Tales from the road — a Vermonter in Armenia

by Bud Vana

For two weeks in July, I was a stranger in a strange land, a mysterious place  called Armenia, rich in history and culture, but flailing economically amidst  border blockades. I went to Armenia an outsider, but emerged an Armenian scholar  and freedom fighter with four stitches in my head as souvenirs.

There are two important questions which arise from my trip; one is, “Where the heck is Armenia?” and the other is, “Why the heck did you go to Armenia?”

The first answer is rather straightforward:  Armenia is nestled in the Caucasus mountain range in southwest Asia wedged between Turkey to the East, Iran to  the south, Azerbaijan to the west and Georgia to the north. Its capital city  is Yerevan, and the entire country’s population is around 1.5 million.  Physically, it’s about the size of Vermont.

The second answer is not so straightforward. Circumstance led me to Armenian studies as well as to one man. I met James Russell through a chance mention of him by another professor while searching for a major at Harvard. My interest  was the linguistic aspects of mystical poetry, and as I met Professor Russell,  I discovered he was a master of many languages, gifted at poetry, and well-versed in mystical treatises. I took a seminar on mysticism with him and listened as  he lectured in length from memory on any topic — book, poem, person, history  — anything Near Eastern. But his focus wasn’t mysticism but Armenian studies. I declared my major after my freshman year to be Near Eastern languages and civilization with a specialization in Islamic studies. I learned Arabic  and Farsi or modern Persian and was finally able to read my mystical poetry  in the original languages, but soon I felt I was drifting into the nothingness  described by the poems and away from my home, Vermont.

This last spring, I enrolled in another of Professor Russell’s classes only to have it cancelled by lack of interest. Professor Russell was disgusted  by the low numbers in a course he had seriously prepared. I walked up to him  as he packed his things in the empty seminar room and told him that I wanted to learn Armenian. Still angered almost to the point of speechlessness he told me to enroll in the fall if he still was at Harvard.

But a few days later he contacted me by e-mail and suggested that he had now  cooled down and we could start instruction in a few days if I were sincere. I would be his only student and the course in classical Armenian was to be perhaps  my most intensive ever, covering two semesters of work in two months, but through  his instruction I became enamored with the language and early Christian culture and its immense history stretching back at least 3,000 years. The expansiveness  of Armenia, this now very small place, was part of the draw; it was something that seemed unfamiliar and a little new. But to this point in my studies, I  had not yet met more than two or three Armenians, mostly through Professor Russell.

In April, Professor Russell received an invitation to speak at an Armenian Youth Forum in Armenia this summer; he quickly suggested that if I would go,  he would go, and that seeing Armenia would put a face on everything we had studied  in the past month. I agreed on the condition that I might get some help paying  for the trip. He found the money easily in the Near Eastern Department and with  the promise of $2,150 I was on my way to Armenia.

Come July 9, our departure day, I was packed and had somewhat of a grasp of the Armenian language. I had studied Armenian with Professor Russell but that was Biblical Armenian. This modern lingo still baffled me and if it was not,  "I will smite you and your poisonous bile," I had a difficult time understanding it. Beyond that, there are two main dialects of modern Armenian, Western and  Eastern. Eastern Armenian is spoken in Armenia proper and is the literarily  accepted language. Western is spoken by the Armenians in the Diaspora who had  to flee from Eastern Turkey when the Turks began massacring their Christian minority during and after World War I. Many made it to Lebanon or Syria and later emigrated to Los Angeles, New York, Boston, London, Paris or Montréal.  The other Armenians who would be learning about their heritage through this  Hamazkayin Forum would be speaking the Western dialect in which consonants like p’s in Eastern become b’s.

But our voyage from Boston to London and then from London to Yerevan was uneventful.  Particularly uneventful was the 12-hour layover in London.

On the plane to Yerevan, I met two guys also in the youth forum, Nareg from Fresno and Shen from Montréal. We were the first participants to land and quickly bonded. It seemed that most of the participants were either early 20s or late teens. After our dawn arrival Thursday, two days after leaving Boston,  we took a minibus through the city to get to our dormitory. We were staying in a guest house of Yerevan State University, one of the few buildings in the  city with reliable running water. Shen and I were roommates, but we welcomed  Nareg into our room that morning where we continued to get to know each other.  Shen worked in his father’s jewelry shop in Montréal, having spent  four years at Concordia College there and Nareg was a biochemistry major at  University of California Davis in his junior year.

