This post is part of Stephan Sveshnikov’s 2024 Global Food Fellowship.
I wrote the initial draft of this post in Khinaliq, a small Caucasian village in Azerbaijan, just south of the Russian border. The entire medieval village, built of stone and perched on a steep hilltop, is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site, partly due to the significance of the long transhumance route that runs through the surrounding mountains: thousand-year old footpaths along which men herd sheep and goats on seasonal migrations that last hundreds of miles. In the courtyards of low stone houses, bricks of cow dung and straw were drying to be used as fuel for the winter. A group of renegade goats roamed the streets, and in one paddock a calf was trying hard to eat the flower off a thistle. As a local brochure explained, the “main activity of the Khinalig community is sheep and cattle breeding.” This fact remained unchanged even now, in 2024, despite an asphalt road connecting the village to the regional center of Quba and, perhaps one of the biggest changes of all, high speed internet access (as of 2022).
The fog had rolled in and thunderstorms were blowing through the mountains, so I put on a yellow parka against the chill and wrote at the guesthouse, looking out the window at a flock of geese that made its way from house to house along the rutted dirt road, eating the tastiest grasses from each yard before moving on with much babble. They had no concern for the rain. In the evening, around 7 o’Clock, the distant lowing of cows signaled the end of daylight. They came down from the mountains, and headed back to their respective homes in small groups. Everyone went out to milk (most of it would be made into cheese). Then we gathered around the table for dinner. On the TV, which had been on all day, the children scrolled through YouTube shorts.
I did not speak the language of Zaur and his family. It is a Caucasian language (classified as “severely endangered” by UNESCO) native only to this village and one that neighbors it. To communicate, we spoke to each other in short, clipped, sentences through Google Translate.
When dinner was over and the tea had been poured, I asked, through the app: “How has internet changed life in Khinaliq? Is it good, or are there things about it you don’t like?”
***
I had come to Azerbaijan because I wanted to know how life in remote mountain villages was changing because of the internet. For some time, my friends and I had been coming across YouTube videos that showed villagers cooking in the scenic Caucasus mountains. The videos were usually over an hour long and had titles like “Life and Cooking of the Mountain Village Hermit Family! Traditional Cuisine Far from Civilization” or “Rustic Recipes using Local Products! Life in the Villages.” On screen, weathered villagers milked sheep and cows, made cheese, grilled meat, and baked bread from scratch. Usually all was silent except for the sound of farm animals and the crackling of wood on the fire or water pouring from a pitcher. Most of the videos ran over an hour. I started to get more curious about who was behind the camera, and when I looked into it, I realized that many of the most popular videos were filmed in Azerbaijan.
So what was this? A form of digital tourism? A way to keep village life afloat in the twenty-first century? Documentary footage? Was it staged? Was it authentic (and what would that mean)? Who in the village benefited?
After several attempts to get in touch, I finally heard back from a channel called “Sweet Village.” They agreed to an interview, and even promised to take me into the field to watch how they filmed. We agreed that I would stop by their office on Monday, the day after I landed. Thus my first stop in Azerbaijan was at the quiet and well-lit headquarters of SOS Media. Inside, young social media, film, and analytics experts were hard at work editing footage and planning their next trip into the mountains.
I knew very little walking into the office. My contact at the SOS Media, Tukyaz Taliyeva (job title: Project Manager), had told me that her company was responsible for three of the YouTube channels I was interested in. In an interview with Tukyaz and the Executive Director, Lyubov Gladysheva, I learned that this family-owned company had nearly 100 employees. There was a filming schedule, there were script writers, editors, and other experts. Their main target audience was in the United States (since YouTube pays creators based on ad revenue, and ads are the most expensive in the U.S., that is the most lucrative market). Later in the week we would head to the Qəbələ region, where most of their footage was shot, and I would meet the family behind “Sweet Village,” who were relatives of the man who had started the parent channel and the most iconic of them all (almost 6 million subscribers), Wilderness Cooking.
The road from Baku to Qəbələ climbs out of the desert plains near the Caspian Sea into the green Caucasian Mountains, winding along silty, shallow rivers. By the time you reach the outskirts of Baku, there are herds of cows, goats, and sheep grazing on the roadside. Qəbələ itself is a prosperous market and tourist town. A few tourists come here, mostly from the Arab countries and India, to enjoy hiking, fresh food, mountain views, and waterfalls. It made sense that someone would have come up with the idea to film in this place: it’s a relatively small step from agro-tourism to digital agro-tourism.
The “Sweet Village” family lived (in their whitewashed stone summer home) on the slopes of the mountains outside Qəbələ, in a small village called Qəmərvan. On the porch, Shamsi, the grandmother and one of the YouTube stars, served me scalding hot tea and the little fried triangles of flaky dough and walnuts called “pakhlava.” The crew set up for filming -- a scene in which Malik (the grandfather’s) and Shamsi’s daughter, Günay, would bake a raspberry pie. One of the younger men — evidently a relative, was getting ready to film on an iPhone. His dream was to direct movies in America — he was interested in the indie movie scene. I told him he might never have as large of an audience there as he has now, on YouTube (736K subscribers on the Sweet Village channel).
Once the filming got going, it went about the way any cooking show would. Lots of stopping and starting. Snatches of soft conversation between cut and action. After about ten minutes, Malik (who was not being filmed that day) got bored. “Do you want to go up into the mountains?” he asked me. Of course I did.
