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Cliff Baxter is an Australian journalist who visited
Armenia with photographer-artist Jacob Majarian of Sydney to prepare
a pictorial history of the country that in 2001 celebrated 17
centuries of faith. It was thefirst Christian nation. The patience
and cheer of the people in a landlocked country struggling to
find an economic base impressed him. In Gyumri, however, he found
an icy Hades. He writes:
Gyumri, northern Armenia. - Veronik will never clatter down
the iron ladder,her boots echoing like a bell, into the icy dungeon
at Khor Virap where Armenia's national hero, Saint Gregory the
Illuminator, was captive for more than a dozen years.
Nor hear how King Tiridates, understandably upset that divine
punishment had changed his head into that of a wild boar, freed
Gregory and in 301 AD declared Armenia the first Christian nation.
Because he freed Gregory the king was rewarded with a cure for
his pigheadedness.
Veronik would have liked that story. Little girls like to draw
pictures of kings who have heads like pigs.
But Veronik will never light a votive candle in the scary dungeon,
reeking of centuries of incensed prayer or let out a giggle when
another child drops a snowball into the hole.
She will not be petted by the two peasant women who sell white
roosters to be sacrificed like something out of the Old Testament
on the blood-flecked ramparts looking out across the plains to
Mount Ararat, white-capped like a monk, and now in Turkish hands.
Veronik will not sit in the schoolroom with her classmates to
hear how on those blooded plains in 1918 one and a half million
unarmed Armenians were slaughtered or driven into death marches
in the deserts, until a band of patriots stopped the Turkish Army
in its tracks.
They proclaimed a republic a thirteenth the size of the original
Armenia.
It had in its glory days most of present Turkey, Iran, Georgia
and Azerbaijan. The small republic was soon swallowed up by the
Soviet Union,but since 1991 has regained its independence.
Veronik's mother will not take her to see the genocide eternal
flame flickering its sombre memorial from the heights overlooking
the capital of Yerevan and buy her a treat after of sujukh, wild
chestnuts coated with solidified grape juice.
She was dressed in her best clothes for our visit. Our Caritas
vehicle lurched to a halt on the sheet of ice in front of the
hideous cargo containers of the Shirigazi ghetto outside Gyumri
in northwest Armenia.
We discovered Veronik dead, inside one of the container homes.
She had died at 3am.
For a dozen years around six thousand families crammed into the
containers after the 1988 earthquake devastated the city.
There is no work. The men walk in the snow hacking at roots for
fuel. You see them everywhere. Men walking from nowhere to nowhere.
In the containers they lie in bed all day to keep warm. They light
fires from discarded motor car tyres. These fill their shelters
with noxious fumes but offer some relief from the subzero temperatures.
It may have been these fumes that killed Veronik at the age of
three months.
She was laid out her pure white woollies and bonnet, under a
pink shawl, her empty bottle close by.
There had been no bread in the place for three days.
Her mother, Kunarig, stood silent, holding Veronik's brother,
Arsen, aged two and a half years. She was still as a khatchkar,
one of the cross-stones carved from the local tufa volcanic rocks
that dot the landscape of this land of ruined monasteries and
churches.
Veronik ('true icon' named after Veronica, the saint who wiped
Christ's face) was a twin.
Her sister Anna lived only six days.
Kunarig's husband was killed when the earthquake shattered their
apartment.
She moved into another, but a kerosene heater exploded and destroyed
the second home. There was nothing left to do but to join the
container ghetto near the Gyumri military barracks.
She married again, but soon her second husband left to look for
work.
He has not come back.
We give Kunarig some money. We will always wonder if Veronik
could have been saved if we had arrived earlier. We were several
days late because we could not obtain seats on a 24-seat Armenian
Airlines aircraft from Beirut despite our protestations that they
were booked and paid for.
Outside Leika, the community's tiny pup, bares her fangs at an
unseen enemy. But the real foe is poverty and injustice.
This iced hell is at latitude 41 degrees, longitude 44 degrees
in a cargo container upon the ice where temperatures can be 20
degrees below freezing.
These are sophisticated people, masters of legendary cuisine.
Their women used to compete to see who could make the best thin
lavash bread, or the tastiest rice packed into vine-leaf wrappers
for tasty sarmas.
In normal times food was the centre of conversation.
