The fountainhead of jokes: Sheki, Azerbaijan
Having visited the village of Russians and the village of Iranians, we left for Sheki, the town of people who spoke with the ‘ha.’ Ha, Sheki, famed for its jokes and jokers, is considered the comical soul of Azerbaijan, and in Soviet days, that of the entire USSR. Ha, its residents, when they spoke – whether in Azeri, Russian or English – had developed a particular habit of beginning every sentence with a ‘ha’. A joke about Sheki way of speaking went like this:
A Shekian sent his son to Russia to learn Russian. A year later, he visited Russia to witness his son’s progress. He knocks on the door. Suddenly, the Russian landlady appears and asks in Russian with a heavy Sheki accent:
-Ha, kto tam? (Ha, who’s there?)
We changed transport thrice on the way to Sheki – shared cars, from Lahij to Ismaili, from Ismaili to Qebele and then from Qebele to Sheki. Omar, our driver for the last leg of this journey, was a burly man of sixty-five with a Chaplin-esque moustache. He gave us an early taste of the Sheki sense of humor.
“This is the best car in the world,” he slapped his steering wheel. “Lada, the Mercedes of the USSR. And what is Mercedes compared to a Lada. Wait, I will drive slowly. Let’s wait till a Mercedes overtakes us. Don’t worry. You will be reaching on time. Everyone has a Mercedes in Azerbaijan.”
Indeed, we didn’t have to wait too long.
“There it goes,” Omar slapped my arm. “Now you see. It is going at hundred and fifty. Now you see.” He stepped up on the accelerator and then overtook the German machine easily. “Now you know. Go back and tell your country about Omar and his Lada.”
“A Mercedes is just like a donkey in comparison to a Lada. You know that joke they have about the donkey?”
“One day Akhundov was going to Sheki by car but was running low on fuel. Once he entered the town, he saw a boy riding on a donkey. Akhundov slowed down by the boy and asked:
-Hey boy! Are you from Sheki?
-Ha, I am not from Sheki, but the donkey is from Sheki
-Do you have any extra fuel?
-The boy lifted up the tail of the donkey and says, ‘It shows zero.’”
Omar’s adventures didn’t end with overtaking the donkey. He kept slowing down to let Mercedes after Mercedes take over and then he would speed again. He got distracted only when he saw a speed camera notice.
“Ok, I see you. I see you. Now I will slow down. You want me to go below 80? I will go at 20. That makes you happy. Are you happy? No, right? No money for your master today, is that why?”
He slapped my arm again. That was his way to talk, “I know exactly where these cameras are. But the police won’t make any money from this old veteran.”
Omar had served in the Russian army in Baikonur and was then put in the army of the newly independent Azerbaijan.
“I had fought in Karabakh. I got a bullet wound.” He rolled up the sleeves of his right arm while driving to show a big patch.
“These Armenians are bad people….”
“Now my sons are fighting in Karabakh. One is in the army. The other is in the air force, he is a pilot. Just few months back, both of them were fighting.”
“But I can’t complain. I am happy for them. One makes 3000 manat a month and the younger one, the one in the army, makes 2500. That’s good money, even in Baku. I am happy for my children. I have one daughter too. She is married and lives in Qebele. She has a baby girl who loves me a lot. Always keeps scolding me, ‘Baba, don’t smoke.’”
“Life is not too bad for me too. After I retired, the government gave me a car and a house. I get 750 manat a month as pension. Then I bought this Lada with my own money. I drive only when I want to. My children also give me money, even my daughter. So I have good children.”
“And things are not like in Russia. I hear a bottle of water there costs 5 manat. Here, it’s free. I can get water for free.. See, there comes a small river. I can just drink from it. What’s the price of water in your country? 3 manat? Come, I stop at the river. You take as much water as you want from here.”
The old town of Sheki appeared as a well-adorned beauty. It was a town made of wide cobbled road lined by a cascading river on one side and neatly arranged beige-stone houses with red-tiled roofs. Gone were the arid lands around Baku. In Sheki, the road soon lost itself among lush green hills beyond which rose the snowy peaks of the Greater Caucasus.
