All posts tagged Armenian Culture

  • The Armenian Genocide in Conversation

    Summer 2012

    I first learned about the Armenian Genocide in university, but the first exposure I had to the controversy it is the centre of in Turkey and the Caucasus came a year later, when I found myself a student at a summer program in France.

    For a reason unbeknownst to me, the group of fifteen classmates had come to include four Turkish women, two of whom spoke a very approximate  French and one of whom provided little evidence that she knew any French at all. Her name was Deniz.

    One day after class, about ten of the group members decided to go out for a beer, including Deniz, the Turkish girl who didn’t talk. We sat down, and I asked the unsmiling waitress which of the beer selection was her favourite. In true French waitress fashion, she shrugged non-committally. I pointed out a white beer of middling price. “What about this one?”

    “Bof,” she said. “People know it.”

    “I’ll have that one then,” I said, mentally making a note to tip the next North American waitress I would meet extra for at least bothering to pretend to have an opinion on beer.

    A few minutes later, the aforementioned unsmiling waitress returned with the alcohol, and the tongues loosened as we put our middling French to use.

    I don’t remember how long it was into the conversation, but at some point somebody mentioned the Armenian genocide. A few minutes passed as we spoke about the genocide; I can no longer remember in what context we were discussing it, but the point is we were discussing it on more or less the same terms. Nobody was questioning its historical veracity.

    Well, not nobody. As everybody paused to catch their breath, Deniz’s voice mumbled from the end of the table. “It didn’t happen.”

    There was a long and awkward silence.

    Summer 2014

    I was talking to Kerem, a Turkish academic I’d met online, about my distaste for Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize Winning Novelist and (in my opinion), self-indulgent bore.

    “There are some people that think he won the Nobel Prize for political reasons,” he said. “Because he came out in public and talked about the Armenian genocide without denying it.”

    “That could explain why somebody who writes such boring novels about himself could have won the Nobel Prize I guess,” I said.

    “Maybe,” said Kerem.

    September 2015

    I was back in Turkey for a few days, staying in the home of an erstwhile friend. She was a university educated woman – a teacher, in fact – and absurdly liberal. So I made the mistake of assuming she believed in the Armenian genocide and mentioned it casually when talking about something related.

    She did not.

    “You want to know what I think?” she retorted. “I think that Armenians are powerful and have a lot of money and influence, and because they are all around the world their story got very popular, but that’s not the truth. It was a war. Lots of people died and I don’t know why Armenians spread this story.”

    A few days later I had drinks with another friend, an academic. “Why are Turkish people so defensive about the Armenian genocide?” I asked. “Well, Turks are very nationalistic,” she said. “But to be honest, I’m not entirely sure. You know, actually a lot of the Armenian genocide was actually perpetrated by Kurds, but they are usually more willing to accept responsibility.”

    October 2015

    I took the train to Armenia. It was the centenary of the Armenian genocide, and Yerevan was decked out in commemorative material. I met a Polish guy at the hostel I was staying at. He knew more about Armenia than I did.

    “You know,” he said. “Of course I believe in the Armenian genocide, but I think Armenians need to stop making it a big deal on the international stage. Armenia has so few friends – their borders with Azerbaijan and Turkey are closed. All they really have is Russia. If they just made peace with everybody, they might have some chances to develop, but as it is….”

    The Next Day

    I met a woman at the post office who invited me to her house for dinner. I accepted. We spoke about her children, both adults, both successful. She was proud of them. We spoke about her divorce. She was proud of that too. We spoke about her vacation to Turkey. “You went to Turkey?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. “But when people asked where I was from, I told them I was Russian, not Armenian. You know history? They are our enemies.”

    “Huh,” I said.

    A Few Days Later

    I made my way to the Armenian Genocide museum in Yerevan. I hate genocide museums, but I felt like I had to go. The museum was up on a hill; the way up was flanked by commemorative posters, including one that portrayed an eraser erasing Armenian words and a pencil replacing them with Turkish. The woman at the museum front desk suggested I join a tour that had just started. I was clearly the only person participating who was not Armenian.

    IMG_2949 IMG_2952 IMG_2954 IMG_2955 IMG_2959

    The tour guide had a monotone voice and unconsciously blasé attitude towards showing very graphic content. “The Ottomans liked to decapitate their victims” she intoned. “Here is a photograph of some Ottoman officials posing with a disembodied head in Macedonia.”

    A few minutes later she showed us photographs of a starving woman, ribs sticking from her torso, clearly close to death. One of the women in the group broke into loud sobs.

    The guide continued without seeming to register. “Some Armenians were even crucified. Look, here are some pictures of Armenians that were given face tattoos brought into harems.”

    November 2015

    I was in Azerbaijan. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union Azerbaijan and Armenia have been at war over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory which used to have a mixed population of Azeris and Armenians. After the territory was granted to Azerbaijan, Armenia claimed it; as a result of this Armenia now counts next to no Azeris and vice versa due to refugees flowing both ways. Refugees to Azerbaijan from Nagorno-Karabakh were not well taken care of, and there is a lot of resentment and hatred towards Armenia among Azerbaijanis.

