- Do you see that park? There was an old cemetery. The city became big, and it quietly grew into it. The clever rulers decided to remove the cemetery and make a park out of it.
- The park?! - I was amazed and looked with renewed interest at the unencumbered colored lamps of the attractions. - Where do they drink and laugh ?! From the cemetery ?!
- It's not so difficult, - Sergey shook his head. - We just need to leave the trees and alleys, and remove the graves and tombstones. And so they did … And since then spirits have come to my house … my ancestors, because they became homeless. They are asking for asylum … Harry Kuntsev [1]
Why Yerevan?
I was asked about this … These are my letters, my south, my size. Sprout: sprouted there, I see how I take root in stones and clay.
Among the cities close to me there are more beautiful and famous, more whole and lively, more organized and atmospheric. But I have nothing to do in them. And here, perhaps, it will turn out to figure out how to do something that is not necessary for you alone. [2]But it won't work - I remember my mother's saying: a kind word is also a thing.
We talk about the spirit of the city when people become its "geniuses". But you can also talk about the genius loci of a person, when, on the contrary, the place, as it were, shares its spirit with him. Isn't this happening to me in Yerevan?
Maybe this city is the place of my genius? I'm as absent-mindedly whole as he is. I need its authenticity. Despite all the fakes and simulacra, destruction and social cataclysms, this is a genuine - for the time being - city.
Poetic comprehension
In one successful capital of the northern region, I said at a public hearing: your city is young, trying new ways, it will still have time to "get together" … And I was indignantly refuted: "how young it is - we are 400 years old!"
In Yerevan, which is almost 2800, I was also once indignantly refuted: “Yerevan is not a historical city! Nothing of value was left here after 25 earthquakes and 55 conquests. " And another resident of Yerevan told me once: "I have as little in common with Urartu as … well, almost like with Turkey." But on the table there is a fragment of the Urartian bowl, taken out for me by an archaeologist from a scattering of shards at the foot of Erebuni … So what city is this? What makes Yerevan Yerevan?
The social and urban planning situation here is typical for many post-Soviet capitals and, in general, large post-imperial cities, once multinational, now more and more mono-ethnic and rurarizing. The surge of "national" ideology, the strengthening of the class of officials, the inversion of the city-forming base (the collapse of most high-tech and large-scale industries, the dominance of the "bazaar" economy), the weakness of the mechanisms of urban regulation (sometimes it seems that it is intentional), the departure of "indigenous townspeople", the influx of villagers attack on the city of the country (here - rabisa [3], and more broadly - “the world village”) defeat the urban in them, lead to environmental entropy, overconsolidation of centers, permanent loss of heritage.
“The city is a big mill, it will grind those who, according to the Yerevan expression, no matter how much you cook, their ears will remain damp … You can live your whole life in Yerevan and not be able to love it. In one of my songs I say that Yerevan itself makes a person a Yerevanian, and that, unfortunately, mothers do not give birth to residents of Yerevan … Give time to the Karabakh people and others with the Ararat dialect … Their children - future residents of Yerevan - will be asked of them …”From the post member of the Facebook group "City" Ashot Gasparyan
But while the newcomers become (or do not become) city dwellers, and the townspeople themselves are stratified into those who have and do not have city memory [4] What holds this scattered, scattered mystery city together like a piano in the heat? Yerevanians love him passionately. For what? It is considered very ancient - where is the antiquity?[5] When asked about the “soul of the city”, Google refers to the presence of a soul in the local hotels … It constantly loses its “forgotten things”, fortresses, rivers, gardens, houses, peoples … in front of my eyes. And from this in Yerevan it is sad and painful in the soul.
But more often I am happy to think and write about him, it is joyful to be in this multi-layered, mysterious, undeveloped, warm city, where by some miracle I managed to form and maintain a special genetic code of “Yerevanness”.
This is a city where it is especially important to answer the question posed by the untimely deceased V. Glazychev: “Why don't the places where everyone dies remain empty? Why are we coming back? "[6]
What happened to the spirits of this place when no one lived here for centuries? When Urartu disappeared … When, millennia later, the “Asian” Yerevan of 1905, described by the journalist Luigi Villari, evaporated: “the vaulted passages beckoning with oriental secrets, shops with dark curtains and crowds of Tatars in long-skirted blue clothes looked interesting. Coffee and tea were offered at every corner. Clumsy camels rested in galleries and small courtyards. "[7].
When - already before our eyes - a special "civilization" of the golden decades of this city - the 1960s, 70s, 80s - passed away[8].
But instead of the old people, new ones come, and the old meanings are resurrected from time to time. So the bucket of an excavator will open the foundations of the main square, perhaps of the 13th century, and this photo will get on the official website of the former president, and many Yerevan residents will see these remains, and will not forget, even if they are again filled with asphalt …[9]
Is the soundtrack to the recent film about the good people of this city "Taxi Eli lava!" called "Reincarnation"? Isn't reincarnation a kind of archetype, a code of Yerevan life? But what is then invariable, what is transmitted in this place from millennium to millennium with a complete change of human content and material entourage?
