Tweet
I had a dream
Naira Hayrumyan, AGBU
14:22 09/03/2013
Story from Lragir.am News:
http://www.lragir.am/index.php/eng/0/society/view/29226
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.
Naira Hayrumyan, AGBU
14:22 09/03/2013
Story from Lragir.am News:
http://www.lragir.am/index.php/eng/0/society/view/29226
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.