Tweet
I had a dream: A Stepanakert native looks back at Karabakh's recent past
http://armenianow.com/karabakh/44217/naira_hayrumyan_karabakh_essay
KARABAKH 25: BUILDING A REPUBLIC | 07.03.13 | 22:04
NAZIK ARMENAKYAN
ArmeniaNow
Naira Hayrumyan
By NAIRA HAYRUMYAN
ArmeniaNow correspondent
As a school girl I dreamed about my city one day becoming a really big
capital to host presidents of foreign states, as well as ordinary
tourists from abroad window shopping large local stores and dining at
fancy local restaurants.
But life in the small provincial town of Soviet-era Stepanakert
proceeded at a measured, conservative step, leaving little room for
any expectations of real big changes, and even smaller ones weren't
anywhere in the offing. After graduating from school many Karabakhis
would leave for studies in big cities, some of them later pursuing
really successful careers as scientists and scholars, military men,
etc. They usually visited Karabakh during summer vacations. Back then,
Stepanakert resembled a large town of summer homes. By the accents of
those visitors one could easily tell whether these `holidaymakers'
were permanent residents of Yerevan, Baku or the North Caucasus
(Russia).
Everything changed in Karabakh in 1988. At one point I even thought my
dream was beginning to come true. First there were demonstrations -
people marched through the city, chanting `Miatsum' (meaning a
unification with Armenia) and `Lenin, Party, Gorbachev' (early naïve
illusions that the Bolshevik Communist Party founded by Lenin and led
by reformist Secretary-General Mikhail Gorbachev at that time could
allow Karabakh Armenians, once wrongly placed under Azerbaijani rule
by Stalin, to reunite with Mother Armenia).
In 1991, the year that brought the formal demise of the USSR, real
presidents came - Boris Yeltsin and Nursultant Nazarbayev, the first
democratic leaders of Russia and of Kazakhstan. It was also then that
Stepanakert became a real capital of a real (if `unrecognized') State.
And then also came the foreigners - albeit dressed in uniforms of
fedayeen. They spoke Armenian, but in some strange dialect barely
comprehensible to me. It turned out that they were Diaspora Armenians
from the United States, Syria and Lebanon. It was also then that I
started to learn the Armenian language and Armenian history anew.
My dream came true, but things worked out not quite in a way I wanted
them to be. It turned out that for my dream to come true my city and
myself had to go through the worst - a war. The city was heavily
bombed. People hiding in the basements of houses, mostly women and
children, were all together counting the number of Grads - deadly
artillery rockets of Soviet make used by Azeris to shell Armenian
towns and villages - falling all over the place, destroying houses,
killing and wounding civilians. The count was usually 40. Then, while
the Azeris were recharging their mortars, we had some 20 minutes in
which we could run outside to get to a spring and fetch some water. My
mother-in-law would come out of the basement/bomb shelter and for some
reason start sweeping the broken glass caused by the shelling off the
area at the entrance to the house. She kept saying that order must be
maintained at all times.
Many families lost their homes, many people lost their parents,
children, and had their fates ruined by these hostilities. My dream,
meanwhile, seems to have come true, as now Stepanakert has a
presidential administration of its own, government ministers, even
SUVs in which these officials drive (or are chauffeured) around the
town. Foreign visitors can be seen at almost every corner, fancy shops
are full of goods, there are fancy restaurants offering fancy menus,
but for some reason one wants to dream about something else. Maybe
about a durable peace and a real ceasefire on the borders where deadly
skirmishes are still an unfortunate and almost daily occurrence...
In 1993 I worked as a Russian-language teacher at a school in
Stepanakert. Once I asked my sixth-grade students to write a
really-really short essay consisting of just a couple of sentences. I
asked them to explain briefly what they thought war was. `You've got
two minutes to put down your thoughts and explain what war is,' I told
my students. I was sure that they'd write about people being killed,
crippled, houses being destroyed under bombings. But they started to
whisper to each other and finally turned to me and asked: `What is the
Russian word for `looting'?'
Looting, or plunder, is when, under the guise of war, people take
someone else's property; something that does not belong to them. For
many in Karabakh it became a disease of sorts, an obsession, a source
of enrichment, while for some also the only escape from hunger and
cold. Then came the humanitarian aid, when Diaspora gifts were being
distributed. Getting it also became an obsession for many.
And while the common people survived on humanitarian aid, meager
`looting' and some gardening, there suddenly began this emergence of
the new rich, these new generals, posh cars and big private homes in
my town. To people's questions of whether it was moral to be building
such houses in post-war Karabakh, the then-president of Karabakh and
future president of Armenia Robert Kocharian answered that people need
to feel confident about their future so that they will continue to
live in this country.