Sheki was an ancient town, and like all residents of ancient towns, locals believed that it had a three to five thousand year history. The town was first inhabited by Iranian people and then served as a major center in the Caucasian Albanian Kingdom. The Arabs took control of Sheki early during their great expansion but ceded control to Georgians during the reigns of David the Builder and Queen Tamar (there is still a small population of Georgians in Qax near Sheki). Tamerlane passed through Sheki on his way to ravage Tbilisi. When the Mongols declined, an independent khanate was established in the region with its capital in Sheki. Even today, Sheki residents take great pride on how their small khanate had humiliated the marauding army of Nader Shah, the great plunderer of Mughal India. Seventy years later, the Tsarist Empire took control of the Khanate and retained Sheki till the Bolsheviks eventually swept the region under the blanket of the USSR. From the time to time, this town of gentle slopes and funny people turned up on its rulers – notable ones being the 1838 peasant rebellion against the Tsars and the 1932 revolt against the Soviets.
In between handing over its keys to this amazing array of invaders, Sheki established its reputation as a major Silk Road stopover. Over time, it became an important center in itself for silk production and tailoring. The tradition continued well into the Soviet period when a large silk factory was built to supply the entire Eastern Bloc (the facility runs to this day). We were staying at one of the focal points of this medieval trade, at the 300 year old Karavansaray (Caravanserai), once a hotel for silk traders, now a hotel for budget backpackers. With its arched columns, elongated inner courtyard, underground storage chambers, iron torches, and stone vaults, the hotel gave us a feel of how it would have been to be a travelling salesman in the 18th century. We wasted no time and as soon as we had checked in, we washed our clothes from the trip thus far – undergarments and what not – and hung them up for drying on each arm of the elaborate cast iron chandelier. Wouldn’t the traders of the past – with a bunch of unwashed clothes from a long journey – have done the same?
To add another feather to its well-plumaged cap, Sheki was also famous in Azerbaijan for its cuisine; the piti (mutton soup) and the halva (a more syrupy form of baklava) being the two most distinctive dishes from the town. Every other shop in Sheki was a halva store. Being a longtime admirer of all things sweet, I developed an instant liking for the town. Lobo, on the other hand, claimed to be the opposite. Whenever my life took a pause in front of sweetshops, my eyes mesmerized by the delights offered by the images of sugary treats, Lobo would spell out an endless series of articles – from serious science journals like Nature to inflight magazines of budget airlines – denouncing this original sin of human beings. In more than three-quarters of such moments of yearning, she would manage to get me to resist. The remaining times, she would end up eating more than half of what I had bought for myself.
In Sheki too, Lobo forewarned, “We will have a problem with food here. Everywhere is halva, only halva.”
I pleaded with her to allow me to taste just one nanogram. We entered a colorful shop, owned by Ahmed, a short, slim and clean-shaven man in his thirties. Ahmed excitement at seeing us hinted that Sheki, a favorite weekend getaway for many Azeris, was rarely visited by foreigners. With his hyperbolic gestures, Ahmad was also the funniest man we had met in Sheki.
“Ha, India, India, na na na na, na na na..”
“Ha, China, China, kungfu, karate,” he posed like Jackie Chan inviting a fight.
Ahmed opened the plastic sheets, uncovering my fantasy world – three large trays of sticky syrupy gooey pies – dripping sweetness, embalming greedy gazes within them. He cut gram-sized pieces for a taste – there I already exceeded the limit I had promised to Lobo. Lobo tried it too and then bit her teeth to display her shock at the sugary intensity.
“I will buy half a kilo please,” I avoided any eye contact with Lobo.
Ahmed wanted a picture with us so he could display it in his shop. But he didn’t have a camera or a smartphone with him.
“Please come back,” he pleaded. “I need a photo.”
The excess halva proved rather invaluable and as expected, Lobo consumed more than half of it. For many days, our morning breakfast would only comprise of one large piece of tasteless bread that we would be made palatable only by putting a pinch of halva inside its folds – the world’s first halva sandwich.
We did return to Ahmed’s store. He would never have a camera with him. We made him compensate for our fruitless journeys by forcing him to tell some Sheki zarafatlari (jokes). After all, every person in Sheki was supposed to know half of the world’s jokes. Most of Ahmed’s jokes were safe and childish. And since he was a sweet-seller, most of his jokes dealt with food.