The shimmering spirit of Yerevan is scattered by grains, flashing in different points of this city, Armenia, the world. These points of power, loci of manifestation of the genius of the place, "centers of resistance"[10] entropies are not just bright traces of the past, the pulse of today's and, I believe, tomorrow's life beats in them …
Here, the “syntopy” invented by M. Epstein is obvious - “the connection of many times through the unity of the place, the uniqueness of events occurring in different times. For example, you wander through the Athenian Agora, follow the footsteps left by Socrates and the Apostle Paul - and thanks to the unity of the place, they become closer to you, as if their souls touch you through these stones, this earth, these trees, this horizon. Syntopy is a way of experiencing a spiritual connection with everyone who has visited and passed here, who touched these things, those around you. This is a kind of contact magic that passes through time. The place somehow preserves the prints of those who have visited it, makes their inner more alive, authentic "[11].
But for such places to be revealed to you, an alien “from the outside,” it is not enough to explore the visible city or its functioning. You need a "feeling" into the environment, immersion in its currents, environmental meditation, and if this happens miraculously, then even being "tongueless" and by definition weakly included in the social context, not knowing the intricacies of local history, you catch the nodal structure of the place, its invisible semantic framework … Existing ones, perhaps, in spite of its material content - this is what often happens in Yerevan now.
This understanding of the city is based on the method that one of the literary “geniuses” of Yerevan, Yuri Karabchievsky, spoke about: “Poetic comprehension is not an anatomical dissection, it occurs not due to the destruction of the shell, but due to active interaction with it. With its help, we comprehend the hidden essence of nature, people and events, without violating their natural integrity, without introducing, without breaking, without killing "[12].
I am slowly putting together a puzzle of my own key points of the Yerevan spirit. They are not always in Yerevan itself, they can be in different temporal and cultural layers, they often do not belong to its “strong” heroes-geniuses, but they necessarily “catch”, touch, are projected into the actual present. My image of Yerevan rests on them. My becoming Yerevanianness …
Cosern and Ani
In addition to the museum Arin-berd with the Urartian Erebuni, there are several inhabited hills in Yerevan, large and small earthen pyramids, as if separate from the main body of the city, hovering a little in the clouds … This is a semi-elite Nork, a semi-slum Kond, a semi-planned Sari -Tah, semi-sacred Causen. The latter is named in honor of the Holy Armenian Church buried here, Hovhannes Kozern, a priest and a prominent scientist-calendar scientist who lived in the late 10th - early 11th centuries. But few people know exactly where his remains are buried, under which residential building - forgetfulness characteristic of Yerevan. Today 15 people are crowded in this house. According to the owner, the Armenian authorities did not respond to letters with a request to remember them and about Hovhannes …
And nearby, in the same house with the same large family, an elderly artist Wang Hunanyan lives. I bought from him a sketch of "The City of Ani" made with a ballpoint pen - I lead one of the 12 ancient Armenian capitals, perhaps the most famous. Ani was once called “the city of 1001 churches”, but now it is a ghost town, which has remained within the borders of Turkey since 1920. In the picture, perhaps a little naive, but very important for Armenians, the image of a “different,” “real,” ideal Armenian city … One of the “points of power” of Armenian urbanism is physically outside Yerevan. Mentally - in it. Ani is the urbanistic Ararat of Armenia.
Grandma Angela. Old Nork
The church in the center of Old Nork was demolished in the 1930s[13]… But there is a self-built chapel - three walls, a canopy, a blackened khachkar, icons, reproductions of Madonnas. Her "mistress" is a cheerful old woman in a black hat. To the question "what is your name?" shyly replies: "Angela … They call me an angel … They say I will never die." Those passing by bow to Angela, exchange a couple of kind words. And the men in the square chuckle: “Grandma's not all houses” … She presents the passers-by with whatever she can, in June - mulberry, strewn with Old Nork (but almost no one makes mulberry vodka here, it's a pity). Well, in winter she gave me a couple of thin candles - keep them for now … Candles from a (possible) angel do not often fall into the hands.
By the way, there was no special rite of canonization in the Armenian Church. If a certain person was consistently considered a saint, then he was revered as such. "Genius" must be recognized by the people, city, place …
Cond: bottom up - bottom down
Places have meanings brought in - from the outside, “from above” - like the “perestroika” idea “you can't live like that,” read in the famous film about Kond by Harutyun Khachatryan (1987). And there are their own. It is still necessary to ascend to Kond's own meaning.
You enter here from below, gradually parting with the bustle, noise, show-off of the center … Overcoming the force of gravity, getting closer to the sky, feeling how meaning and value are added to the environment with each step, the illusions unnecessary here are peeled off …
This is probably the oldest continuously inhabited place in the city. The lower belly of Yerevan - Khantar market - destroyed[14]… Kond - the upper womb of the city?
How does this self-built environment hold up, from adobe, concrete blocks, dilapidated logs, rusty pipes, slate, plywood? The water supply is bad here, many families live crowded and difficult. Although there are also quite comfortable, neat courtyards with grape pergolas, expensive cars. There are also new houses with 3-4 floors, some with shops that are not working yet. There are many children playing in the streets, careless and suddenly pensive, like this girl …
Going up to Kond is a kind of downshifting. Cond rebuilds, turns your "town-planning" consciousness from head to foot. Climbing up, you go to the roots, to the fundamental principles of creating the environment, which is naturally always built bottom up. Bottom - down.
