2-August-99 Garni and Gekhard
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First thing after breakfast we set out for the memorial to the victims of the 1915 genocide in Tsitsernakaberd Park.
I didn't know about it until I lived in Watertown in my grad school years, but during World War I the Turks massacred about a million and a half Armenians, systematically driving them out of the area in what's now eastern Turkey where they were the majority population. Many were killed on the spot, others forced to walk to the Syrian desert to die there. The government of Turkey has never admitted that it happened. This is, naturally, as important to modern Armenians as what Jews call “The Holocaust” is to modern Jews. It's time to get over the “The” and recognize that what's happened in Rwanda and Bosnia isn't so different, and that we all have to stand up for each other -- and maybe the NATO intervention in Kosovo is the first sign of a change.
Well, whatever, we felt that it was appropriate to pay a respectful visit to the memorial Armenia had established for its genocide victims. We caught minibus #74 going the other direction from yesterday (there was no room -- we stood and crouched under the low ceiling) and got off just over the bridge over the Hrazdan River, across the street from the huge yellow stone Ararat Brandy factory. Anne asked the driver of a truck parked nearby how we should walk, and he got out and carefully pointed out the way. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but Anne was very impressed. In Russia, she said, she would have been lucky if the driver had grunted and pointed his finger in the right direction from up in the cab.
Anne has been consistently saying things like, “Everyone is so friendly!” Also, “They all have such beautiful eyes! Look at those long thick eyelashes! And all the older women look like Olympia Dukakis.”
It turned out we had got off the bus one stop sooner than we had to. We walked up past a big stadium and the concession booths next to it and asked more directions (“Keep going up that way -- you'll see some steps”) from policemen playing backgammon in the shade of one of the booths.
We continued the long hot dry walk up the hill. There were some trailers (we couldn't figure out their purpose) being hoisted off a flatbed truck. We paused to watch someone hook cables from a crane to the four top corners of a container and ride on top as the container was lifted off the truck and swung into position on the ground.
Sure enough, there were the steps, five or six flights worth, going up the hill.
There was a lot more bird life up on the hill in Tsitsernakaberd Park than there had been in downtown Yerevan. Magpies were flying back and forth and carrying on loud discussions in the trees. A large hawk flew over and into a tree near the monument, but I didn't see any details of it.
Monument
The steps we came up were at the back of the monument, so we missed some of the effect. I'll take you around the front so you can see it as it was intended.
There's about fifty yards of lawn in front of you with a paved path down the middle. Off to the left, parallel to the path, is a dark gray stone wall. Carved into it (you know how people say, “it's not carved in stone?” In Armenia it likely is carved in stone. The alphabet has a particularly crisp look that looks exceptionally nice in stone) are a series of single, separated words. I found out later that they are the names of cities and regions destroyed in the genocide. At the right of the far end of the lawn is a needle-like pyramid with a section cut out along the near vertical edge. If it's intended to symbolize the loss of a large fraction of the population, it works. At the end of the lawn is a big circle formed by six or eight large inward-sloping slabs of basalt. You walk down some steps between the slabs into a large, dark (but in this climate, thankfully, shady!) circle with a bowl of fire in the middle. It has an impressive, solemn, stark beauty.
We walked back down the steps and hill, easier going in this direction, got some juice at a kiosk at the bus stop, and tried to flag a #74 minibus. The first two that came by were full and didn't stop, so we got on a #30 full size bus. I don't think the US DOT would have let us on it. It was battered! There was a hole in the floorboards by our feet and the doors wouldn't close fully. It ran, though, and got us back to Republic Square.
A typical bus
We bought a cheese turnover (for Anne) and a meat turnover (for me) for lunch and made a wonderful discovery for a beverage -- rose hip juice. That would be the same rose hips that are a major source of natural vitamin C. The juice was a little like apple juice, but more flavorful, tarter, and more refreshing. I haven't found any yet in the US, but I'll keep looking.
