Sashik Vardanyan, 63, used to be a mason in Kerkenj. Now, he’s a farmer in Dzyunashogh. Every morning and evening, he visits his barn to water and feed his cattle.

“The houses of this village were new. Some of them even had only walls covered with plaster,” remembers 56-year old Sofia Grigoryan, who moved to Dzyunashogh from Kerkenj in 1989. The village today contains many empty houses once inhabited by ethnic Armenians from Baku who could not adapt to village life and moved elsewhere, she says.

“We didn’t have much cattle in Kerkenj; maybe a cow per family just as a source for dairy products,” remembers Sonia Vardanyan. “We would grow grapes on our farms . . . we had huge vineyards.” She expressed concern about the vineyards’ condition today.

Grapes in this staircase and metalwork are reminiscent of the vineyards the villagers once had in Azerbaijan. “Our parents would work all year around and we would send the grapes to Moscow,” Sonia Vardanya says. “The village also had a wine factory and we would surpass the [state-mandated production] plan all the time as we produced too much wine.”

“The Azerbaijanis had built big houses here,” says Sonia Vardanyan. “They visited our village and liked it. It was a rich village. [When] [w]e came to this village, some of us liked it, others didn’t because of the cold climate."

In Kerkenj, after the 1988 Sumgayit attacks, “[t]he men of the village stood on the border of the village to keep watch on everything,” remembers Sashik Vardanyan. “And the women were waiting in the houses, ready to leave at any moment . . . this continued for several months.”