Pilgrimage to Karabakh

I’m just back from an 8 day, 75 mile walk through the magnificent mountain countryside of Nagorno-Karabakh in the southern Caucasus. I was with a group of more than 60 participants, including visitors from Burma, the US, Australia, France, South Africa and Germany, as well as from the UK.

Our pilgrimage took us across some strikingly beautiful countryside. ‘Nagorno’ means ‘mountainous’ and ‘Karabakh’ means ‘black garden’. There are upland meadows with masses of wild flowers, birds and other wildlife. The history of the country is equally rich. Armenia was the first nation in the world to formally adopt Christianity, and this is reflected in the wonderful churches and monasteries of the region, as well as in the ancient Armenian Apostolic Church itself. Our walk took us from Lachin in the west of Karabakh through to the famous 13th century Gandzasar monastery, which aptly means ‘hilltop treasure’ in Armenian.

It is always a great pleasure for me to visit this little country. My regular visits have two goals. The first is to visit the Rehabilitation Centre that HART supports in Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. Here, great work takes place in the fields of physiotherapy, rehabilitation and the management of physical disabilities. It’s a tribute to the progress made that the Stepanakert centre has become an internationally recognized centre of excellence taking the latest techniques beyond the borders of Karabakh to Georgia, Azerbaijan, Abkhazia, Ossetia and Chechnya.

The second reason for my visits is to make more widely known the facts of the Karabakh/Azerbaijan conflict. There is now a fragile ceasefire, but it was not always so. In the early 1990s a full-scale war erupted when Azerbaijan attempted to violently drive out the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh. The attempt failed, but Nagorno-Karabakh's future remains unresolved, with its independence unrecognized by the rest of the world. A solution to this injustice is long overdue.