We walked around a bit that morning getting our bearings. The city seemed to  be in reconstruction; it had been the victim of a terrible earthquake in 1988.  But the architecture was not the Soviet square style one might have imagined  but instead was beautiful pink stones on rather nice three story buildings.  We were staying on the main street of the city, Mashtots Avenue named after  Mesrop Mashtots, the creator of the Armenian alphabet in 405 AD and an early translator of the Bible into Armenian. His statue sits at the head of the street  in front of the Matenaderan, a building which contains nearly 14,000 manuscripts,  medieval and ancient, the largest collection in the world.

Professor Russell became our tour guide in the days before the program began, but he had a scheduled return to Boston halfway through the program to take  care of his ailing cat. But as we became grounded in Yerevan, more of our cohorts began arriving: first the group from France, then the large group from California and then the Lebanese and Iranians, making our total about 63. We all met together for a little orientation and Armenian quickly became the official language. I was the only one who didn’t speak it since birth and I was the only non-Armenian  with the exception of Professor Russell. I usually needed a translator and quickly  arrived at a deal with a friend named Vahe who would translate speech for me,  while I would read aloud written Armenian instructions which he could then translate for the both of us.

We quickly began a routine: in the morning, we would try to drag ourselves  out of bed as the chaperones knocked at our doors, go down to breakfast, attend  a morning lecture, go to lunch, then take an afternoon sightseeing trip, eating dinner at some interesting restaurant. Food as well as everything else in Armenia was cheap, a meal usually costing two dollars or less. My Armenian diet involved a lot of flat pita-like bread called lavash, fried chicken, cucumbers, lots  of other greens and kebabs. I once bought a “cheeseburger” only to find that it was a toasted bun with cheese and a cucumber in it. It was late and I gobbled it down. Thankfully, the Hawaiian pizza which I later ate was a little more normal.

Most of the sights we visited were Armenian churches. These churches, however, were often miles away from civilization around twisty mountain roads and as  opposed to being used for congregational worship, they were points of pilgrimage.  Though each came from a similar template, they all had a very different character, affected by the various decorations outside and inside the building. We also visited Holy Echmiadzin, the headquarters of the Armenian and met the current Catholicos who is the patriarch of the Armenian Orthodox Church. The Catholicos recently helped Armenians all over the world celebrate their seventeen hundreth anniversary as a Christian nation.

We also took a trip to Lake Sevan, one of the highest freshwater lakes in the  world, where I got sunburned and was baptized “culturally Armenian,” welcoming me into the tight but affectionate Armenian community in preparation for my studies.

In addition to churches and lakes, we visited the water park, local and rising high tech businesses, the headquarters of the Armenian Special Forces and the local universities. We also had a few workshops with local Armenian youth discussing  how to build better ties between Armenia and her Diaspora.

Our lectures were quite diverse: Professor Russell spoke on the Armenian origins  of King Arthur’s “Sword in the Stone” and the Armenian collection of mystical poems called the Narek while others described Armenian folk epic stories, drawings on Armenian manuscripts as well as Armenian’s post-Soviet history and the broad prospects for Armenia’s youth and its involvement in public affairs.

There was another side of Armenia that I became privy to. Scattered through  Yerevan, there are gentlemen’s clubs. One has a picture of post-Soviet  Russia as being dominated by gangsters, and well, one night I got to meet such men who run these clubs.

Some of the people from the forum had gone to a dance club one evening as a large group. After a while my roommate Shen sat down and began speaking with  some cordial guys next to where most of us were sitting. They were talking and  eventually he motioned me over and I sat down, to receive a toast of vodka.  Then I was toasted again and again to my being American and wanting to study  Armenia. It was nice but there was something different about these guys. They didn’t pay for their drinks and all of the wait staff seemed to give them  their space except when it seemed they needed more drink. Shen and I were convinced they were part of the Armenian Mafia and Shen became adamant that everyone should leave the club quickly and orderly. Most of our party was a little drunk so this was easier said than done. I walked back with a few girls who wanted to  grab a bite to eat on the way. When I didn’t arrive back at the hotel with all of the rest of the group who had taken taxis, Shen became paranoid and quickly  dashed back to the club and asked the men we had met about me. He was certain  that they had taken me. His relief at seeing me as I walked back into view of the hotel was immeasurable. But this was only the tip of the iceberg.