'Inch gerak?' What did you eat? They would demand after a member
of their family visited another. 'Ger, ger, ger' - Eat! They would
command their guests. This still happens in Yerevan, but not in
Gyumri.
In a room not much larger than a small car I drink tea with the
mother of nine children. They sleep all day to stay warm.
The power has been cut off.
Government relief money has not arrived. Lack of money means
there is no gas from the old Soviet line from the Caspian Sea.
Neighbours crowd in with a gift of bread they have cooked over
a burning car tyre. People are gasping, coughing from the poisonous
stench.
A 77-year-old woman from nearby Spitak shivers in her green cardigan,
floral dress and head scarf as she tells how she asked the mayor
for help but nothing happened.
She is entitled to D. 5,000 a month relief, but it has not come
for months.
She pays D. 1,000 a month for electricity, but it has been cut
off because she cannot pay the bill.
A woman tells how she escaped from the Aberbaijani tanks that
crushed people beneath their tread in Karabagh to end up in this
desolate place.
A man puts another piece of motor car tyre on the little stove.
We engage in a litany of coughs.
A young man tells of five years in prison. He is now doing his
two years of probation in a cargo container. I give him my Aussie
merino beanie in return for his poor headgear.
What can the visitor do? I give the group 50 American dollars
and I pay the power bills.
It is a fortune. Four dollars will buy an 18-year-old bottle
of cognac, 32 a feast for two with vodka and caviar at Yerevan's
Russian restaurant, and 60 a necklace made in the time of Catherine
the Great.
Silence descends. The young man speaks. 'My eyes were freezing.
I knew someone would come.'
There is a tradition that when one's eyes are cold a stranger
will arrive.
I wonder how long it will be before international aid gets through
to these people.
I have seen the local mafia bosses standing arrogantly by their
flash cars.
I have seen the Soviet-built apartments standing empty and windowless.
I have seen the pot-holed roads.
The country has learning, artistic skills, civilised people but
there is no true economy.
The 'white genocide' forces the professionals to queue up in
hundreds for an American visa. It is said that the Americans are
making it easy to get visas in the south so that the land will
be depopulated and land exchanges can be negotiated with Aberbaijan.
Gunmen have invaded the parliament and shot several of the politicians,
but I felt safe walking the streets. 'Welcome' was said to me
so many times.
Policemen who have not been paid stop motorists and demand on
the spot cash, but they are very polite. They just want to eat.
Even pedestrians get 'fined' sometimes.
Yerevan has enormous water distribution problems, but it has
a Waterworld.
It also has a casino soon to be shifted out of town because of
public opposition.
Pizza Hut in Yerevan has the city's second violinist playing
and food better than Paris and red wine from Areni where an appreciative
Roman once built a monument in its honour.
The country is paradise for the archaeologist. 'Taking nothing,
we laboured here' reads a laconic Greek inscription near Garni,
where a classical temple has been restored.
Greek, Persian, Roman, Arab, Seljuk Turk, Mongols have poured
through and left their marks of destruction on the forts that
peer down from the heights and the monasteries and churches whose
ruins are scattered throughout the country.
The Apostles Thaddeus and Batholomew were martyred in Armenia
in 40 AD.
The Iranian government has preserved the monastery over the remains
of Thaddeus, but Bartholomew's, in Turkey, has been destroyed
as bulldozers try to erase all traces of Greater Armenia that
once stretched to the Mediterranean.
Scientific teams from Yerevan are photographing them while there
is still time.
In Georgia, too, churches are being ethnically cleansed.
An optical engineer who worked on the Mir space station now works
as a mountain guide and uses a screwdriver to keep alive his ancient
Volga car.
Young musical virtuosos are touring the world and there is a
cultural renaissance under way regardless of the economic crisis.
In the southern city of Sisian, Ashot Avagyan, a hero from the
war against Aberbaijan runs an art academy for children and studies
petroglyphs from prehistorical times. He has refused offers to
move to Paris and London. Many people are refusing to budge.
The cultural renaissance of the young republic has passed by
the men in the snow of Gyumri. They are burning the roots of fruit
trees for fuel. Yet this place is famous for its gaiety.