“The other day, on the way home, I talked with a student. The conversation was about Konda (she lives there). I told her a little about The City, about what I had read. And she says to me: "Zara Aramovna, do you know what is surprising? We have neighbors who live well, just in inhuman conditions. But for some reason they do not want to leave. But they are offered apartments, and they resisted and that's it. It's strange how why? " I didn’t answer her, I just asked her to think.”From the post of Zara Markaryan, a member of the "Gorod" Facebook group
To tell the truth, many residents of Kondo have long wanted to leave there, dreaming of the apartments that were once promised to them. They have a right. But those who would like to stay and live in their native place in normal conditions - what to do with them? So far, the only method has been tested in Yerevan - the expulsion of the indigenous population with the participation of the state and the presence of a strong (impudent) investor-applicant for the territory. This is how Northern Avenue was built on the site of ul. Lalayants, this is how Buzand and Arami streets are being built up now. I would not like to see the same fate befell the Kondovites.
Well, you don’t live here, you don’t have to run around with a kettle to the speaker in the morning, and the web of streets, passages, stairs, cracks easily leads you into an environment trance. You wander, enjoy the handmade labyrinth, take pictures enthusiastically - and yourself - for minutes, perhaps - you become the "genius" of this place … Fleeting … Collected and absent-minded …
And then you go down to the "normal" city. Although what is more “normal” is a completely “grassroots” Kond or Tamanyan's “Small Center” imposed “from above” on the old Yerevan[15]where the "grassroots" remained only fragmentary? I would say both now. Especially when compared with their surroundings - peripheral dormitory Bangladeshs and bird cherries, or with the "new" Yerevan, which is already being imposed on the "Small Center" today.
Tretyakov Gallery: Saryan. Three heroes
I knew two landscapes of Saryan in Yerevan from his house-museum: "Yerevan courtyard" in 1928 and "Old Yerevan" in 1968. Lovely warm pictures of the old environment. But due to the complete isolation of the depicted from the present day, they somehow did not fit into the context of reflections on Yerevan.
But then I accidentally wandered into the new building of the Tretyakov Gallery, to the exhibition of the teacher Saryan K. Korovin, and then something attracted me to the third floor - to the empty halls of Soviet art.
And there the award - "Old Yerevan" already in 1928 - a visual encyclopedia, a textbook of the city, a selection of environmental archetypes of old Yerevan.
"Eastern" courtyard, full of lazy bliss, unhurried life. And in the background - in Armenian, scattering Alyosha, Ilya, Dobrynya - Ararat, Kond, a temple.
Still standing today. There are no more donkeys and flat roofs like this. But the support - the ground and the landmarks - the peaks, peaks - stand as they stood. And the beam hanging of linen, thick blue shadows, bluish skies are also invariable.
Pyramids and anthills
It is not so easy to see something ordered, complete, crystalline correct in Yerevan. Tamanyan's ideal circle cost Yerevan the old city, but it has not been completed, has not been brought to the level of the author's concept, and now it is also wasted by the aggressive moth of skyscrapers.
And yet here, as in many ancient cities, there are pyramids of their own.
Environment: consists of three conventional tiers or steps. In the middle - "Small Center" - a connecting link in the structure of the city's districts. It forms the medial, middle level of the environment, the presence of which is very important for a normal, well-ordered city. Most likely, it is this "low-center" identity, which developed mainly in the Soviet period, that Yerevan should take as a basis for its city-wide identity, support and form its basic image on its basis.[16]… Preserving, of course, everything of any value (or better, everything that remains) from other environmental layers.
"Above" - places with special symbolic significance, city "peaks" and rarities (Tsitsernakaberd, Matenadaran, Monument, Square). "Below" is a vast peripheral belt of residential areas.
Social: the “Armenian pyramid” by Liya Ivanyan, which has no middle layer, “which was built by the authorities, and then retired at its top, leaving the people below. The middle remained empty "[17]… Of course, this emptiness in the social center affects the urban environment, dissolves its meanings, the cultural and spiritual values of Yerevan are washed out through it.
Due to this structural hole, which is possibly artificially cultivated "from above"[18], social escalators or elevators are impossible in society, it is difficult to consistently build personal careers, closed clans dominate, which ended up at the top of the pyramid after the collapse of the USSR.
However, this image of the country, true a few years ago, in relation to its main city, may no longer be so accurate. "Between" the top, concerned about momentary profit and therefore ready for any substitution of the genuine by the fake, worthy of the small, by the arrogant big, and indifferent to everything except bread and circuses, the lower classes (to which the remnants of the un-left intelligentsia, desperate change), a third force is emerging - a social cluster of mostly young, active, caring people who do not want to leave and are not afraid to defend their values. They defended Arami, 30 at the end of 2011 and the Mashtots garden in the spring of 2012[19]… There are still relatively few of them. But they already have a success story, and their activity ceases to be episodic.
Finally, the architectural and artistic pyramid: Cascade. More precisely, the image of a pyramid - from below from Tamanyan Square, a series of terraces and stairs climbing the mountain is perceived in this way. The pyramid is more Mexican than Egyptian. More precisely, this is one visible facet of a large hidden pyramid growing out of the Yerevan land …
The cascade, like many things in Yerevan, was conceived by Tamanyan, but implemented much later.[20]… But, unlike Northern Avenue, it is much more successful: architecture is embedded in the landscape of the hill as an integral part of it, a symbiosis of building, earth, water, greenery, sky has been created. And in the depths of the mountain, as befits a pyramid, there are treasures, in this case, of contemporary art.