“Ha, a witch from Sheki sees that a little girl is working in the kitchen.
-Ha, my girl, what are you doing there?
-Ha, I am cooking a meal, aunt.
-Ha, let me eat you and then I will eat your meal too!
The girl’s father replies from the next room:
-Ha, witch, if you want to eat the daughter, eat, but do not touch the meal!
Many of the jokes were about Uncle Haji, a sharp mouth modelled on Mullah Nasiruddin, the Turkish wise man popular all over the Islamic world and beyond.
Uncle Haji had a rooster. Every evening, when people returned to their homes from their farms, Uncle Haji would catch this rooster and shout loudly.
-Ha, hey child, bring here a knife, let’s cut its head off.
After that, he would release the rooster back to the chicken coop.
One day his wife asked him, ‘Hey man, why do you do this every day? Stop your silliness.’
Uncle Haji replied:
-I want to let our neighbors believe that we eat a rooster every night. Let them burn in jealousy.
Some of the jokes Ahmed knew bordered on the need for parental advisory. These ones too, however, had something to do with food.
According to customs, the bride doesn’t speak with the elders at home. One day her father-in-law asked her:
– Ha, did my daughter-in-law have a child eventually?
The bride gives the “yes” sign by nodding.
– It’s a boy, or a girl?
The bride didn’t know how to answer without speaking. But she was smart. She put two small pots in her hand, then put a ladle in between these and then began wiggling the ladle inside the pot, thus giving the old man the answer.
We asked Ahmed what kept Shekian’s so happy.
“Only the mountains and the weather,” he said. “And my halva, of course. Otherwise, what is there to be happy about? The economy is not doing well. All this halva you see here in my place, it used to finish off by lunch. I could go home and relax. Now, it takes two days, three days.”
Despite what Ahmed said, his business couldn’t have been that bad for he always shut down the shutters of his shop by afternoon.
“Not enough tourists are coming,” he said. “The young are leaving. Anyone who can get a good job is leaving. All the educated people are leaving. Only people like me will be left in Azerbaijan. Only halva makers, no halva eaters. No, also the children of the government officials. Because if they leave, it shows the government officials don’t have faith in our country. Then no more promotion for them. Maybe even fired. They better eat more and more halva.”
“But you don’t hear all this on TV. You only hear that Azerbaijan is doing great and everyone else is doing worse. There is this man who comes every morning on National TV. Every day, he repeats that Armenia is suffering, Russia is under sanctions, Georgia is clueless, US has Trump, Iran has fanatics, Turkey has bombers, only Azerbaijan is progressing, progressing every minute. I say this man on TV is the one who doesn’t read any real news. He is a zombie. He is a dead. He has no idea what is happening anywhere.”
The second trademark Sheki dish was the Piti, a meat and chickpea soup cooked on slow fire in clay pots for long hours (the making of these clay pots was another revered Sheki craft by itself). There were rules for eating Piti. One had to tear off small chunks of bread and place them in a bowl before pouring the fatty soup into it – only the soup and not the meat and the chickpeas which were to be left behind in the clay pot. This distilled soup and the soup-soaked bread had to be eaten first. Only after it had been finished could one begin to devour the remaining meat and chick peas with the aid of some seasoning. Piti was once cooked for the servants of the Sheki Khanate as a source of cheap calories but today it has become an eat-before-you-leave dish for any tourist to Sheki.
Our encounter with piti was accidental. It was late afternoon on our first day at Sheki and we struggled to find a restaurant that was still open for lunch. We found one shack under a leafy tree where the cooks were having their own lunch. When we asked if anything was still available, they rushed inside the kitchen and brought a pot of piti for Lobo and fried eggs and omelet for me.
We came across a joke in Sheki about piti too, one that seemed loosely based on the restaurant we had just patronized.
A restaurant-owner loved the piti from his restaurant so much that he always cooked piti and ate it himself. One day, a few of his friends came to his shop while he was eating piti. The shopkeeper invited them to join in as guests. These friends started to eat the piti and once done with the soup, went about pouring the meat into their bowls. At that very moment, the shopkeeper took away all these bowls with the meat that had been poured in.
