Going to Gyumri

Gyumri is Armenia’s second-largest city; in its pre-Soviet heyday it was bigger than Yerevan, and a center of arts and culture. An important trading post between the Ottoman Empire and the rest of Asia and Russia, Tsar Nicholas visited in 1837 and named it Alexandropol after his wife. The Turkish-Armenian war ended here in 1920 with the Treaty of Alexandropol, which stopped the Turkish advance on Yerevan. In Soviet times, the city was known as Leninakan. The most significant event in recent memory, though, is the 1988 Spitak earthquake. It leveled large sections of the city, killed 25,000 of its people, and drove most of the survivors away.

To Gyumri I went for my first non-business overnight trip, this past weekend. I stayed with Barbara, a PCV who I’d met only a couple of times but who welcomed me when I asked if I could visit. She was in Yerevan for the COS conference, so I traveled on the marchutny (basically, a 15-seat van) with her on Saturday; we arrived and she made delicious grilled cheese sandwiches and waited for rain to let up. It didn’t (until I was in an office all day on Monday!), but that didn’t stop us from walking all over. Barbara is not only a good cook, but also a good tour guide, a good PCV, and a good person!

We saw a lot of beautiful buildings – imperialist Russian architecture, with solid stone, beautiful arches, and decorative touches. These survived (at least the facades did) while the Soviet high-rises did not; now there isn’t a building over five stories tall. Barbara has a friend who is here on a Fulbright, teaching architecture and researching the old buildings of Gyumri, so she knew of and pointed out interesting details. We went to the Two Sisters Museum – one of the sisters was a painter and one a ceramicist; both were well-traveled and their work shows a range of interests. We also saw Gyumri’s big market, the biggest in the country – it wasn’t at its most bustling in the rain, but it still had some energy. There are cobblestone streets, and we saw a wedding party enter the church – we followed them and observed some of the (short) ceremony.

The most dramatic thing about Gyumri, though, is the impact of the earthquake. Many of those stately Russian buildings had caved-in roofs – still – and random stones piled around. The courtyards are filled – still – with domiks, the railroad-car containers where the displaced people were housed, and where they still live. The government paid them enough to move in 2002, but many spent the money in other ways and remain. There are fountains all over town – they provide water to people who don’t have any, and they are also memorials to the earthquake; one even had the time of day (11:40ish am) of the magnitude 7.2 quake. There are squatters in many of the damaged buildings; if anyone wants to fix them up, they must pay to relocate the squatters – which is a big disincentive. There are a lot of NGOs – lots of aid came to Gyumri after the earthquake – but, per Barbara, there is duplication of effort and a general feeling of hopelessness that is probably more acute here than elsewhere in the country. Lonely Planet says the city is making a comeback and we did see some signs of that – the Berlin Hotel has local art in each of its modern rooms, and there’s a new park by the Russian Church, from which one has a nice view of Turkey, just over the hill where the statue of Mother Armenia stands. Some of the old buildings are indeed being restored, including the big church. And there are several museums. A popular new restaurant, Ponchik Monchik, opened near Barbara’s apartment. Ponchik is a deep-fried puffball filled with vanilla cream; Monchik has chocolate cream. Either one is a worthy snack after a day of walking around in the rain and negotiating the river-like street crossing!

For dinner, she cooked chicken stroganoff while I made a salad. We hurried to wash the dishes during the one hour a day when she has running water, and then talked about her life and her service until it was time for bed. The next morning she made scones and we took them over to the apartment of another Judy, PCV, who had made fruit salad. They have that breakfast most weekends, a delightful ritual. Gyumri is also the stepping-off point for some more monasteries (Lonely Planet likes them; Barbara is of the “you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all” school) and a big rock with a person-sized hole in it that dates from pagan times (i.e. my kind of site). There wasn’t the time or the weather for rural exploration, but I’ve been invited to return. And I just might – I had a lovely (albeit very wet) time.