It is a pity that the archetype of the pyramid was not read by the builders of mansions on the sides of the Cascade - they should not have ascended above the main Yerevan triangle. The pyramids are bad jokes …
But there are also antipyramids here - not conceived, not designed by anyone, but always former, living, warm, carpet-like mounds that have grown by themselves - the embodiment of Mandelstam's "Erivansky anthill"[21]… Noragyuh. Cond. Cosern. Old Nork. Sari-Tah …
Afrikyan's boots
Africa is shabby fake columns on the facade, peeling plaster, boarded-up windows on the first floor, sagging roof, patched up with tin, sometimes with iron, and sometimes with boards at random. Above the entrance, the remains of a coat of arms that belonged to some African Petrovsky, one of the former owners of the house, were guessed. Around the building are elder bushes, lilacs, rotten woodpiles, debris, heaps of broken bricks and rusty iron. Inside it smelled of mice and mothballs, shreds of tow sticking out from the cracks, and from the holes in the floor it was drawing cold and dampness. People left here a long time ago - only Ida remained, occupying an upstairs three-room apartment with a kitchen … Yuri Buida [22]
Brutal bas-reliefs on the main facade: bull's muzzles in chains, Amazons on fallow deer with scaly tails, naked curly-haired African women in vines. A compact courtyard between the outbuildings with graceful wooden galleries. Upstairs in the right wing (as viewed from the courtyard) and on the ground floor of the whole house are still living.
After clearing the inter-apartment partitions on the second floor, a vast hall was formed, where you can see the club salon of the beginning of the century - not of the past, but of the present.
Fauvist palimpsest of faded wallpaper … Scars of torn wires … Tiny cornices … Through reed holes in the ceiling - the sky … And on the windowsill - an unintentional installation - boots of one of the last inhabitants of this house. Flew away? Gone barefoot?
This is one of the most beautiful houses in the old town. Built at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, it belonged to four brothers from a wealthy Afrikyan family, since 1913 there was a club of the Yerevan elite, then, according to legend, a brothel, the NKVD administration, now it is half-housing, half-ruin, just like described Yu. Buyda "Africa" is Russian. It is included in the state list of monuments, which means here the doom to numbering the facade stones, dismantling and the vague prospect of "re-creation" in "Old Yerevan" - a false place[23].
The first act of the drama of the House of Afrikyans took place on June 11, 2012. The stones are neatly numbered by two executive workers - in rows, from bottom to top, one after the other. On the planes and patterns, muzzles and necks of deer, thighs and stomachs of Amazons - bright white numbers - black Yerevan marks[24].
But sometimes the inhabitants of the house come back. Not long before the "numbering" I met in my "salon" one of them, maybe the last one, who had returned for a while.
And boots with him. For some reason he addressed me in German, then switched to Russian: “In Russia, such houses are being restored. On Julius Fucik Street in Moscow, I saw it myself: the old beautiful facade was left, but inside everything is made of concrete. Can I?"
I hope the struggle for Yerevan's "Africa" will continue until victory. Such houses (there are very few of them left) visibly refute the myth imposed on the city about the "rusticity" of pre-revolutionary Erivan. But losing them, he becomes a village. It's not about the height of the skyscrapers and the price per square meter …
Parajanov's view
Sometimes it is not a person who becomes the genius of a place, but the House of a person who has never lived either in it or in this city at all …
There is a photograph taken in the spring of 1990 on the day when Parajanov “spent several hours in his dream - in his Armenian home. This photo could be a perfect illustration for a completely different book … The Book of Ecclesiastes …
Sitting in the courtyard of his never-lived house, Parajanov looks at the biblical Ararat[25] and leads a monologue. Nobody hears him … But this monologue largely coincides with the well-known words. In any case, his face is so amazing at this moment, his eyes are so expressive … And it seems that this is the photograph of Ecclesiastes … "[26].
In recent years, many have left Yerevan, and few have returned … At the end of his life, Parajanov really wanted to return and did not have time. But an example has been set. Filled with the explosive energy of the master's work, the House-Museum has become part of a city in which genius and place are too often separate …
And the monologue of the great director becomes a dialogue that his house has with every visitor. “There is no memory of the past; and even what will happen, there will be no memory for those who will be after”(Ekk 1:11); “All came out of dust, and all will return to dust” (Ekk. 3:20). But the very fact of the appearance of such a house "out of nothing" refutes these words, which too often come to mind in Yerevan. The memory of the House is preserved in those who have visited it and becomes part of the memory of the city - a part of the city. Wandering around the museum, multiplying in the faceted mirrors of installations, for a second you become Parajanov's eye, looking at yourself, at the city, at Ararat, visible from everywhere for such an eye.
Mountain. Explosive genius
the city exchanges its miserable share
on a landscape with the likeness of Ararat, gold-framed
for homesick citizens
Arsene Vahe [27] A lot of photos - business cards of Yerevan - have one plot: the city from above, from the Monument, from below the houses lit by the dawn sun (the Opera and skyscrapers, tearing the fabric of the Small Center, which are incompatible with the Mountain even visually, stand out). a volcano with two dazzling peaks.
