We spent the day after in Koti, a peninsula of
Armenian territory surrounded by the frontline with Azerbaijan. Levon’s mother,
Aghunik, hosts us in her house with its wonderful little vegetable garden:
cabbage, tomato, basil,… The house still didn’t recover all its glass windows blown
away by two Alazan rockets that fell there during the 1992 war.
Levon has planted here a bit more than 100 pomegranate
trees in April 2013. He waters them once a month and covers them during the two
first winters to protect them from the cold. Three cultivars: Goychay, Ganja/Gandzak and another Armenian one, all coming from Bagratashen.
We then visit a large area that used to be covered
with orchards, including of pomegranate trees. It is only used for cereals and
tobacco nowadays because there is no access anymore to the large water reserve
located on the Azeri side. The geopolitics of pomegranate is not far…
The
atmosphere reminds of Buzatti’s Il deserto
dei Tartari on this peaceful afternoon, with this steppe landscape and the
Georgian and Azeri mountains in the far front. The locals tell us that Kalachnikov shootings between Armenian and Azeri soldiers are frequent.
Not a single one today. Just Chacals howling around the village, in the
darkness of a late evening, the dogs joining them while we are having a
delicious bowl of matsoon, sheltered from the rain.
The village also has a few donkeys, including this
little 5 years old black female named ... "black" in Armenian. Aghunik, Levon's mother, shows us a very nice donkey pack. She
made it by hand with her grandmother, one of the local centenaries, who died at
the age of 105 (here: in 1990 in Koti at the age of 98, with Aghunik
on the left, in front of a Cornelian cherry tree). Memories of an Alentejano
donkey pack in manta from Reguengos are not far…
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire