There are years in the memory of history that do not fit into the pages of a calendar, carrying the burden of years and centuries onto a handful of land. The dark shadow that fell over Karabakh in the early 1990s divided the lives of millions of people into two halves: the burning longing of the gloomy years and the hopes that were silently suffocating in a corner of rooms. The bitter defeat of the First Karabakh War, the children and elderly people displaced from their homes, the people who could see their native homeland only in their dreams – this was the quiet yet unbearable pain that a nation endured deep inside every day for three decades.
For thirty years, that sorrow did not lift from this land like a heavy fog. Villages whose names remained on maps but whose inhabitants themselves became a memory, childhood photographs left among ruined walls, eyes opening every morning saying, “perhaps today”... As time passed, this longing became an incurable shared pain that settled in the heart of the entire nation.
Children grew up without ever seeing these lands, without breathing their air into their lungs. That unquenchable light in the eyes of parents, the desire that boiled inside them with every passing autumn – not for revenge, but to take back what was rightfully theirs – slowly wore down the patience of this people. The yellowing pages on the shelves of the United Nations Security Council’s resolutions 822, 853, 874 and 884, which remained only on paper, and the silence of international law preserved for years made this pain even more unbearable.
Everyone knew that this injustice could not last forever; but no one knew how and when that darkness would be torn apart. As the morning of September 27, 2020, dawned, a different kind of roar erupted across the skies of the South Caucasus. The 44-day Patriotic War was the cry of existence of a people emerging from thirty years of silence, wounded pride and darkness.
Every day, every hour had its own drama, its own epic of heroism. The steep rocks climbed by soldiers stitch by stitch, the foggy mountains were waiting this time not to witness defeat, but to build the throne of victory. Those 44 days kept a dance of fear and hope alive in the heart of every Azerbaijani.
In Baku, Ganja and the regions, everyone’s ears were tuned to the news, while their eyes were on the lists coming from the front. Every news of a martyr fell into homes like a burning ember, but those tears flowed not from despair, but from the pride of revenge and the restoration of justice. As the Azerbaijani soldier climbed those steep rocks with his fingernails, he was taking revenge for thirty years of silence.
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