Nagorno Karabakh’s Last of the Mohicans

Author: Knar Babayan

13.04.17

Nina Avanesyan grew up in Mehmana, a Greek village, as the tiny settlement was known in Nagorno Karabakh. She is one of the 200-odd Greeks who used to live in the region where the first settlers arrived in the early 1800s.

In the early 1990s when the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan broke out over Nagorno Karabakh’s push for independence from Azerbaijan, the authorities gave ethnic minorities the opportunity to move to their fatherlands, and in 1992 most of the Greek community who lived mainly in the northern area of Martakert, left.  

Nina and her family stayed on - today she is the last Greek left in Nagorno Karabakh.