I don't know if people could get that kind of confidence from the
sight of luxurious homes, but for sure they could get mixed feelings,
having watched the northern part of Stepanakert turn into a huge city
gravesite with more than 3,000 young, handsome men buried there.
Not far from that cemetery someone opened a restaurant, naming it `The
Living and the Dead'. At first glance, the name is terrible and it can
send shivers down your spine, or a flinch of anger. But in post-war
Karabakh the attitude towards the dead is different. For most
Karabakhis these dead are still alive. And a cemetery for Stepanakert
is just a large bedroom where their family members are resting after a
tiring battle.
In the courtyard of this restaurant there is a small church, Vararakn.
Vararakn is the ancient name of Stepanakert, which means a
`full-flowing stream'. The legend has it that some 1,500 years ago
King Vachagan the Pious vowed to God to build 300 churches across the
Armenian land. He traveled around the country and in the place where
his horses were stomping on the ground to warn there was water
underground, he would dig a spring and build a church on that site.
Vararakn is one of those surviving churches.
But for some reason the church does not function, perhaps because it
is part of private property as it is situated in a territory
privatized under the restaurant. This is very much like the history of
Karabakh proper, as there wasn't a single functioning church in
Karabakh for more than half a century.
The first time I saw a `real' priest was in 1986 when I was on an
excursion to Echmiadzin, to the Holy See of the Armenian Apostolic
Church. Before that the church seemed to me something fabulous,
non-existent. In the 1930s the last church was closed in Karabakh. My
mother kept, in a closet, a portrait of Catholicos Vazgen I and that
image of the supreme head of the Church embodied Christian morality in
our house. The first church to open in Karabakh in 1988 was Gandzasar,
a majestic 13th-century edifice in the Martakert province. Then other
churches were reopened one after another, and it turned out that
almost every village had a small church and it was enough to clean a
thin layer of dust off them to get their bells ringing again.
Now a cathedral is being built in Stepanakert. Meanwhile, in the lower
part of the Karabakh capital a small church has been constructed at
the expense of Armenian American philanthropists, the Vatche Yepremian
family, from California. It is never empty - people come here to pray
for the repose of the dead and for new births; students come here to
ask God for good marks during exam sessions, and this itself
demonstrates that Karabakh has returned to God.
Generally speaking, there's a lot of building going on in Stepanakert.
A guest who visited the city during AGBU's Assembly in October,
compared the main street of Stepanakert to the famous Champs-Elysées
in Paris. This is, of course, a bit of a stretch, but the street has
greatly improved.
In a way, though, things still look like fancy props, as the beautiful
facades of the buildings hide that same measured provincial life of
Stepanakert, with men playing backgammon and women skillfully hanging
linen and clothes on lines stretched between the houses.
Stepanakert courtyards generally resemble a large exhibition of
underwear. And visitors happily take pictures of this `tourist
attraction'. Most women in Karabakh are laundry-hanging freaks, as
they treat the job as a sacred art - linen and clothes need to be
arranged neatly on the washing line, following a special order and
keeping in mind the colors and sizes. And God forbid you break this
order. My mother-in-law, for example, taught me how to hang clothes
correctly `not to lose face in front of our neighbors'.
Karabakh has a provincial way of life in the positive sense of the
word. It is a fairly quiet place where life does not have a frantic
pace typical of big countries and cities. Here people appear to have
more time and space for pondering about life and stuff...
But this measured pace of life and this typical post-war aspiration
for stability at times turn the place into a stagnant bog in which
people are afraid to speak out, even to defend their common rights.
Although during the latest presidential election in July more than 30
percent of Karabakh voters who went to the polls refused to support
the incumbent, but voted for the candidate who, in fact, criticized
him, nothing has changed after the elections. People are still afraid
to speak out, perhaps remembering that their president's resume
includes having been a former KGB boss.
But Stepanakert has never been provincial in terms of the scale of
local thought. Folks in the Karabakh capital think globally. As one
person used to say, everyone in Stepanakert knows about the potato
crop in Honduras, and who assassinated JFK and why. The locals are
able to dream on a universal scale. They even joke that if it weren't
for their dreams, two of the three presidents of Armenia would not
have been natives of Karabakh.
Today's Stepanakert, a beautiful, clean and cozy city, has been built
on these dreams as well as on a very clear understanding of liberty
and equality. And even the threat of war does not stop the locals from
looking into the future to see tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.
Why not? Shushi could turn out to be the capital of a united Armenia.
