The clearest point where my memory begins is not a place I chose, but one we were brought to- what we called “home” inside an administrative building in Djalilabad. I was six years old.
It wasn’t just a move. It was an erasure followed by an improvisation. My parents were forced to leave the place where they had been born and raised, where they had built a family and believed they belonged. It was the cost of a war none of us- neither my parents nor we, their four children had chosen.
I was the youngest, so my memories of Fuzuli come in fragments. But some images refuse to fade: our large yard, fruit trees bending under their own weight, the blackberry bush in front of the house. And the nights when my mother made us sleep in outdoor clothes, as if even rest had to be provisional. At any moment, news could come. At any moment, we might have to run.
And one day, we did.
My parents gathered what they could- four children, a few belongings, photo albums - and we left. I remember kissing the wall of our house before we went. Even as a child, I felt something final in that gesture, as if I already knew we would not return.
After that, life became a sequence of migrations: a settlement near Fuzuli, then Djalilabad, later Baku. But among all those places, Djalilabad stayed with me. It was where I started first grade. Where I made my first friends. Where I first understood what it meant to be marked as different.
“Refugee,” my classmates would say, stretching the word into something sharp. I didn’t understand it then-why it carried that look, that tone. It hurt. I was angry. Only later did I realize that the judgment did not belong to them. Children inherit their language from adults; they repeat what they hear without knowing its weight.
At home, our parents told us something else: We are guests here. This is their city. We must get along with everyone, because we have nowhere else to go.
As I grew, my dislike of war grew with me. I never liked toy guns. Even now, seeing children play with them unsettles me. Around us, I often heard families speak with hatred about Armenians. But never in our home. My parents did not pass that on to us. If I believe in peace, it is because of them.
We lived in a section of an administrative building- three unused rooms given to us because we had nowhere else. My father found a low-paying job at a motor depot. The six of us lived together in that space, trying to make it into something that resembled a home.
I rarely invited classmates over. When it was my turn, I would invent excuses. Their homes felt “normal.” Ours felt temporary, exposed- as if at any moment someone might remind us that it wasn’t really ours.
We had lost not only our house, but also the rhythm of life that came with it. The winter food supplies we had prepared in Fuzuli were gone. Only my father worked. We were rebuilding from nothing, like so many families after the war.
Humanitarian aid would arrive in boxes from Europe, distributed through the UN. Inside were food, clothes, hygiene products-practical things for survival. But once, among these necessities, there was something unexpected: a small packet of flower seeds.
It felt almost absurd. Who would imagine that people who had just fled a war would think of planting flowers? Where would they even plant them? And yet, there it was- this quiet, stubborn gesture of belief.
My mother planted them.
There was an empty plot of land in the yard of the building. She turned the soil with her hands and scattered the seeds. Months later, flowers bloomed—bright, persistent, impossible to ignore. People who worked in the building stopped to look. Passersby paused, surprised, grateful. They thanked her for creating something like a small paradise.
I think now that she wasn’t just growing flowers. She was growing a future we couldn’t yet see.
The conditions we lived in were harsh. There was no hot water. In winter, my mother washed dishes and clothes with freezing water. We heated only one room with a wood stove, and all six of us slept there, close together, trying to keep warm and not fall ill. We worried most about my father—he was the only one earning money. If he got sick, everything would collapse.
I remember one evening especially. There was a shortage of bread across the country. People waited in long lines for hours. My father went after work, and we waited for him so we could have dinner together—as we always did, no matter what. But when he finally reached the front, the bread was gone.
It is one of the bitterest memories I carry from those years: the waiting, the hunger, the quiet disappointment he brought back with him.
And yet, when I think of that time, I find myself missing that “home” more than any other. Because it was the last place where we were all together, before life began to scatter us. My sisters married and moved to Baku. My brother left for military service. Eventually, we followed.
Baku became the latest stop in my family’s migrations.
As for me, the movement never really ended.