Yerevan streets were rife with remnants. Leftover communism wasn't Armenians' fault, but it was their reality: remnant autos, housing, and remnant attitudes.Traffic and shops and change booths filled Mashtots Avenue, and young people stood everywhere talking on their phones as we drove around town. Men without shirts mowed the parks, forlorn. Couples, aging and young alike, sat under trees and flirted.
A month before, a new Armavia A 320 Airbus crashed on approach to the other side of the Black Sea, to the Russian resort of Sochi, killing all 113 aboard. Today, teens on cell phones congregated around the glassy Armavia building not seeming to remember.
We bought a little something from the artists market across from the philharmonic and enjoyed fine Kotayk (“Co-Tike”) beers at terrace cafes. At one, a café associated with the adjacent Palace of Culture, a former Peace Corps volunteer remarked how Armenia had grown sharply more European in his five year absence.
We took a spin around Republic Square, and watched the wedding processions. Newlyweds, preceded by a car video-taping their antics, stood through the sunroof in their limousine, as they took turns around the center of the capital.
*****
We went to pay our bill at the travel agency and Noune, travel agent, sat us down for remarks. She kept pulling a shock of gray back into her black hair. She told us about her sons, in photos behind her. This one was in Boston! A medical student! The other? Oh, he lived in Moscow. She was dismissive. He was in television.
Noune was new at her job. Only for some months. She had been a violinist and that was all well and good, but finally she had resigned herself to the need to get paid. She complained, “Our only pension is ten, fifteen dollars a month. Electricity is expensive, sometimes more than one hundred, but some people make less than one hundred.”
“In the U.S. I know, you can make five thousand, ten thousand dollars in a month, it is depending on what you do, but here? Maybe two hundred.”
That’s a big difference. There’s also a difference in what she says Armenians expect from their leaders.
“We take care of each other, we can not expect the government to,” she told us.
And here is where blood feuds and honor killings become the least bit more conceivable:
Civil society is a wreck in the post-Soviet world. Outside Russia-proper, everybody makes the best of their battered Russian remnants. In remote places beyond Soviet penetration, civil society never existed, and still doesn’t, and the administration of the village is sub-divided among clans, who make and enforce the laws, such as they are.Jason Burke wrote in his book On the Road to Kandahar, “such ritualized and overt violence … publicly demonstrated the power of a … tribe to chastise those who transgress its rules….” And may have helped, somehow, to push back at a hostile, encroaching world.
*****
There was no fighting here. Noune stoutly asserted this, dismissing any other possibility.
No, it was not a war. It all happened because of the great earthquake of 1988, after which the good people of Narorno-Karabakh rose up and demanded the right to places to live, what was theirs.
A man in this office went to fight, she told us.
“He is great patriot. And may I say,” she said, with a thin smile, “Very heartbroken.”
The Turks of course, they pushed in all directions, not just toward Armenia but also toward the Greeks, the Bulgarians, but it was preposterous, she said. They claimed the Khachkars as their own. Khachkars are delicate patterned “stone lace” carvings, “crosses of stone” unique to Armenians.
“And they don’t even have churches.”
Noune’s office charged my Visa 40,000 Manats eight times because they didn’t know how to charge more than 40,000 at once, since they had only had a Visa terminal since April, and they said they were the first travel agent in town to get one.
Just before the last charge went through the receipt roll ran out, and so a long delay ensued as staff, I guess, ran around town to find more paper, but finally we all agreed a photocopy for each of us would be just as good.
So we rolled toward the suburbs but they called Levon back. Noune stood on the street with a form she forgot for us to sign (she was new), one copy in Armenian and ours in English, attesting to the services they’d rendered, because I guess all hell would descend on Sati Travel if they made money and the government didn’t know about it.
It was just as well we came back. Nobody bought bottles of water, and so I went to a little storefront in front of Noune’s walk-up office, and Noune followed me in. She insisted that I not pay. A few words to the vendor just downstairs from her office, and he handed me two bottles and waved my money away.
“We help each other.”
And later, when we ate at Lake Sevan, the lady wouldn’t take money for Levon. We paid, Levon ate free.
He brings you to our restaurant. We help each other.
******
Leaving Yerevan you’ll see a cloister, the zoo, a big water park with long slides, the statue to Mashtots (Saint Mesrop Mashtots, inventor of the Armenian alphabet, born around 360) and the engineering and medical institutes.
Yerevan is bigger than Podgorica, Montenegro, the latest former Yugoslav state to declare itself independent, but the two towns have a lot in common. Leafy and dry, battered and saddled with making do with post-communist remnants, and never meant to be a national capital. If you live there, it’s a slow but altogether agreeable, family-based way of life.
