Once a year, 83-year-old Azerbaijani Bayram Allazov travels from his house a few hours outside of Baku to the hills of southern Georgia for a look back in time. From the village of Irganchai, he tries to see the location in neighboring Armenia, just three kilometers away, that he still considers home. But the effort inevitably fails.

“I look out from there. There is nothing. Emptiness,” Allazov says sadly.

In late 1988, Bayram Allazov, the chairman of the state-run collective farm, or sovkhoz, of the ethnic Azerbaijani village of Qizil Shafaq (Red Dawn) in northern Armenia, took a momentous decision. He shared with his village a proposal that they exchange their homes with those of Kerkenj, a village of ethnic Armenians in Azerbaijan, some 540 kilometers to the east.

One of his sons, then a student in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, had phoned with the proposal from an Armenian friend from Kerkenj.

With violence mounting between ethnic Azerbaijanis and Armenians over Azerbaijan’s breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, it seemed to the villagers like a sensible move.