High above the village, Malik recited the poetry of Lermontov and we talked about the seasonal migration of animals from the summer mountain meadows to winter grazing grounds down in the valley. In his younger days he had spent many nights with the sheep up in the mountains. Even now, in his late seventies, he walked fully upright, straight up the mountain slopes, without pausing for breath.
“Isn’t it strange, I said at one point, “that so many people here want to go to America -- but in America, so many people watch your channel and wish they were here?”
Malik’s face was impassive. “It’s normal,” he said. “Take these mountains, for instance. To you they’re breathtaking, because you’re seeing them for the first time. To me, they’re ordinary. It’s like that.”
When I had asked Lyubov Gladysheva, the Executive Director at SOS Media, about why people loved these videos so much, she said simply, “people are more or less alike.” In other words, everyone loves to watch the process of cooking good food, and to relax by enjoying beautiful scenery.
As far as I could tell, Malik and Shamsi’s lives had not changed much since they became YouTube stars. To them it was an unremarkable thing. Life for them still centered around their grandchildren, around their livestock, and around the seasonal migration from their village home in the summer down into the valley in the winter.
***
Back in Khinaliq, heavy rains had washed out the bridge, and I had to take a more mountainous road back to Baku. Morning found me at the general store. Outside, a saddled horse was tied to a telephone pole. Its owner, a shepherd, was inside, stocking up on food before heading back up into the mountains. In the courtyard across the road, Yusif Askerov Bagiroglu, the assistant director of the historical museum, was enjoying the morning sun. He was old enough to remember the summer when professors from Moscow State University traveled out to Khinaliq to document the language and create an alphabet. I asked him, in Russian, about Khinaliq’s future. What would the village look like one hundred years from now?
Yusif shook his head at the question. “One hundred years I cannot say. It is not given to us to see that far. But I can tell you that in twenty years there will be no more livestock raising. Tourism will develop. This process has already begun.” There were already plans for a hotel and a restaurant. The jobs of the future would be in the service industry.
“And how do you feel about this?” I asked.
“How? Well how…this is progress. It is inevitable —” he looked at me searchingly — “isn’t it?”
A couple of days prior, Zaur, my host, had answered my question about the internet without hesitation, shaking his head. “The internet is good!” he said. Then he grabbed the TV remote and turned on a black-and-white 1937 film showing Khinaliq in the era of Soviet Collectivization. The road had not yet been built, and electricity was just being set up. There was no television. The oldest man in the village could remember the days of the Russian Empire. Wheat was threshed by hand and water had to be carried every day from wells. We watched in silence, and then the film ended and dinner was over.
I still don’t know what Zaur was trying to say by showing me that film. It was as if he was saying, “is this what you want? To see the village as it was before the internet?” Or maybe he wanted to say: “The internet is good. It allows me to show you how life was before, which is what you want to see. Here it is.” In any case, it was easier to show me than it was to explain anything through the translation app.
So, what can I say about village life in the Caucasus? Nothing here stands still. On the slopes of one of the mountains outside Khinaliq, I saw a shepherd silhouetted against the sky, head bent over his phone. Young people film their grandparents and post on YouTube. No one uses the old tools, which are relegated to local museums. TV, internet, cars, electric lighting -- it’s all here. So is the plastic garbage clogging the ditches. Some of the problems are very old, and they are different from the problems most of us (at least in New Haven, Connecticut) will encounter in our lives: how to cut enough hay for the winter, how to tell your own sheep apart from your neighbor’s, how to wean a calf from its mother. Some of the problems are new. But in the end it is hard for me to say what role the internet plays. The internet may accelerate some of the processes of change, and retard others. But it does not have much power on its own. The internet will bring tourists to Khinaliq, but only if the government repairs the washed out road. The internet allowed one family in Qəmərvan to create a thriving media company, but most of those new jobs are in the city. Maybe the most crucial thing that access to the internet does is change the lives of children, both by altering the way they spend their free time, and by making them realize very early on that the centers of culture are urban. But on this trip I did not ask about children.
One of the newest videos on the “Sweet Village” channel is titled “How Azerbaijani Family Lives in 21st Century? Cooking KFC Fried Chicken Far from Civilization.” The chicken (probably not from the village) is breaded by hand and then fried in cast iron cauldrons over a wood fire. The caption to the video reads:
Life in our azerbaijani home is simple, but full of warmth. Today, my family and i made homemade chicken nuggets using fresh ingredients from our garden. We cooked and laughed together, sharing stories as we prepared the meal. Living in the 21st century has its challenges, but these moments remind us of what truly matters❤️
There is a reason, of course, that these quiet meditations on food preparation are so popular, and this caption captures the crux of it fairly well. If there is anything universal about humans, it is that they like to prepare good food together, tell stories and laugh, and feel warm at heart. Sometimes we are almost embarrassed to say it out loud, because it sounds too simple. And the truth is that many of the people around the world who watch these videos are enthralled because they see something that they want to replicate in their own life. In that way, the YouTube channel “Sweet Village” is as much about the people who watch it as it is about Azerbaijan.
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Stephan Sveshnikov is a PhD student in the Yale History Department whose research focuses on agriculture and village life in Russia and Eastern Europe. You can read more about his travels in Azerbaijan and elsewhere on his Substack.