If you’re young in Yerevan you have a cell phone. The telephony infrastructure was so decrepit it behooved to erect towers. The girls wear tight pants. Unfortunately what passes for male fashion is still the black-with-trim, mafia-and-running-suit look that used to be the rage in early post-Soviet Russia.
It’s like the American south when I was young, probably any rural American community forty years ago. It’s uncomplicated, with simpler toys and aims, like back when chasing the ice cream man constituted a sublime afternoon.
*****
Huge new housing blocks rose from the hills outside of Yerevan, mostly unfinished. His meaning poignant, Levon made a sign with his hands. “Communist,” he said, and showed this much. “Now,” he indicated much less.
He made a motion with his hand like something falling off a table, like, ‘End of Communism, end of dachas.’ Noune said that Armenians from Iran were trying to buy land and move to Armenia because the government in Iran is terrible.
“Of course it’s okay, they’re Armenian!”
Levon tapped his knuckles and pointed around (while driving) to tell us something really important and every time it was just unfathomable.
A ding on Levon's windshield caused the view to warp in the very part of the windshield at his eye level.
Twenty dachas sat unfinished on a hill. Levon: “Comoneest. Money no. Dacha no.” Sometimes there were whole hillsides of sandy-colored unfinished housing.
Lavender & yellow wild flowers bloomed and temperatures cooled outside the bowl where Yerevan sat. With altitude, snowy patches ponded all over the slopes, in summer retreat.
White bushes bloomed in the median of the M4, a well-maintained split highway. Eroded humps of landscape were dotted with tired brown evergreens, slumping down the hill in lumpy, listless contrast to a bright yellow soil.
Lake Sevan boasted a proliferation of straw hat and beach towel stands. All around the lake makeshift shashli grills stood more often than not unattended.
Ka – Ra – Ma, Levon chants at a place. Ka – Ra – Ma. Karama still had spotty snow here and there in the fields. In June.
Levon gestured to a village over on the left and told us, “Yuri Gegarin,” the famous Soviet cosmonaut who beat the American Alan Shepard into orbit by less than a month in 1961.
A car park led to a walk up to the Lake Sevan monastery. Dozens of the fine filigreed Khuchkars Noune mentioned stood hewn into the church walls. Men sang traditional songs or played some stringed thing for tips, and quit immediately as you walked past.
They barbequed fish at a fine terrace with tables of families, all laid out against the deep blue water below. Reminded me just the least bit of Lake Baikal - not Lake Sevan itself, but the old Russian trucks, unkempt landscaping and the signs in Cyrillic. Families were happy, there were jet skis out on the water and the lake was busy sprouting resort hotels.
Lake Sevan has been manipulated for hydropower and its elevation has varied, but right now at 1900 meters (6200 feet), it’s the world’s highest alpine lake. That’s remarkable, and it explains the snow fields in June.
From a delicate green salad of dill, flat leaf parsley and tiny green onions all in a pile, Levon picked a few pieces, folded them back on each other a couple of times so that they fit onto a torn piece of lavash and rolled the bread into a roll around them.
He grinned and said, “Armenian sandwich.”
Then, beaming, he did the same with a slice of cheese, “Armenian sandwich – anything!”
Through hand motions he told us that “Sevan wasser” (German was our very tenuous common language) was good to drink and described two kinds of lake fish, and how expensive they were.
We watched a bus’s exhaust start a brush fire leaving the parking lot. We were way above it, looking down. Boys, just two of them, came with bowls of water and rags to put it out.
At intervals after the lake, men stood outside permanently placed shipping containers by the roadway. Each walked toward the Volga as we approached and pointed the index fingers of both hands at the car, arms held a certain distance apart.
They were selling freshly caught lake fish, advertising them as, “this big.”
Rusty 1940’s vintage buses plied the roads (as it would turn out, all the way through Georgia up to the Russian border).
Forested villages scrolled by one after the next, stone houses tucked under outcrops of rock, dramatic vertical relief, not many cars, mostly people on foot. Lots wore straw hats against the penetrating sun, and that introduced a sense of languor.
Few material goods, but of course fashion (or its impostor) imposed itself. A girl on a village street corner wore a t-shirt with the English words “Love Team M.”
That young fellow, late of the Peace Corps, who had marveled in Yerevan how “It looks so much like Europe than four years ago” wouldn’t have said the same in the considerable hillside town of Vanajo. Its prominent feature, a long bridge that held out the potential of a lovely stream underneath, yielded only a disappointing industrial zone that spilled over to the other side, where we left the M4 for the M6 and through blighted alleys, clinging to the hillside.