The cargo container men have not lost their humour. They like
to tell jokes against themselves. They say when Gyumri men went
to Niagra Falls they had to ask them to shut up so that tourists
could hear the waterfall. Gyumri men say they built a tomb for
the unknown soldier because it was unknown whether or not he was
a soldier. A smoker tells me he dreamed he found the after-life
filled with cigarettes. No, they told him, this is hell. If we
had any matches this would be heaven.
Gyumri is the second city of Armenia and the centre of the Shirak
region.
It is also a place of great heart. Poor people offered me chewing
gum, saying, 'Bon appetit.'
There is a Catholic soup kitchen where people can find nourishment.
Gyumri also has a gracious convent run by the Armenian Sisters
of the Immaculate Conception.
The sisters open their doors to orphans from all parts of Armenia.
'Children's smiles are the signs of the Lord's presence and their
hope for the future,' said Sister Arousiag Sajonian, the Superior.
There is pain in her eyes when she talks of those who are not
being helped.
'It hurts me that I cannot help all of our people who need our
help. I can only help a handful. Because of this many children,
especially girls are being lost.'
She has heard disturbing tales of young girls being taken on
flights to Middle Eastern countries for the enjoyment of wealthy,
aged men.
What is needed, she says, is for people to find honourable work.
Her shopping always includes a visit to one street stall because
the man there is an opera singer who somehow has to stay alive.
She knows authors who are forced to sell souvenirs.
Her children go to the soup kitchen and sing for the old people.
They sing You are My Sunshine and If You're Happy and You Know
It Clap Your Hands on the school bus on the way to the soup kitchen.
They present gifts. There is not a dry eye in the place.
Back home in their safe environment the children stand respectfully
when Sister Arousiag enters the dining room for grace.
The Sisters' goals are to supply healthy food in a pleasant atmosphere,
develop a set of values consistent with Christian ideals, develop
an awareness of personal strengths and limitations and practice
faith and traditions of the Armenian Church through special classes
and participation in prayers. Music, dancing and drawing assist
in the child's development.
Stepping outside the convent is to find another world, to meet
the people Sister Arousiag would like to help.
In one cargo container I meet an attractive young mother. She
has two children aged 15 and 13. They cannot go to school because
she has no shoes for them.
'They don't do anything' she says, her eyes flashing anger. She
has lived in these disgraceful conditions for 12 years.
She is baking bread over a motor car tyre fire.
She insists I try some. Armenian women compete for guests even
in poverty.
A glass chandelier from better days hangs incongruously above
her. The place is immaculate.
'Winter is the season for gourmets' says the tourist guide. Not
for the cargo container people.
Gyumri, on the bank of River Akhurian, 1556 metres above the
sea level, was once the premier city of Armenia. It is one of
the oldest cities in the
world, as old as Babylon.
Shirak region has had people living there from the stone age.
The local museum has bronze, ceramics, weapons and precious things.
The Greek historian and military leader Xenophon mentioned Gyumri
in his writing.
Leninakan was its name from 1924; before that it was called Gimira,
Kumairie, Gyumrie.
In 1837 the Russian Emperor Nikolai the First visited the city.
He named it Alexandropol after his wife, the Empress Alexandra.
The Emperor built a Russian church, founded military castles and
frontier fortifications and the town became an important outpost
of the Russian Empire.
In 1924, after Lenin's death, the town was called Leninakan in
memory of the leader of the Russian Revolution.
In recent times two Armenians who came from Beirut built a new
hotel in Gyumri in the hope that the railway line through Georgia
would reopen.
It has not happened.
Gyumri's notables include Anania Shirakatsi - brilliant mathematician
and astronomer (7th century) and the architect Trdat (10th century).
It produced poets Avetik Issahakian and Hovhannes Shiraz, and
composers Tigran Chukhadjian and Armen Tigranian.
March is known as 'crazy month' because of the sudden changes
in weather as the country prepares for Spring. Warmth is coming.
Veronik did not make it to her first Spring
She will not see the apricot trees burst into springtime glory
or the street women singing the praises of 'spirit washing bleach'.
This 1700th anniversary year will bring thousands of pilgrims
including Pope John Paul II.
This ancient country is where Noah rested his ark. It is a young
republic facing challenges.
It needs its children.
Armenia's celebration of the anniversary of the coming of the
Illuminator has been dimmed by the loss of a small candle.
It was called Veronik.
Kate: I trust you do not mind my borrowing
your virtual candle to help illuminate this story.
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