The Difference

"It was difficult," recalls Ihsan.

“There (in Azerbaijan) education was important and mandatory. When I was seven my dad could not send me to school, we were too poor, he could not pay. At nine, he said that I had to study and he reapplied to school, but they did not take me because I was too old. So I lied about my age. Now I am 84, but according to my ID card I am 82," he explains.

"In Agdash as the other children, we lived like in paradise - without any hard days, or responsibilities. But here our life turned into the opposite. Here we started to sell mint sugar, we were helping our father to earn bread money. In Azerbaijan we did not care about it,'' he says.

Every day, Ihsan and his brother would sell mint candies at the station where the train for the Soviet Union would depart, every early morning he would make some money cleaning people's shoes.

In Turkey money was scarce, and discrimination was common. "We were constantly hunting for a piece of bread, kids of our age would run after us calling us, "Russians, Russians!” he laments. “At home we’d ask, "Father, they called us Russians, are we Russians? My father, doing his namaz (reciting his prayers) would respond, “How could we be Russians? They did not know what they are saying.”

Hikmat Alp shares Ihsan’s memories. He is the head of the Azerbaijani Cultural House in Istanbul and his family moved to Igdir from Azerbaijan in the early 1900s.

At the turn of the 20th century, clashes between different ethnic groups broke out, the most serious between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. The first clashes exploded in Baku in February 1905 and soon spilled over to other parts of the region where the two communities lived. Later the October Revolution triggered more localized conflicts between Armenians and Azerbaijanis from the city of Gyumri to Baku - and between March 1918 and November 1920 military confrontation caused thousands of casualties. Azerbaijanis left to either Iran or Turkey. Alp’s family moved to Turkey following the first wave in 1905.

"Hundreds of people in cities like Kars for example were Azerbaijanis but they were discriminated by local people who called them Russians. In Anadolu they were called acem, meaningPersian in Turkish [it has a negative connotation, it means the person is a foreigner]."

Others recall how local Turkish used to ask the Azerbaijanis whether they were Sunni or Shia, as they divided people according their religious beliefs - being Shia meant being Azerbaijani.