My dreams often come true, and this one could be no exception.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
http://armenianow.com/karabakh/44217/naira_hayrumyan_karabakh_essay
KARABAKH 25: BUILDING A REPUBLIC | 07.03.13 | 22:04
NAZIK ARMENAKYAN
ArmeniaNow
Naira Hayrumyan
By NAIRA HAYRUMYAN
ArmeniaNow correspondent
As a school girl I dreamed about my city one day becoming a really big
capital to host presidents of foreign states, as well as ordinary
tourists from abroad window shopping large local stores and dining at
fancy local restaurants.
But life in the small provincial town of Soviet-era Stepanakert
proceeded at a measured, conservative step, leaving little room for
any expectations of real big changes, and even smaller ones weren't
anywhere in the offing. After graduating from school many Karabakhis
would leave for studies in big cities, some of them later pursuing
really successful careers as scientists and scholars, military men,
etc. They usually visited Karabakh during summer vacations. Back then,
Stepanakert resembled a large town of summer homes. By the accents of
those visitors one could easily tell whether these `holidaymakers'
were permanent residents of Yerevan, Baku or the North Caucasus
(Russia).
Everything changed in Karabakh in 1988. At one point I even thought my
dream was beginning to come true. First there were demonstrations -
people marched through the city, chanting `Miatsum' (meaning a
unification with Armenia) and `Lenin, Party, Gorbachev' (early naïve
illusions that the Bolshevik Communist Party founded by Lenin and led
by reformist Secretary-General Mikhail Gorbachev at that time could
allow Karabakh Armenians, once wrongly placed under Azerbaijani rule
by Stalin, to reunite with Mother Armenia).
In 1991, the year that brought the formal demise of the USSR, real
presidents came - Boris Yeltsin and Nursultant Nazarbayev, the first
democratic leaders of Russia and of Kazakhstan. It was also then that
Stepanakert became a real capital of a real (if `unrecognized') State.
And then also came the foreigners - albeit dressed in uniforms of
fedayeen. They spoke Armenian, but in some strange dialect barely
comprehensible to me. It turned out that they were Diaspora Armenians
from the United States, Syria and Lebanon. It was also then that I
started to learn the Armenian language and Armenian history anew.
My dream came true, but things worked out not quite in a way I wanted
them to be. It turned out that for my dream to come true my city and
myself had to go through the worst - a war. The city was heavily
bombed. People hiding in the basements of houses, mostly women and
children, were all together counting the number of Grads - deadly
artillery rockets of Soviet make used by Azeris to shell Armenian
towns and villages - falling all over the place, destroying houses,
killing and wounding civilians. The count was usually 40. Then, while
the Azeris were recharging their mortars, we had some 20 minutes in
which we could run outside to get to a spring and fetch some water. My
mother-in-law would come out of the basement/bomb shelter and for some
reason start sweeping the broken glass caused by the shelling off the
area at the entrance to the house. She kept saying that order must be
maintained at all times.
Many families lost their homes, many people lost their parents,
children, and had their fates ruined by these hostilities. My dream,
meanwhile, seems to have come true, as now Stepanakert has a
presidential administration of its own, government ministers, even
SUVs in which these officials drive (or are chauffeured) around the
town. Foreign visitors can be seen at almost every corner, fancy shops
are full of goods, there are fancy restaurants offering fancy menus,
but for some reason one wants to dream about something else. Maybe
about a durable peace and a real ceasefire on the borders where deadly
skirmishes are still an unfortunate and almost daily occurrence...
In 1993 I worked as a Russian-language teacher at a school in
Stepanakert. Once I asked my sixth-grade students to write a
really-really short essay consisting of just a couple of sentences. I
asked them to explain briefly what they thought war was. `You've got
two minutes to put down your thoughts and explain what war is,' I told
my students. I was sure that they'd write about people being killed,
crippled, houses being destroyed under bombings. But they started to
whisper to each other and finally turned to me and asked: `What is the
Russian word for `looting'?'
Looting, or plunder, is when, under the guise of war, people take
someone else's property; something that does not belong to them. For
many in Karabakh it became a disease of sorts, an obsession, a source
of enrichment, while for some also the only escape from hunger and
cold. Then came the humanitarian aid, when Diaspora gifts were being
distributed. Getting it also became an obsession for many.
And while the common people survived on humanitarian aid, meager
`looting' and some gardening, there suddenly began this emergence of
the new rich, these new generals, posh cars and big private homes in
my town. To people's questions of whether it was moral to be building
such houses in post-war Karabakh, the then-president of Karabakh and
future president of Armenia Robert Kocharian answered that people need
to feel confident about their future so that they will continue to
live in this country.