You can relate to this image in different ways.
Collectivist-enthusiastic: “How beautiful is our Yerevan! Biblically ancient! And somewhere between him and the Mountain there are also Noah's vineyards!"
Personalistically detached: here, thanks to the Mountain, always "in pairs": suspension and distillate, transient and eternal, chaos and space, "vanity of vanities" and "enjoyment of life"[28].
Apologetically justifying: having an Ideal Image of such a Mountain as part of the everyday landscape, it is permissible to do anything under “it” - everything will be written off… “Yerevan is unthinkable without Ararat. Every citizen of Yerevan knows this. Can Ararat exist without Yerevan? Take off this city, erase it, like it was washed and trampled into the ground more than once. As long as there is Ararat, Noah's descendants will flock here again and build a city. And they will call him the same - E R E V A N "[29]… Isn't that why it is allowed not to take care of various "small" city values? From Ararat, without asking and free of charge, they take indulgences for the production of entropy, deforestation of parks and the demolition of monuments.
But if you try it differently: following Ararat, insist, build up a continuous, solid “horizontal” urban life below?
But for now, they are going to build a new "Noah's Ark" in Yerevan, for tourists[30]… Should the world village have its own "well"?
Square and house on Arami, 30
“And so, on the one hand, it’s official, you go out, say, to Lenin Square - and you want to show your documents. On the other hand, right there, two streets later, there are home-made living sheds, curtained with some kind of rags, and next to it there is a public restroom, to which you cannot go to a shot. "[31]… This is the dichotomy of the Yerevan environment of the 70s according to Yuri Karabchievsky, who was not imbued with the charm of the local vernacular.
Something has changed since then. There are no public latrines, there are fewer officialdom, and instead of almost all the "streets" there is a concrete jungle of multi-storey residential blocks.
But the square (for everyone, just the Square, although it is now called "Republic Square", the same one where the first in the USSR "singing fountains" and "torture advice") remains the main, ceremonial and at the same time beloved by the townspeople space of Yerevan. There is no such thing in Tiflis-Tbilisi, another satellite locus, the reference point of the Yerevan genius. Designed and partially (Government House) built by A. Tamanyan, may be the most “materially significant” genius of the place, whose role in Yerevan is still debated and debated[32].
Why did Tamanyan conceive this square? Really dreaming of showing documents, parades, rallies at the podium? For beauty? As a thing in itself? Or is this a case of megalomania typical of architects who suddenly got a city to work? After all, even today the scale of this space seems to be exaggerated in relation to a million-plus city, and what about Erivan in the 1920s?
Tourists wander here, from time to time there are holidays, concerts, official meetings of the people with the ruling party … But the main purpose of the place, perhaps, is to be just a Square as such, the main emptiness of Yerevan.
And very close, a hundred meters from here, is a one-storey house at 30 Arami, on the corner with Abovyan Street. Nondescript, inconspicuous. But in November-December 2011, several dozen young residents of Yerevan and representatives of the intelligentsia stood up to save him. Pickets, PR actions were held, articles were published in newspapers and on the Internet[33]… And the small house, which interferes with bringing to the Northern Avenue Square, another Tamanyan's idea, not roughly built in Tamanyan's way already in the 2000s, was left alone for the time being. How long?
Analogies arise with another city builder. In the Dutch Zaandam they keep a tiny hut where the carpenter Pyotr Mikhailov, aka Peter I, spent several nights. There, on the wall, the words are written in Russian, as if Napoleon said about him: "Nothing is enough for the Main Man." They are translated into modern Russian as follows: "For the truly great, nothing is small" - and this is true for any city. I cannot imagine Yerevan without a majestic Square, or without a modest house on Arami 30. Small is beautiful[34].
By the way, Tamanyan's little masterpiece - the University Observatory, half-hidden by overgrown bushes - touches me, humanly, stronger than the Government House …
The fluttering Draft. Glendale
Yerevan is a city of the lonely. And when the people of Yerevan feel unbearably lonely, they go out to the streets, but not on the streets of Yerevan, but on the real ones, on the streets full of life and news. And such streets are in other cities. Tigran Khzmalyan[35] To get to Draft, you have to go to California. In Yerevan, this legendary cafe, the cult place of the 60s bohemia, is no longer there … But “in Glendale, Armenian emigrants have chosen one cafe - it is located on the first floor of the building and is also blown from both sides. Nostalgically, they called it "Draft" and now they gather in it, drink coffee, discuss the latest news, recalling the Yerevan "original", in the place of which someone thought to arrange an office with mirrored glasses. Old Yerevan residents try to pass by him quickly - nothing can be seen in these mirrors except the city distorted by time and joyless faces … "[36]
An office is not an office, but a Lu-Lu Luxé salon! Well, the picture in the mirrors depends on the mood of the beholder. Yes, these are not mirrored facets of Parajanov's collages, in which everything is visible. But I saw in the show-windows of the salon that living part of the “new Yerevan”, which inevitably had to come to this city … And the girls from Lu-Lu happily confirmed: “Draft” was right here, not on the contrary, with them. Maybe he will come back?
