Sumgait

Tensions burst into violence in 1988 when more than 30 — some say as many as 200 — ethnic Armenians were killed in a pogrom in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait.

In response, Azeris set about murdering Armenians in the city of Sumgait and other parts of Azerbaijan.

The guard of the village school, Tigran Saakyan, recalled the inflection point as his once-friendly attitudes to his Azerbaijani neighbors shifted: the day in 1988 that his cousin arrived, fleeing the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait, where anti-Armenian riots had taken at least 32 lives.

Mr. Danilian is Armenian but was born in Sumgait, Azerbaijan, then a part of the Soviet Union.

When I mentioned this to Mr. Saryan — an Armenian who fled Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, around the time of the anti-Armenian Sumgait pogrom in 1988 — he said he still had nostalgia for Baku, where he had spent most of his life.