The Taste of Karabakh: What a Peace Deal Means for a Cuisine in Exile

Pashinyan said it plainly, the words carried by Euronews across the world: Karabakh 'was not ours.' I read the headline three times at my kitchen table, a half-eaten plate of tolma going cold beside my coffee.

I am not Armenian. But I have spent enough time in the kitchens of Yerevan, Tbilisi, and the diaspora homes of Lyon and Los Angeles to understand that the cuisines of the southern Caucasus do not respect the lines drawn by geopolitics. They never have. And right now, as Armenia and Azerbaijan look — however tentatively — toward a shared future, I find myself thinking about what that means for the food. For the cooks. For the grandmothers who are still here, and the ones who are not.

There is a dish I keep returning to in my mind. It has a dozen names depending on which side of which border you are standing on. It is slow-cooked lamb, piled into a clay pot with dried fruits — sometimes sour plums, sometimes apricots, sometimes both — and left to find its own truth in a low oven for three hours. In Azerbaijani homes, they call it a piti. In Armenian homes, it becomes something else entirely, adjusted by altitude and grief and the particular dried fruit your family carried out when they left. Same clay. Same lamb. Different story told into the pot.

This is what the politics of the Caucasus have always done to food: they have multiplied it. Every displacement creates a new variation. Every peace negotiation, every ceasefire, every politician's public statement is eventually absorbed — slowly, unconsciously — into the way someone adjusts their spice ratios when they are far from home.

I think about the Karabakh Armenians who left in 2023. That exodus — recent, raw, still unprocessed by history — created another wave of cooks carrying their knowledge somewhere new. I have spoken to women in Yerevan who arrived with nothing but the memory of how their own grandmothers salted meat, how long the lavash baked, how sour the matsun was supposed to taste. Memory as luggage. Recipe as passport.

Now Pashinyan is saying, in public, in front of cameras, that the political claim is over. And I find myself asking: does a cuisine mourn differently when the political fight is formally conceded? Or does the food outlast the diplomacy entirely — because food was never really about territory to begin with?

I believe it is the latter. I have to believe it, or none of what I do makes any sense.

The most consequential thing I know about Caucasian cooking is that it has always been bigger than the people who claim exclusive ownership of it. Dolma — the stuffed grape leaf that every nation between the Bosphorus and the Caspian Sea will argue belongs only to them — is proof enough. The argument itself is the inheritance. You fight about the food because the food is the last place you can still win.

But something shifts when a peace process becomes real, however fragile. Borders, even psychological ones, become slightly more permeable. I have seen this in small ways already: Azerbaijani food writers engaging, carefully, with Armenian recipe archives. Armenian cooks in Europe quietly incorporating techniques from cookbooks they once refused to touch. The food moves before the diplomats finish their sentences.

This does not mean the wounds are healed. Wounds this old, layered under this much history, do not heal in a news cycle or a peace framework. The grandmother in Goris who lost her house in Stepanakert is not soothed by a Euronews headline. But her kitchen — the one she has rebuilt in an apartment she never expected to be living in — that kitchen is already doing the slow work of preservation. She is teaching her granddaughter the recipes. The granddaughter is writing them down. That is the archive that matters most.

What strikes me, sitting here three years after that exodus, is that we are at a rare hinge moment. The South Caucasus is not at peace — not exactly, not yet, perhaps not for a long time — but it is in negotiation with itself. And food, that most honest of diplomats, will register every shift before the treaties are signed.

I want to write more about the cooks of Karabakh. I want to document the recipes that traveled with the displacement and the ones that were left behind in empty kitchens. I want to find the woman who still makes her grandmother's version of the stuffed quince — beh dolması, as Azerbaijanis call it; something almost identical exists in Armenian cooking under a different name — and sit with her long enough to understand what ingredient she considers non-negotiable.

Because that non-negotiable ingredient — that one thing she will not substitute — is where the real history lives.

The question I cannot stop asking is this: when two peoples finally begin to share a future, how long before they can share a table without counting what was lost?