We’d doze, and Levon, trying his endearing best to be tour guide without a common language, would declaim something like, “Gomarodie!” and grin and poke the air with his finger and show us five or six teeth.
A sign announced, “Pambak.” In Pambak you could buy Byuregh distilled water.
Top-heavy blue Kamaz trucks struggled up switchbacks in smoke-choked queues while we glided down. Breezy cool, it was a brilliant afternoon, the moon waxing through half full, high in the sky at five in the afternoon.
A man stood on the roadside beside four huge packages outside Vahagnad.
Through the pine forests of Lori we ran inside a narrow defile alongside the Debed River, which crashed through the center of Dzoraget town and men fished on rocks. It’s one of those places where the water has carved so far down into the valley that the sun must leave the valley floor by noon.
They’re making a go at making Dzoraget a holiday village, with a fancy hotel called the Avan, featured in Travel & Leisure magazine on a page called “Where to go next.”
It must have had some earlier heyday, because there were remnants of cable cars long rusted to a stop. On a few buildings they were replacing some cement walls with new wooden siding.
You couldn’t leave Armenia without one last monastery (very famous monastery number 37), called Sanahin, from 996 in the reign of Ashtot the Bagratouni (doesn’t he sound like a comic book hero?), a time when fortresses and not borders marked the extent of rule. It was perched so high on a hill even the thought of hauling the building stones up there was crippling.
Ashtot the Bagratouni was an enlightened ruler. His fortress housed a school of higher education and a rich library.
Levon, bless him, was already going to be seriously late by the time he got us to Tbilisi and turned around to head back home, but he dutifully and without reluctance offered to take us up there, and he didn’t even show relief when we declined.
Now we settled into gliding around curves and following stream or canyon rim until gradually the hills were lower and the vegetation, except for planted cedars and poplars shrunk from alpine to more scrub than trees, and it was hot again.
Cows walked the roads apparently untended.
When we stopped to fill up, Levon smiled and declared, “Toilet is Europe NO!”
They dispensed petrol into a tank in the trunk, and everybody assembled smoked. Mirja and I scrambled out to avoid what looked like the inferno to come. A young man called out to me. I had no idea what he was saying, of course, and Levon said something that caused him to laugh and rush over to shake my hand.
“Good morning I am David,” he smiled, even though it was late afternoon.
“Good morning I am Bill,” I replied as we embraced.
Levon told me David was alarmed at my taking pictures and thought I must be the police.
Both sides of the border cost us just 23 minutes. Levon showed us his passport, which had pages of Georgia entry stamps. He clearly knew his way around this border, and on the Armenian side, stifling and still, the officials were indifferent.
Georgia customs was a shipping container with peeling green paint. They’d made a go at an awning to provide a little shade but it was long since gone, its remaining supports rusted away, and three boys, one in uniform, smoked and stared ahead. We did the border formalities with a Georgian official in French and it all came off with no baksheesh, although as we pulled away someone shouted and Levon, unsure, stopped while someone unaffiliated with officialdom sauntered up and casually showed a knife. Levon determined he was merely blustering for small change, shook his head and drove on.
Sheep and the smell of wood smoke were new to this side of the border. Leafy green crops grew behind man-high thistle. Craggy, naked hills rose beyond. For miles people trod the roadside, but there was simply no commerce.
Giant cedars rose between the fields, and the roads were much more pocked and potholed in the towns and villages, where there was much more holdover Cyrillic than in Armenia. And then, for no reason I could tell, we came upon a comically giant traffic circle.
A vast plain opened before us. Looked ripe for a horde.
Way, way over there, such was the open space, appeared some kind of fortress or monument on a distant hill. We made our way toward it. The air was fragrant and a lake spread far below on the right.
We made a turn and descent to merge with a highway in the valley, and ran straight up on the fortress. Along the way, some administrative building and a cell phone tower. Around a ridge, eventually, predictably, the fortress was discernible as a monastery. It held a sweeping view of the next valley floor – and Tbilisi.
*****
Next: Up to the Russian border
Photos: 1. Singing man at Lake Sevan, 2. Republic Square, Yerevan, 3. Downtown Yerevan, 4. Housing outside Yerevan, 5. Lake Sevan, 6. Kochkars, 7. Fish monger, 8. The road to Tbilisi. Click to make 'em bigger. See more photos of the South Caucasus in the Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan Galleries at EarthPhotos.com.
This is the latest in a series of excerpts from the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey. Previous entries: The Southern Caucasus Part One, Madagascar, Greenland, Patagonia, Sri Lanka, Tasmania, Paraguay, Climbing Mt. Kinabalu, Tibet and Cambodia and Malawi.
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