I don't know if people could get that kind of confidence from the
sight of luxurious homes, but for sure they could get mixed feelings,
having watched the northern part of Stepanakert turn into a huge city
gravesite with more than 3,000 young, handsome men buried there.
Not far from that cemetery someone opened a restaurant, naming it `The
Living and the Dead'. At first glance, the name is terrible and it can
send shivers down your spine, or a flinch of anger. But in post-war
Karabakh the attitude towards the dead is different. For most
Karabakhis these dead are still alive. And a cemetery for Stepanakert
is just a large bedroom where their family members are resting after a
tiring battle.
In the courtyard of this restaurant there is a small church, Vararakn.
Vararakn is the ancient name of Stepanakert, which means a
`full-flowing stream'. The legend has it that some 1,500 years ago
King Vachagan the Pious vowed to God to build 300 churches across the
Armenian land. He traveled around the country and in the place where
his horses were stomping on the ground to warn there was water
underground, he would dig a spring and build a church on that site.
Vararakn is one of those surviving churches.
But for some reason the church does not function, perhaps because it
is part of private property as it is situated in a territory
privatized under the restaurant. This is very much like the history of
Karabakh proper, as there wasn't a single functioning church in
Karabakh for more than half a century.
The first time I saw a `real' priest was in 1986 when I was on an
excursion to Echmiadzin, to the Holy See of the Armenian Apostolic
Church. Before that the church seemed to me something fabulous,
non-existent. In the 1930s the last church was closed in Karabakh. My
mother kept, in a closet, a portrait of Catholicos Vazgen I and that
image of the supreme head of the Church embodied Christian morality in
our house. The first church to open in Karabakh in 1988 was Gandzasar,
a majestic 13th-century edifice in the Martakert province. Then other
churches were reopened one after another, and it turned out that
almost every village had a small church and it was enough to clean a
thin layer of dust off them to get their bells ringing again.
Now a cathedral is being built in Stepanakert. Meanwhile, in the lower
part of the Karabakh capital a small church has been constructed at
the expense of Armenian American philanthropists, the Vatche Yepremian
family, from California. It is never empty - people come here to pray
for the repose of the dead and for new births; students come here to
ask God for good marks during exam sessions, and this itself
demonstrates that Karabakh has returned to God.
Generally speaking, there's a lot of building going on in Stepanakert.
A guest who visited the city during AGBU's Assembly in October,
compared the main street of Stepanakert to the famous Champs-Elysées
in Paris. This is, of course, a bit of a stretch, but the street has
greatly improved.
In a way, though, things still look like fancy props, as the beautiful
facades of the buildings hide that same measured provincial life of
Stepanakert, with men playing backgammon and women skillfully hanging
linen and clothes on lines stretched between the houses.
Stepanakert courtyards generally resemble a large exhibition of
underwear. And visitors happily take pictures of this `tourist
attraction'. Most women in Karabakh are laundry-hanging freaks, as
they treat the job as a sacred art - linen and clothes need to be
arranged neatly on the washing line, following a special order and
keeping in mind the colors and sizes. And God forbid you break this
order. My mother-in-law, for example, taught me how to hang clothes
correctly `not to lose face in front of our neighbors'.
Karabakh has a provincial way of life in the positive sense of the
word. It is a fairly quiet place where life does not have a frantic
pace typical of big countries and cities. Here people appear to have
more time and space for pondering about life and stuff...
But this measured pace of life and this typical post-war aspiration
for stability at times turn the place into a stagnant bog in which
people are afraid to speak out, even to defend their common rights.
Although during the latest presidential election in July more than 30
percent of Karabakh voters who went to the polls refused to support
the incumbent, but voted for the candidate who, in fact, criticized
him, nothing has changed after the elections. People are still afraid
to speak out, perhaps remembering that their president's resume
includes having been a former KGB boss.
But Stepanakert has never been provincial in terms of the scale of
local thought. Folks in the Karabakh capital think globally. As one
person used to say, everyone in Stepanakert knows about the potato
crop in Honduras, and who assassinated JFK and why. The locals are
able to dream on a universal scale. They even joke that if it weren't
for their dreams, two of the three presidents of Armenia would not
have been natives of Karabakh.
Today's Stepanakert, a beautiful, clean and cozy city, has been built
on these dreams as well as on a very clear understanding of liberty
and equality. And even the threat of war does not stop the locals from
looking into the future to see tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.
Why not? Shushi could turn out to be the capital of a united Armenia.
My dreams often come true, and this one could be no exception.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress