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wind music (aonghas macneacail)
Armenia had been my own silent space for too long. That space has finally been given a voice ...
The idea of visiting Armenia had lain dormant for decades – probably since my childhood, when, growing up in pre-revolutionary Iran, we would occasionally be invited to a gathering in honour of a distant relation who had emigrated years before and had obtained a precious visitor’s visa. In my memory, one stand out – an unknown cousin, elderly, gaunt and stooped, with lank, grey hair and haunted eyes. There were stories of hardship, of nothing to eat but onions. The memory stayed. Armenia was a ‘closed’ country, a Soviet Socialist republic, yet within my family and the Armenian community in Iran, ‘Hayastan’ was the longed-for homeland. My mother had a calendar on the wall of her study, produced every year by the Armenian church in Iran. Each page had a photograph of a church with its distinctive architecture - ancient, ruined perhaps, together with excerpts from the works of the great Armenian writers and poets – Toumanian, Charents, Sayat Nova. The covers of these calendars – named ‘Raffi’ after the writer - always featured Mount Ararat, looming, eternally snow-capped, an everpresent reminder of the lands lost in 1915 after the massacres and enforced marches of the Armenian population in Eastern Turkey. My aunt Ashkhen, now in her nineties and with a memory span of seconds, would wring her hands and weep, remembering the stories of the horrors of that time. My uncle Tigran had a photograph on his wall of a group of soldiers, grim-faced and bedecked with bullet belts, ready to cross the border and fight the Young Turks. One of the soldiers is my great uncle.
Armenia remained elusive. In the wake of the terrible earthquake of 1988, I met a group of Armenian children and their teachers on an exchange visit to a Highland school. The primary head carried a copy of Burns in Armenian, and could quote chunks from memory. The Party representative, a wary-eyed woman from the Russian-speaking elite, had a suitcase of goods to sell for hard currency – Armenian brandy and crystal, badges and table mats, even hand painted copies of illustrated religious texts.
All this to way I carried a deal of excess baggage when I stepped off the plane at Yerevan airport last September. Unforgettable: to open my mouth and find a language – unburnished and inflected, but unforgotten – precious knowledge, a tongue learned in my Iranian childhood but spoken only within the family. To hear it, speak it everywhere, was a delight; to lose it again on the homeward journey a bereavement. The decision to visit Armenia at this time had been, in the end, spontaneous and logical. My dissertation subject was Armenian cinema. Armenian films were hard to come by in the Highlands, in Scotland, in Britain. Diasporan, yes. French Armenian Robert Guediguian, Canadian Armenian Atom Egoyan – all their films could be acquired more or less easily, more or less expensively, via the internet. But Armenian Armenians – Dovlatyan, Malyan, Peleshian, Ismaelyan – that was another matter. The thought, once seeded, could not be ignored. I had read of the Paradjanov museum in Yerevan. I longed to see it.
My husband was the first to glimpse Ararat on our first day in Yerevan. It proved to be our only sighting. After that, Ararat disappeared behind a thick veil of mist, unreachable beyond the closed Turkish border. My husband is steeped in Scottishness. He belongs. He did not – perhaps could not – understand the impact of what we were seeing ... the immensity of the mountain, its physicality, its proximity. Knowing it since childhood, I had not expected it to be so big, so near. I write this on a train weaving through the Cairngorms on a snowy March day. The memory of Ararat catches me out, wells up. This wide, open space I have grown to love – did I choose (as far as one chooses these things) to put down my roots in the high lands of Scotland because they mirrored the high lands of Iran (the Alborz mountains glimpsed daily through the Tehran smog), and the memory of a snow-capped mountain that was more than a mountain? My mother too, loved mountains. Sergei Paradjanov, Sarkis Paradjanian. Georgian Armenian, steeped in the cultures and languages of the Caucasus. Passionate, intense, brave in the face of Soviet repression. The museum dedicated to him in the old quarter of Yerevan is mesmerising. Yerevan is remodelling itself to a mid-Atlantic blueprint. Vast tracts of land are sealed off, under construction, whole neighbourhoods of elegant, shuttered wooden houses demolished. Paradjanov’s house, built in the freer air of perestroika but too late for him to enjoy, is now his museum, and one of a handful of traditional houses left. It overlooks wasteland and a giant, forlorn stadium in the distance. Inside, his vision stuns. Paradjanov once said: ‘Poetry and poetics – they don’t care for it in Soviet cinema … they accuse me of creating beauty.’ His instinct for beauty was irrepressible and subversive. It caused him to be incarcerated, it helped him survive five years hard labour in the gulags of Siberia. It is encapsulated in his pencil drawings of his fellow inmates, in his precious collages, made from scraps and added to daily. Paradjanov made only four feature films between 1964 and 1988, and left behind numerous film scripts and unfinished projects, all rejected by the Soviet authorities. He died in 1990, just one year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, largely misunderstood and rejected at home, but revered and lauded abroad, and hugely influential for generations of filmmakers, at home and in the diaspora. Vigen Chaldranian honours his memory in Voice in the Wilderness (1991) and Kyrie Eleison (1994); Edgar Baghdassarian quotes him in Mariam (2005).