-‘Ha, let us keep all this meat for my old father,’ thus spoke the piti-obsessed shopkeeper.
At Sheki, we met my friend Ilham Mehmedi (real name), a digital entrepreneur. He was, in many ways, a representative of the Azeri youth; well-informed, balanced, cosmopolitan, and relaxed. Ilham was a wanderer at heart and a member of an online collective of young Azerbaijanis (I had got to know a few of them) who hitchhiked all over the region whenever their right thumb got itchy. Ilham’s favorite destinations were Batumi (a hipster Black Sea city in Georgia) and Turkey.
“Georgians are just crazy,” he said. “When we hitchhike there, we get so drunk. Most Azeris drink, despite being Muslim. But they drink in moderation but in Georgia, everyone is drunk from the morning. The drivers who give us lift there just make us drink, drink, drink.”
The well-travelled man was genuinely proud of his haloed hometown.
“Sheki has historically been a tolerant place,” he said. “Shekians treat women as equals. We have always been peace-loving. Many of our jokes are about Pakistanis and Iranians – about the Pakistanis being ever ready to blow up the world and about the 24-7 radicalism of the Iranians. Azerbaijan is a lot more moderate and especially Sheki. Sheki has always had a sizeable population of Sunnis. And Shias and Sunnis have always lived together in peace.” (Azerbaijan has at times been accused of being paranoid about Sunni extremism and reports of forcibly shaving off Sunnis and closing down Sunni mosques had surfaced in recent past).
With Ilham, we roamed the streets of Sheki. We visited small shops. We looked at the faces, walking or waiting. I caught the evening sun reflected by the gold teeth that sparkled, countless.
“We people of the Caucasus love golden teeth,” said Ilham. “That’s how people saved their money in the past. Some would even pluck out their perfectly normal teeth and put the gold ones in.”
Shekians had something to say about the gold teeth too.
Bandits accosted a Shekian in the Old City and ran away with his gold ring. The police officers who arrived at the crime scene asked him:
-Why did you not shout for help?
The Shekian shows them his mouthful of gold teeth and says:
-Ha, you say that I should have opened my mouth and ha let them take out these too?
“When Caucasus people die, it is perfectly fine to pluck out the gold teeth and pass it down to the next in the family,” Ilham said.
We asked Ilham about how family ties had evolved in Azeri society.
“Family is still very important. Like today, my mother was asking me to stay at home instead of meeting you two because some daughter of some distant uncle’s cousin is visiting home. But I have no idea who this person is. I don’t think even my mother has ever met her. But she has organized a big feast at home for her. That’s how important family is. But things have changed from the past. Back then, people would have eight or ten kids. So the farmland would have to be divided among them. So, an entire village would end up being made up of relatives. Now, families are much smaller. And people migrate to Baku or overseas. So you have less of relationships to maintain and it’s harder to maintain even those.”
I had heard Russians in Azerbaijan say that Azeris have one too many children. But then, fertility rate in Russia – at 1.59, one of the lowest in the word – was not the best benchmark. In reality, the fertility rate in Azerbaijan had dropped to 2.0, below the replacement level. In Ali and Nino, the author Kurban Said mentions a unique fertility ritual in Azeri weddings:
My friends stand in four corners of the hall, whispering incantations against impotence. Thus custom decrees, for every man has enemies, who on the wedding day draw their daggers out of the sheath, turn their faces towards the west and whisper: ‘Anisani, banisani, mamawerli, kaniani – he can’t do it…[i]
Perhaps, the disappearance of such customs together with other socio-economic factors had resulted in this threat of imminent decline in the nation’s population.
Azerbaijan, in any case, was not the land where most Azeris lived. The number of Azerbaijanis in Iran was four times higher than that in Azerbaijan itself. In that aspect, they resembled only a few nationalities of the world like the Lebanese who had a larger diaspora than citizens within the borders of the countries named after their people.
“The idea of Azerbaijan as a nation is more geographical than demographic,” Ilham explained. “Anyway, our population comprises of not just Azeris but people like Lezgins, Tats, Turks, Kurds, etc.”
