KHAGAN KALENDERLI – AZERI LIVING IN YEREVAN

“I never quite understood why I should leave Armenia”, Khagan Kalenderli, 57-year-old producer of a state-run documentary film studio in Yerevan says. His father ran an Azeri theater in Yerevan, he himself is married to an Armenian woman and decided to stay in the city, which has become native for him despite the lasting conflict between the two states. “I think it was quite normal for me to stay here. I was neither forced nor asked to do that. I have simply lived here since my birth by the law of nature”, he says in his interview with RFE/RL. Unlike the Armenian community of Azerbaijan that was mostly concentrated in the capital Baku, the Azerbaijani population of Armenia was overwhelmingly rural. Only a few thousand Azerbaijanis lived in Yerevan and Khagan Kalenderli was one of them. What about other Azeris remaining in Armenia? Kalenderli says he knows a few of them but has little contact with them. “I could have immigrated but my roots are here. Not to mention Armenian apricots,” he says, chuckling. “Where else could you find such tasty apricots?”