But while in Yerevan itself, the "Glendale Hills" company in the place where the Yerevan fortress once stood[37], a faceless complex of elite housing "Yerevan Fortress" is being built. Better to call it "Glendale" …
Everything is messed up. Will a Skvoznyachok memorial café ever open here? In the middle of a cramped multi-storey courtyard, by some miracle, the ruin of the Khan's mosque has survived - the last pylon. But he doesn't save anything … And I don't want to write about this no-place.
"Visor", Opera
There is a cafe in the very center of Granada. It is easy to find it, it is called “Cafe Central”. Drinks and food there are the most common, but if someone gets the idea to draw something on a napkin while waiting for an order, the drawing will be excellent and accurate, regardless of whether this person can draw. Unfortunately, the artists do not know about this and do not gather in the "Cafe Central", so the inspiration intended for them goes to tourists and taxi drivers. Max Fry [38] But the legendary "Visor" - a relic of the "Yerevan civilization" of the 60s - survived in its native place. It brings together artists and resellers of all ages, selling paintings in the neighborhood, at the monument to Saryan. But this cafe also has a special age niche - here they like to sit and gossip Yerevanians of the era when, according to Armen Davtyan, the townspeople obeyed their "second government" - the Academy of Sciences, located on the other side of the CPA Central Committee building on the side of Baghramyan Ave.
The semicircular visor of a tiny cafe reverberates with a huge round Opera. Four tables inside in winter, more under the umbrellas stuck to the visor in spring-summer-autumn. Simple dishes, local beer, tobacco smoke. A cheerful waitress, flying paper airplanes folded by a gray-haired bearded man around the hall … You will not find such an atmosphere in Moscow.
She
That's what she does to a man, Armenia. It was as if I got to another planet, into a force field unknown to me and, like the hero of a fantastic story, reluctantly, helplessly turning my legs, move in the direction of its vector. And after all, no one, in fact, told me anything, no events happened to me, this is just him, the invisible vector of Armenia, steady lines of force. There, in front, perhaps, death - I can do nothing, I am flying. Yuri Karabchievsky [39]
How does a new, at first foreign place penetrate into you?
Through taste, aromas, sounds … Areni, homemade cheese, lavash and greens in a cave on the way to Noravank … Khorovats in the Hrazdan gorge, the most tender khashlama in Dolmam, finally, khash, every spoon of which should be washed down with a sip of mulberry … Jazz in clubs on Pushkin - the most Yerevan street for me. The crossing of tuff shoes along Prospect …
Through touching - with a glance, with a hand - "black" houses, their hundredfold painted, peeling white doors, half-open semi-dark front doors, empty openings, wobbly wooden galleries … Miraculously survived courtyards, braided with grapes, wires, clotheslines …
And yet, and above all, through her … The female soul, the quintessence of this "male" city … Through it passes the millennial time axis of Yerevan - from Noah and Urartu - to me. Through her, I connect to the energy, wholeness and emptiness of this place. Polo-complete, ancient-new, invented-seeming-real … "I can't do anything, I'm flying." Or I walk along a tightrope over the Garni canyon - and then either fall or reach the end …
I would like to write down someday the legend of my co-creation of Yerevan, where there will be a magical meeting, anxiety, separation, overcoming the abyss, the search for “I don’t know what” and finding the only thing needed … Where she will reign and love.
Minas. Airport "Zvartnots"
Once famous throughout the Union, the Yerevan Museum of Modern Art (its own, Armenian, quite comparable in quality with the world's best examples of modern art) huddles on the first floor of a panel five-story building. But for the sake of several masterpieces - for me, first of all, Minas Avetisyan - you definitely need to come here.
The new Cafesjian Center for the Arts is a much more fashionable and civilized place. The exhibition of modernist sculptures on the boulevard behind the Tamanyan monument is an infusion of contemporary contemporary art from all over the world into the urban environment. In Yerevan today, one can compare the paintings of Minas that grew out of his native land and the glossy bronze of Fernando Botero, freely moving around the world. I am afraid that for many, the bright, universal "external" is more and more often stronger[40].
But just recently, in the huge new international terminal "Zvartnots", which is as small-scale as the present city, as the former Erivan Square of the 1920s, there is another reincarnation. The fresco of Minas became the symbolic center of the main hall, miraculously preserved after the 1988 earthquake in the dining room of the Galvanometer plant in Leninakan-Gyumri, restored and, not without protests from the local public, transported to Yerevan. Saying goodbye under this fresco, I want to fly here again.
Places of power and memory can be created today.
Yerevan Napoleon. Cakes without cream, cherries without cake?