Shen slowly became convinced after this trauma that the Armenian Mafia was  trying to keep him in the country and would eventually kill him. He told me  of people who were following him, lights which suspiciously flickered and on several occasions would only speak to me in French because of possible bugging. Though this may seem humorous now and at the time was a little funny, he was  absolutely certain of his plight and the gravity of the situation became greater  and greater as we entered the final week of the forum.

I eventually diagnosed it as a paranoid schizophrenia not really having any  formal psychological training and hence no credibility but regardless there  were no facilities where he could be treated in Armenia. So Ayk, Shen’s Californian cousin, one of our other roommates and I stayed with Shen constantly  as we embarked on this final journey to mountainous Nagorno-Karabagh, a region in Azerbaijan predominately Armenian, which after some Azeri massacring of locals, Armenians fought for and won after six years of battle in 1994. ‘Mountainous’ is always attached to its name and rightfully so; the bus ride which would have  lasted about an hour if we took a straight path from Yerevan to Stepankert where we stayed instead took nearly ten hours. But the land was beautiful and Shen  was uneasy.  Shen felt that he was being driven farther and farther from the  airport, from his way home, and he often was unable to speak because he was so overwhelmed by fear. The culmination of his fear and the trip Karabagh happened  about a half hour before we were to head back to Yerevan.

As we were sitting at lunch in a large hotel banquet hall, he discovered a CD which I had packed for him in one of our friend’s bags — he had been incapable of packing because of his anxiety. It had been left on one of  our Karabagh tour minibuses. He looked at it, began to walk back to his seat next to mine, drank what was left in his Orange Fanta bottle and without a sign of anger, whapped me once on the side of the head and then again on my forehead.  I didn’t see the strikes — I was eating — but I saw the bottle get placed calmly on the table, and then I began to bleed. Shen sat and finished his lunch as the room started to scream. I was rushed to a local hospital where I was quickly stitched up by a Russian doctor who had been in Karabagh during  a little of the civil war. Having no Tylenol or other painkillers to give me  after the stitches went in, he suggested that I needed a bit of cognac and then I’d be just fine. In fact I was quite fine; the blows had been superficial and the bottle did not break, thanks be to the Coca-Cola corporation which gave me a scholarship for college and also made a bottle which both threatened and saved my life because it didn’t crack open and crack me open.

Shen rode back to Yerevan in a separate car and I rode back on the bus where  I was pampered by innumerable Armenian girls who were very concerned for my safety. They said I was now a fedayi, an Armenian freedom fighter-farmer like  those who stopped the Turkish advance into Armenia in 1918 and transmuted my  given name, George, into the Armenian equivalent, Kevork. The journey home was  quick. I opted for an extra-strength Tylenol over the cognac and was out for most of the ride. When we got back, I had to repack my 75 pounds of Armenian books I had bought in preparation for next year’s study with the help of two of my caretaker Armenian girls, named Eleeza and Myrna. I called my mother and told her that instead of picking me up at Professor Russell’s house  on Sunday, she should try to pick me up at the airport on Saturday when I arrived  because of all the books I couldn’t drag to Professor Russell’s house. This was true but ulterior to my bleeding head wound. Before leaving, Hourig, the woman in charge of the group from France, took off a wooden cross she had bought in Karabagh and placed it around my neck, saying that my Armenian cultural baptism was now complete and I would have to return.

The entire plane ride provided me with a lot of time to reflect. Armenia wasn’t so strange a place to me. I felt very at home and at first I thought that it  might be due to the wonderful people who brought me into their cultural family. But the more and more I thought about it, Armenia wasn’t so very different from the Northeast Kingdom. People still go about their daily chores there.  The seemingly dilapidated shacks on the side of the mountain roads made me recall  trailer parks and the different level of functionality that arises from necessity. The landscape, though accented by gargantuan mountains, was hilly and interesting  like Vermont with its gap-roads and other mountain passes. These two places both sit at crossroads, though this East-West crossroad of Armenia has been crossed many more times with more grave results than our North-South international border. And the character of Armenians reminded me directly of the independent nature of Vermonters, not willing to submit completely to anyone else’s point of view, or willing to let colonial invaders ransack the country. The  Armenian stand at Sardarapet in 1918 which forced Turkish retreat reminded me distinctly of Vermont’s Battle of Bennington and the similarly outnumbered  and outmanned victory. I found pieces of home in Armenia and I expect through further visits and study of its ancient kingdoms, I’ll find greater appreciation  of this Kingdom and ever more ways to connect here and there.