At the other end of the city is the Matenadaran – the manuscript library, repository of Armenia’s medieval written culture. A vast grey basalt mass, built at the height of Stalinism, sober, dwarfing, intimidating. The building is guarded by towering statues – Mashtots the alphabet giver of the fourth century, Khorenatsi the fifth-century historian, Toros Roslin, thirteenth-century manuscript illuminator. Also Tatevatsi the theologian, Shirakatsi the mathematician, Gosh the lawyer, Frik the poet … Inside, two vast rooms are lined with glass cases containing manuscripts – whole books, single pages, unimaginably old, some tiny, others representing a scribe’s lifework. One case holds a donation from Charles Aznavour. There is a notice of thanks in English and Armenian. The tone is reverent. This doyen among Armenian émigrés has achieved iconic status here – his image is inescapable, his music videos played in bars.
Yerevan is a modern city on the up. A city filled with young people with an Italian flair for style and a hunger for the trappings of café culture. There are fountains, pavement restaurants and no shortage of flaneurs. But there are also survivors from another era. Ex-soldiers, broken in the Karabakh war, roam the crowds at the vast weekly market, lacking a limb, wild-eyed, begging, sometimes demanding; old women, bent over, sell small bunches of flowers; children approach with strings of carved wooden pomegranates and crosses. One old man with thick glasses and a bowler hat shows us his talent for writing backwards, then quietly waits for a donation. We talk. He has cataracts in both eyes and has been saving for his operation for four years. He is from the same area in Iran as my mother, and emigrated to Armenia, like so many others, in 1945. I think of my long-dead distant cousin, the visitor from Armenia. They could have known each other.
We spend a hot, noisy week in Yerevan, then head for the hills – Dilijan, ‘the Switzerland of the Caucasus.’ It is a world apart. The road there is lined with stalls piled high with the rich autumn harvest - watermelons, plums, walnuts, apples. There are small, corralled brown sheep waiting for customers. You choose your sheep, your animal is slaughtered, skinned and quartered on the spot, you load it into the boot of your car. In Dilijan, we stay with an artist and his wife, a specialist in traditional crafts. She supplements their income by renting out rooms and providing delicious local cuisine to the increasing numbers of foreign tourists. It is cooler here, the old part of the town is beautiful – and empty. A whole cobbled street of wooden, balconied houses and shops was bought by a rich American Armenian a few years ago. His plans to open a museum, a craft centre, remain unrealised. In the surrounding valleys, old Soviet factories lie unused and rusting. Armenian industry was quickly sold off in a frenzy of privatisation after independence. Corruption and short-sightedness have taken their toll. During a sudden, torrential downpour, I shelter under a tree with another passerby. We talk for a long time after the sun reappears. He was born in Dilijan; he points to the nearby building that was once his primary school. He is 48 years old, but feels his life is all but over. There is no work. Six out of seven residents have moved to Yerevan or left the country entirely. Most Armenians have relations abroad. Family ties are strong and lasting. The man regrets the passing of the Soviet Union, with the security it promised and provided.
We hitch a lift with an ebullient Bulgarian from South Africa on route to Haghartsin monastery near Dilijan. The setting is breathtaking. We are surrounded by forested mountains inhabited by bear, wolf, boar and deer. There is an ancient walnut tree, ‘the most famous tree in Armenia’ according to our host, carrying hundreds of knotted ribbons and strips of frayed fabric. Inside, the church is dark and cool. Tall, thin yellow candles are lit every day by visitors and locals. The grounds are well-tended and swept. The Church has always been a powerful focus of Armenian identity, here and in diasporan communities around the world. A secretary at our Yerevan hostel sat with me to watch one of the films I had arranged to see – an exploration, through music and sumptuous photography, of the Church’s rituals and its place among world religions. She had grown up in a Communist state, yet she was a committed believer, familiar with the festivals of the church calendar, enthusiastically describing to me the minutiae of ceremonies and their meanings. She regularly visited Echmiatzin, the richly-decorated fourth-century complex south of Yerevan, seat of the Katolikos for nearly ten centuries. Further afield, we pass through Alaverdi, dilapidated and depressing, with its abandoned copper mines. Beyond, perched high and facing each other across a huge gorge, are Sanahin and Haghpat, richly decorated monastic complexes, both important medieval centres of learning. The eighteenth-century bard and poet Sayat Nova, beloved and widely quoted, subject of Paradjanov’s 1969 film Colour of Pomegranates, is reputed to have lived and worked in Sanahin, in a tiny stone room beneath some grassy steps. Everywhere, we encounter generous, cheerful hospitality. We ask a woman for directions. She gets into the car and guides us. We meet a shepherd and his wife and son outside their cabin high up in the summer pastures, and are treated to tiny cups of strong, freshly-made coffee. A woman sees us passing and invites us into her home. We are showered with fruit, coffee and homemade vodka, and leave, three hours later, laden with bags of fruit from their garden. Three generations live together in a small house. The son is a police chief, the daughter-in-law teaches English at the university, their two small boys are already learning English. We exchange addresses and promise to keep in touch. We have.
I do not want to be misty-eyed about Armenia. There is a strand of vociferous nationalism that has grown over the last century or two and contributed to division and suffering in the area. The culture is Caucasian, not European or Middle Eastern. There are elements I found intensely familiar (the love of music and singing, the emphasis on learning, the importance of family), and others which are surprisingly different to what I had expected (the cuisine). Armenia, at last, is no longer a mythic place filled with disembodied names and potent images. It will never be home. But language, landscape and friendship will draw me back.
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