It was not easy for me to write this text. A constant background - news about cheerful development projects "on the bones" of the old city, about attempts to destroy parks, courtyards, iconic historical buildings - places of collective memory of Yerevan residents (the last disaster - the destruction of the Covered Market, one of the symbols of the city) and more modest houses, about leaving Of Yerevan, more and more bright people who did not manage to become its "geniuses"[41], and dreams about the "sanctification" of any urban processes by the Mountain, whose "invisible spirituality" "cleans and lifts everything"[42]…
Sometimes there is a feeling of the theater of the absurd. Hands give up … And it seems that these few of me and many, unknown to me yet "not mine", someone's personal and common loci-nodules of the manifestation of the Yerevan spirit - are like cherries without a cake on the urban pie of Yerevan. Yes, and the cake itself seemed to be forgotten to smear with cream: its not connected, separate layers-cakes somehow very accidentally coexist in time and space …
And then I remember the Afrikyan brothers - Tigran, Yervand, Karapet and Harutyun - and grandmother Angela, the deep aura of Parajanov and Kond crowning the "Yerevan pyramid", who can still be saved, the calendars expert Kozern, who was buried under someone's bed, and the "villager" Min at the globalist airport, the house on Arami 30 and the magnificent Square, their friends. Her.
And the fact that the all-sanctifying Mountain has not yet appeared to me in all its glory is not a sign: look around as closely as possible. A scattering of modest “points of genius” is no less important for Yerevan than Mandelstam's “Ararat feeling”.
It is clear that my "benchmarks" are only a dotted line, sketches of the "structure" of the Yerevan spirit of the place. Each citizen of Yerevan has many of his own, and their manifestation, recognition as a heritage, treatment of the city with their acupuncture is a chance for Yerevan not to turn into an empty, forgetful and meaningless place.
“It is necessary to somehow change the vector of thinking of the townspeople … The townspeople must realize that urban history and culture is formed not by a revolutionary way of denying and destroying the old and replacing it with a new one, but through the accumulation of spiritual and material values and respect for them. … We argue what needs to be preserved, and what needs or can be replaced and destroyed … as long as such thoughts are possible for us, we will always lose."
From the post of the moderator of the Facebook group "Gorod" Tigran Poghosyan
A poet with a "double" Russian-Jewish Boris Kherson remarked: "… the structure of an integrated personality, the density of the monolith leaves no room for poetry."[43]… Maybe the chance of a non-monolithic city is in creativity in this space between the layers? Is my own chance for creativity in it - in its intervals?
As stated in the Quebec Declaration on Keeping the Spirit of the Place, "the best tool for keeping the spirit of the place alive is communication."[44]… I would really like this text to become a small contribution to human communication about - and, more importantly, in - Yerevan. After all, it is necessary to preserve the local "genius" not at all for its own sake, but for the sake of saving, development, and prosperity of this very place.
"Locus of genius" can become catalysts for urban dialogue - both a virtual recalculation of places and their geniuses, and a practical discussion of citizens, experts and authorities, the outcome of which may determine the fate of Yerevan's urban development heritage.
The mode of understanding may or may not pass into the mode of action. It is worth believing that our “loci of the spirit” support themselves, are protected “from above” and, like Ararat, will survive, no matter what. Climbing up the Cascade, sometimes you can see how the good god of Yerevan soaring above the city throws warm rays on the Angela chapel, 30 Arami, Mashtots garden … Is that so? Or are these rays directed primarily to the hearts of people associated with these places, supporting, saving, making them?
Notes (edit)
[1] Kuntsev G. Once upon a time Parajanov // Friendship of Peoples. 2011. No. 9 //
[2] I thank my friends, acquaintances, colleagues Oleg Babajanyan, Sedrak Baghdasaryan, Karen Balyan, Armen Davtyan, Ken Komendaryan, Svetlana Lurie, Tigran Poghosyan, Vika Sukiasyan, Tigran Khzmalyan, Gevorg Khurshudyan, Garegin Chukaszyan, and many others who helped my Yerevan and many others.
[3] See note 21 in the first part of this text: “North Avenue leads to Kond. Sketches on the spirit of the place "// Archi.ru 19.10.2011 //
[4] See the bitter article about the renewed destruction of the Covered Market, one of the symbols of Yerevan, which resumed in May 2012: L. Hovhannisyan. Congratulations, my beloved “Yerevan” LLC! 2012-29-05 //
[5] Especially for the "scientists" of the neighboring country with Armenia and the vigilant citizens of Yerevan, who catch the "anti-Armenian" in my texts: the question "where are the antiquities?" does not mean at all an immediate answer "there are no antiquities."
[6] Revzin G. Outsider // Kommersant, 07.06.2012, No. 102 (4887) //
www.kommersant.ru/doc/1952662.
[7] Villari L. Fire and sword in the Caucasus // Aniv. 2006. No. 3 // https://aniv.ru/archive/23/ogon-i-mech-na-kavkazeokonchanie-luidzhi-villari/. Recall that Erivan at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries was practically a binational city: Armenians - 43.2%, Aderbeydzhan Tatars (as they wrote then in Brockhaus and Efron) - 42.6%, Russians - 9.5% (data from the first general census population of the Russian Empire in 1897:
[8] See: Lurie S., Davtyan A. Yerevan civilization //
[9] See:
[10] De Certeau M. Ghosts in the city // Emergency reserve. 2010. No. 2. P. 109.
[11] Letters. sommestie, from the Greek. roots syn, with, and topos, place. Epstein M. Gift of the Word. Projective lexicon of the Russian language. Issue 302 (380). June 11, 2012.
[12] Karabchievsky Yu. Resurrection of Mayakovsky //
[13] Orbelian G. Old and new Yerevan. Guide book. Yerevan: Author's edition, 2010. S. 52-53.