Ilham offered to take us to the Khansarai (Sheki Khan’s Summer Palace). And there we met The Beast.
We had perhaps seen The Beast earlier. In the morning, we had met an old man who was dragging him to the arena, all covered up in a thick blanket. But now, The Beast had been uncovered and he meant real menace. His teeth would have ripped apart a shark; his paws would have squeezed life out of a lioness. He was as big as me. His eyes promised fire and his breath ready to unleash gallons of venom.
“Ha, I have been seeing The Beast since I was a child,” said Ilham. “For 16 years, I have seen this man bring him down everyday. He lives in a village high in the hills. As children, we used to find him quite nasty but now he has become too old. I think he charges one manat for getting a photograph with The Beast.”
The man was perhaps in his 80s. He just sat on the road in front of the Khansarai, dressed in what could have been his well-worn wedding suit. He wore a sheepskin hat and made The Beast wear the same too, for he was the proverbial wolf in a sheep’s clothing, a metal frame statue of a large wolf covered up by white wool.
The old man struggled to speak. We asked for a picture and he just waved at us to go ahead. When we looked closer, we saw the tiny torch bulbs that jutted out of The Beast’s eyes; there was one such bulb inside his mouth too. These three bulbs were linked up by a circuit of wires so jumbled up and complicated that one would assume that it had been knocked off from a cyclotron. The man tried to connect the bare ends of two wires, but the lights wouldn’t turn on. He kept trying. His hands were shaking. He began mumbling. Soon, he looked utterly miserable. What if The Beast never lights up again? This was his only livelihood. Ilham and I tried to help but the circuit was beyond our talents. We asked the old man if he had spare batteries. He fumbled through his pockets. He wasn’t sure. He appeared demented. The Beast had grown old with him. He was delighted when we gave The Beast some money. This man – who in his younger days had acted pricey to kids who wanted to pose with The Beast – kept mumbling a deluge of blessings. Hearing him, a real street dog came by and started begging us for food.
The ticket collector at the Summer Palace, one of the most visited tourist attractions in Azerbaijan, told Ilham,
“Ha, I saw these two earlier in the morning. They were asking if we have rooms.”
Indeed, we had confused the Khansarai as the Caravansarai – the hotel we were looking for.
“Since they didn’t look like the Sheki Khans, I couldn’t allow them to stay here,” he said.
The Khansarai was built in 1797 and was heavily damaged during the early Soviet period. It was then restored extensively during Khrushchev’s time. The graceful building has one of the finest assemblages of the Shebeke orstained glass windows and chandeliers. In Shebekes, the glasses are cut into small pieces and then fitted inside wooden grids; these grids are then joined to each other to make a larger frame.
“No nails are used in the entire process,” Ilham proudly claimed.
Good Shebeke took months to produce and Shebeke masters like Resulov Asraf Yaqub still commanded immense respect in Azerbaijan.
The palace was decorated with colorful tiles and murals painted in the Persian tradition. These murals, depicting scenes from the battle between the forces of Nadir Shah and Sheki Khan Haji Celebi were done by renowned painters from Azerbaijan who had signed their initials into these. There were the familiar tricks of the orient in these paintings such as the eyes that look straight back at you from whichever angle you looked at it from and dense assemblage of thousands of soldiers, each with a unique face. As Ilham explained the different rooms for public and private purposes, we wondered where the Khan’s toilets were.
“Ha, they had to go outside,” he said. “Like commoners, even in the winter snow.”
Yet, despite its magnificent Shebeke, tile work, and the murals, the summer palace was rather humble in scale.
“Ha, our Khans were not very rich,” said Ilham. “One can’t compare them with the Ottomans or Safavids.”
The Sheki Khans had also built a Winter Palace. We had tried to visit this palace the day before we met Ilham. In the maze of ancient Sheki, we had to try hard to find the Winter Palace. Even Shekians didn’t know for sure. When asked, some of them invited us home for tea – the haloed Caucasian hospitality that was much cherished and at times abused by tourists. Since we were rushing to make it before the palace’s scheduled closing time, we had to decline such kind offers with a heavy heart.