A driver, Tom, was supposed to meet us in the hotel lobby at 2:00 to take us to two towns outside Yerevan. We were in the lobby a couple of minutes early. Were Armenians on time, or would appointments customarily be kept ten minutes after the specified time? Tom showed up precisely at 2:00. He had an '83 Volga, pretty much the Buick of Russian cars. Don't be silly, of course it wasn't air conditioned. However, it had those little ventilator windows in the front -- little glass triangles at the very front of the front windows that pivot on a vertical axis and can be aimed to direct a breeze on the front seat passengers even at twenty miles an hour. My family's '51 Pontiac had vent windows like that. I don't know when they disappeared from American cars. Anyway, we went up through Nork, a section of Yerevan on the east side of town, on the hills (the temperature was several degrees cooler just at that elevation, a couple of miles away from the center of the city), and Tom pointed out many Soviet-era monuments along the way. To me the most memorable was of a hefty guy striding along bent over under a huge lumpy burden -- a large stone. That one shows the relation between the Armenian worker and STONE, the classic building material. Workers! How Soviet can you get!
We turned off the road to Sevan and went towards Garni.
Garni landscape
No way could I drive in Armenia. Forget not being able to read the road signs. Dealing with the roads is the main problem. There are potholes and stretches where the pavement is just missing. You have to be prepared to slow to 10 MPH at any time. And then there's the question of cows and sheep on the road. Fortunately, Tom has been driving there all along.
Garni has a restored ancient pagan temple. It looks a bit like the Parthenon, but is a lot smaller and is built of dark gray basalt rather than white marble. It has had a long and checkered history, most recently having been damaged in the earthquake a couple of decades ago. Some of the stones fell and were broken beyond re-use, and some were put back in place. We climbed up and stood where the priests of ancient Urartu would address their congregation, and looked at the remains of the baths and storehouses next to the temple.
Anne at Garni temple
Local women were selling soujouk nearby. That's a snack made by stringing walnuts on about 18 inches of thread and coating it all with grape juice. Somehow it manages not to get sticky or gummy. I had read about it, recognized it, and got a piece. I'll take it over trail mix any day.
We drove on to Gekhard. There's a medieval church there carved right into a rock by a cliff. At the bottom of the hill, near where we parked, were three musicians playing traditional music on a dumbek, clarinet, and doudouk. Oops -- vocabulary note. The doudouk is a double reed instrument about the size and shape of an alto recorder. The reed is about an inch across, not like an oboe or bassoon reed. Across the street from the musicians were some people selling food -- fruit rollup and some ornate flat cakes. Between the music and the food, this was probably the most traditional folk culture of the trip.
The church in the rock was carved out from the top down. The dome carved inside the rock looks just like church domes that were built from the bottom up, pretty normal until you realize that there aren't stone blocks with seams between them, just solid stone. Then you think about the problems of measuring it so it came out even and so the builders didn't punch through the walls where they didn't want to.
Tom got three candles, lit one, and gave one each to Anne and me. I had to think for a minute, then decided I was lighting it for my graduate school landlady, Louise Saghbazarian.
On the way back a black and white bird with an orange head flew across the road. No question -- a hoopoe!
Back in town, we walked back up Abovian Street to the Tiflis restaurant for some Georgian food. We were the only people in the restaurant when we got there and when we were served. Then the band came in and set up behind me. I moved my place to the other side of the table to see. There were four musicians: a bulky fortyish man with a bulbous nose playing the accordian; a woman in a black dress playing a zither, something like an autoharp but with four times the surface area and without the chord bars, with an intricately carved soundboard, held flat on the lap and played with finger picks; a thin man in a teal blue shirt with a short gray beard just along the chin line playing a little hourglass-shaped drum (is that a dumbek? I just think of it by its Hebrew name, tof); and a man in his sixties playing a string instrument that you've only seen in a museum -- something like a gourd with a drumhead across it, with a neck and four strings. How scratchy and primitive is that going to sound, I wondered. No! He rosined up his bow and started to play, and a concert violinist would have been happy with the tone. The tof player was the lead vocalist, and of course we couldn't do anything with the Georgian lyrics. The string player and zither player in particular had amazing riffs. The music was beautiful, and Anne and I (and the waitress, and the zither player's kid) were the entire audience until another party of three came in. As I write this, four days after getting home, that music is the high point of the trip for me.
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