure are works by Ermakov.

The inscription on the grave in the foreground on the right reads: “1878 г. 12 апреля. Здесь покоится тело страдальца Давыда Евсеевича. Страдал за Дух Святой 50 лет. Помер волею Божиею. Жил 70 лет” (“12 April 1878. Here rests the body of the sufferer David Evseevich. He suffered for the Holy Spirit for 50 years. Died by the will of God. Lived 70 years.”). In his handwritten notebook, Telegin writes about him: “David Evseevich, our renowned spiritual ruler… was of above-average height, of a manly build. He wore a grey full beard, similar to that of King David as depicted in psalters. He never raised his voice and did not indulge in verbosity. He wore a simple blue jacket and a plain hat… At gatherings he only read the Bible and the Psalms and prayed, but never ‘jumped’ or prophesied… He was respected and loved above all for his kindness.”

In July 1921, when the Bolsheviks broke through the Vorotan Pass, the Molokans of Bazarchay welcomed them with bread and salt, and many young men joined them in fighting against General Nzhdeh’s Armenian forces retreating toward Persia. In the following years, however, the Molokans received as a reward what the Armenians received as punishment. Their leaders were arrested, their prayer houses demolished, and their stones scattered. During Stalin’s terror, part of the community was deported to Siberia; many renounced their faith or fled to Russia. Others replaced them: from the 1960s onward, the tombstones in the cemetery gradually became Armenian-language. The last Molokan woman died in Bazarchay in 1978, two years before the village itself was flooded. At her funeral, her nephew, Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Serafimovich Begas, who lived in Vinnytsia (Ukraine), delivered a farewell speech not only for her but for the entire Molokan community: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will send a famine in the land; not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.” (Amos 8:11)

Pirosmani: Singing Molokans, Tbilisi, c. 1910

George Gurdjieff (1866–1949), Armenian-Greek-Russian folk music collector, composer, and philosopher: Molokan Songs. Performed on piano by Thomas de Hartmann.