We found no one at the Winter Palace but the doors weren’t locked. We pushed gently and sneaked in. Soon we heard a voice from behind. She said that she was the official responsible for the place.
“I was just about to close the place and then I saw your shoes outside,” she said. “Otherwise, you would have ended up spending a night as the Khans.”
The palace had been lovingly restored – almost too lovingly for it now appeared like the mansion of a noveau-rich. Some of the rooms in the Winter Palace had charming murals depicting scenes from the works of Nizami – Azerbaijan’s legendary bard who composed Laila-Majnu, the epic love story popular all the way from India to Morocco.
“This palace was once bought over by a family that lived nearby,” our guide said. “That was during the Karabakh War when the government had other priorities. The family then spent many years searching for treasure that they believed were hidden somewhere in the palace. A few years back the government bought it back from them by paying a much larger amount. We then found so many holes in these palace walls – the family must have searched allover for the treasure. We had to repair at so many places. We don’t know if the family had found anything. But they seem to have done well and many of their members now live abroad.”
The Khansarai complex also housed several museums and we visited them with Ilham. Unlike in any other country, museum officials in Sheki were not the usual couldn’t-be-bothered sort. They actively pursued tourists and encouraged them to buy tickets to see the ethnographic items they had collected – kitchen tools, wedding gowns, baby cradles. We visited a couple of them. There were more displays of masterful Shebekes in the museums. The colors of choice for the stained glasses happened to be orange, blue, green and red.
“Ha, these signify the colors of the season,” said Ilham. “Orange signifies summer; red, the changing colors of autumn, blue for winter and green for spring.”
It appeared that Azeris were as fascinated by seasons as the Japanese. Much of their activities were dictated by the flow of seasons. Summer was the most favored and days and nights of the warm months were filled with festivities and events such as horse-riding, singing and dancing, and wrestling. The sketches in the museum of groups of young men wrestling during long summer days led to us discussing with Ilham about this sport that Azerbaijan had traditionally excelled in. In the Rio Olympics, Azerbaijan won the most medals per head of population, half of those 18 medals coming from wrestling. Its stellar record is, however, under threat given IOC’s decision to remove wrestling from the 2020 Olympics. Azerbaijan’s wrestlers, in any case, were often foreign born (mostly from CIS countries). This was evident in other sports too – a trend that attracted many critics. Nijat Rahimov, an Azerbaijani weightlifter, left his home country after a dispute over this issue of the national coach aggressively courting foreign athletes. He ended up competing on behalf of Kazakhstan and won a Gold Medal in the Rio Games.
“Many say that Rahimov had to leave because we Azerbaijanis don’t like good people,” said Ilham. “Our sports officials are infamous. We have this joke about one of the swimmers who managed to get into the team by bribing officials. We say that the Olympics haven’t ended yet because this swimmer is still struggling to complete his lap.”
One museum had posters and images from the Karabakh wars. No visitor could avoid the ‘Cries of Khojaly’ posters depicting the worst massacre of Azeris by Armenian forces during the 1992 edition of the war. The fearless journalists Chingiz Mustafayev and Yuri Romanov did much to document the destruction bought about by the conflict that had gained so little attention from the rest of humanity. The estimates of the number of dead in Khojaly varied from 160 to 613. But imagining just one image from the war was enough to trample the zeal of a battle-craving heart and make him contemplate the futility of the war and the tragedy it inflicts on innocent humans – that of an elderly woman and her granddaughter tied to each other with barbed wire, both shot through their heads, the baby girl’s dead hands trying to embrace the grandmother one last time in a futile attempt to save her.
But the same images were equally potent in keeping the hatred alive. In Sheki, all major crossroads now looked up to giant portraits of Iskenderov Elnur, the ‘Shehid (Martyr) of Sheki’, killed in the war’s 2016 edition. A passerby whom we had asked who the poster was about had told us,
“Look at his eyes. So young. So unfortunate. When he died, we all came out in the streets. Even women like me. I saw his father. The old man was crying. Have you seen an old man crying? It is awful to see such things. We will take revenge. It is just a matter of time. It’s not enough for the old man. But that’s the least the country can do for him.”
[i] Ali and Nino
Shivaji Das, Travel writer, Workshop facilitator, speaker, Singapore 