[14] In the same place. S. 25-26.
[15] “Small Center” is the common name for the territory of the city core of Yerevan inside the Ring Boulevard.
[16] The image of the environmental pyramid does not contradict another image of the Yerevan environment - the “Napoleon” of cultural and historical layers, whose middle “cakes” (the buildings of the late 19th - early 20th centuries and the timeless vernacular) are just as important for cementing the city in time and space as the Small Centre". See: A. Ivanov, Northern Avenue leads to Cond. Sketches about the spirit of the place. Part I (https://agency.archi.ru/news_current.html?nid=37058)
[17] Ivanyan L. Transformations. Yerevan: "Egeya", 2009. P. 34.
[18] Thus, according to Gevorg Poghosyan, Director of the Institute of Philosophy, Sociology and Law of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, the Armenian authorities, for many reasons, benefit from the emigration of the most active, including politically active, contingent, in fact, the emerging middle class. See: V. Hakobyan, Armenians and Armenia - when the nation is wider than the state //
[19] A relatively small group of activists managed to defend one of the few remaining squares in the center of Yerevan, having achieved the demolition of those moved there from the street. Abovyan of ugly trade pavilions.
[20] The cascade has been built intermittently since the early 1970s according to the project of architects J. Torosyan, S. Gurzadyan and A. Mkhitaryan, in the last decade - under the patronage of the American philanthropist J. Cafesjian. In 2009, the Cafesjian Center for the Arts was opened here.
[21] See: G. Kubatyan Escape to Armenia and other studies about Mandelstam // Voprosy literatury 2012, No. 3 //
[22] Buida Y. Blue Blood //
[23] About the "Old Yerevan" project see: A. Ivanov: Should You Be Like Salmon? Old Yerevan is already in the center of the capital // Voice of Armenia, February 16, 2012, No. 15 (20228) //
[24] On the air of Radio Van, Sedrak Baghdasaryan, who is well aware of the practice of destroying Yerevan's black houses (argued that there is nothing to restore in “Old Yerevan” - stones stripped from the facades of historical buildings are lying around nowhere.
[25] This is probably the author's fantasy - Ararat is not visible from that courtyard. But a beautiful, correct fantasy.
[26] Grigoryan L. R. Parajanov. M.: Molodaya gvardiya, 2011. S. 310.
[27] Arsen Vahe. Express "Sunny Route". Er.: Author's edition, 2011. S. 78.
[28] “Enjoy life with the wife you love, all the days of your vain life, and which God has given you under the sun for all your vain days; because this is your share in your life and in your labors as you work under the sun”(Ecclesiastes 9: 9).
[29] My Yerevan. Yerevan: ACNALIS, 2002. p. 12 (author of the text - V. Navasardyan).
[30] See:
[31] Karabchievsky Yu. Longing for Armenia //
[32] See, for example: Balyan K. So according to Tamanyan or against? Dialogue with Andrei Ivanov // Voice of Armenia, March 8, 2012, No. 24 (20237) // https://www.golosarmenii.am/ru/20237/society/17186/, as well as the head office “Peretamanyan? Nedotamanyan? " to Ivanov A. Northern Avenue leads to Cond. Sketches about the spirit of the place. Part II (https://agency.archi.ru/news_current.html?nid=37059)
[33] See, for example: Ivanov A. The legacy of Yerevan has not yet been created (about which the "GA" does not yet write) // Voice of Armenia, December 8, 2011, No. 132 (20205) // https://golosarmenii.am/ru/ 20205 / culture / 15410 /.
[34] "Small is Beautiful" is the title of a collection of articles (1973) by the prominent British economist E. F. Schumacher.
[35] Cit. Quoted from: A. Aleksanyan. Yerevan déjà vu (in Armenian). 2012-03-06 //
[36] Malkhasyan E., Gyulmisaryan R. Yerevan “Bermuda Triangle”. Part 2: Draft //
[37] I am deliberately not using any ethnic or political epithet here. It was an old fortress, the irretrievable loss of which is a disaster for the city.
[38] Fry M. Tales of Old Vilnius. SPb.: Amphora, 2012. S. 133-134.
[39] Karabchievsky Yu. Longing for Armenia.
[40] “The Armenian public consciousness is now in a state of intellectual and moral degradation. The consequence of this process is the formation of a fundamentally new culture dominated by alien, often frankly primitive values "(Kazinyan A. Opening of the first republic // Voice of Armenia, May 26, 2012, No. 57 (20270) https://www.golosarmenii.am/ru / 20270 / home / 19146 /).
[41] See: https://www.lragir.am/russrc/comments22470.html. Departure (and in fact, expulsion from the city) of the former owner of the cafe "Parisian Coffee" on the street. Abovyan is a symbolic act of the dissipation of the Yerevan spirit. The coffee tradition imported by repatriates from France, of course, will not go anywhere. But what a pity the disappearance of her best manifestations!
[42] Sahakyan N. World Mountain // Noah's Ark, June (16-30) 2011, No. 12 (171) //
[43] B. Kherson. Inseparable and Inseparable. About Russian-Jewish poetry // Interpoetry. 2012, No. 1 //
[44] Quebec declaration on the preservation of the spirit of place. Adopted at Quebec, Canada, October 4th 2008 //
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