evidence: I was talking to a friend about my travel plans to Azerbaijan and she told me about the exclave of Nakhchivan, geographically separated from the rest of Azerbaijan by its neighbor and enemy, Armenia, with whom they’re still at war. [...] For a capital of an autonomous republic, the streets of Nakhchivan City are puzzlingly sedate. Meanwhile, the apartments of Nakhchivan City look like lacquered Lego toys, tidily stacked in OCD-like perfection. Nakhchivan is almost Swiss in its cleanness. Every courtyard is meticulously manicured. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more rosebushes than people in the city of Nakhchivan, population 75,000. [...] Nakhchivan was the first part of the former USSR to claim independence, in January of 1990, yet the ease with which it gained independence would belie what was to come. The Nagorno-Karabakh War between Azerbaijan and Armenia claimed tens of thousands of lives, displacing over a million. It was during this war that Nakhchivan was blockaded for a year, which has made the exclave a bit obsessed with self-reliance.