    According to the owner of a bookstore I went to in Baku, Azeris are not great readers, but Azerbaijan does have a national novel, a romance called Ali and Nino. The book is about the Caucasus in the early 20th century, as exemplified through Ali, an Azeri youth, and his Georgian love Nino. Unfortunately for Ali, there is also an Armenian fellow with his eye on Nino, and Ali exacts his revenge by killing him when Ali believes that Nino has been kidnapped by him.

    I met an Azerbaijani while I was staying in Baku, and mentioned I was reading the book to him.

    “Oh,” he said, “I read half of it but never finished. What happened at the end?”

    “Well,” I said, “The Armenian guy dies and—“

    “Good,” he said.

    Baku by night.

    Baku by night.

    A Few Days Later

    I was staying at an AirBnB in Baku, home to a wonderfully hospitable family and an exchange student with whom I spent every evening. This particular evening, the extended family had been invited over. One of them mentioned the Armenian genocide. Needless to say, I was surprised.

    “You believe in the Armenian genocide?” I asked.

    He seemed taken aback, but quickly recovered himself.

    “No!” he said. “Armenians are – Armenians are, well it was a war, and lots of people died. Turks died, Armenians died. The same number of Armenians and Turks died, that’s it. Same number, same number.”

     

  • Going Viral or How I Try to Give Slippers the Slip

    I have a cold. I’ve had it for a little over a week. No need to be concerned – it’s a small thing, a little throat scratchiness and a bit of fatigue at the end of the day. Nothing major.

    How did I get this cold? A virus, obviously. But not according to everybody I seem to meet. For them, I have this cold because I am cold.

    This is actually an Ebola virus, not a cold. But it looks cool, doesn't it?

    This is actually an Ebola virus, not a cold. But it looks cool, doesn’t it?

    In Canada, I walk around in bare or sock feet all the time. In Turkey and the Caucasus, a mark of a good host is that they will give you slippers upon entering their house. These are often cheap plastic affairs of the wrong size, sometimes with a high heel, and I am more comfortable without them. Usually I accept them out of politeness, take them off at the earliest opportunity, and then forget to put them back on. At some point somebody usually notices.

    Host: Hey, you aren’t wearing any slippers! Did my mother not give you any?

    Me: Oh, ah, uh, yes, slippers. Well, you see, in Canada we don’t actually wear them. Not that much anyway. She did give me some, but I just forgot about them. It’s a small and insignificant cultural difference, but I really prefer not to wear them. No problem.

    Host: But, you are going to get cold.

    Me: No, I swear I’m not cold. I’m perfectly comfortable.

    Host: Yes, you are going to get cold, and then you are going to get a cold.

    Me: No, don’t worry, I won’t. I won’t get a virus from not wearing slippers.

    Host: You don’t get a cold from a virus, you get it from being cold. Here, I’ll go and get you some slippers.

    Me: I guess I’ll just get them myself.

    At the end of this conversation I feel like I am spitting on my hosts’ hospitality by not wanting to wear slippers; believing that their guest is doing something unhealthy in their home and not doing anything about it might make them feel as though they are a bad host or as though it is their fault that I have fallen ill, and I don’t particularly want them to feel that way.

    (Oddly, this concern does not extend to smoking, which has been known to cause far worse chronic and potentially lethal respiratory problems, but hey. Cancer, chemo, cold, chicken soup – they all start with ‘c’ so they can’t be much different.)

    Anyway, I also don’t want to create more work for my hosts by making them chase me around the house with my neglected pair of slippers. So usually I put on the damn slippers and then forget about them again, and then I do the same dance at every place I go to in the hopes that I will eventually be able to get away with my rebellious discalceatism.

    When I finally did get a cold, I had another version of this conversation.

    Host: Didn’t my mother give you slippers? You must have gotten the cold from walking around on the cold floor.

    Me: No, it’s a virus. I’m sure of it. Canada is very cold and we don’t just all have a cold all the time. I’m definitely sure it’s a virus.

    Host: No . . . I’m sure. It’s because you’re cold.

    Me: Okay, fine, I’ll wear the slippers.

    I have given up on convincing people of the scientific impossibility of colds being related to actually being cold.* If the fact that I am from one of the coldest countries in the world, have lived in a city that was regularly -40 in the winter time, waited every day for the bus in said temperatures and did not perpetually have a cold does not convince them, I’m not sure what will.**

    *Obviously I can recognize that being extremely cold and having hypothermia will compromise your immune system and make you more susceptible to catching cold, but inside it is always above 17 degrees.

    **This anecdotal argument is actually a logical fallacy, but it is not only me. All Canadians do not spend from October to April with a cold. I am confident that these results could be backed up with science.

    photo by:
  • Armenian and Azerbaijani Family Culture. Also, Dryers.

    A question I get asked a lot on my travels through the Caucasus is “Do you live with your family?” Since I have not lived with my parents for a while, I usually tell the truth, which is “No.” Then I grin mischievously and say “my parents live a 12 hour drive from me.”

    People respond in a variety of ways. Shock, horror, consternation, pity. Sometimes even mild surprise. The point is, that sort of thing is really not normal here.

    Clean

    In fact, in Armenia and Azerbaijan, I was told that while older children have the right to move away from their parents when they marry, the role of the youngest male child is usually to stay. If this youngest child wishes to get married, he must find a wife who will move in with his parents after their happy nuptials. In more liberal families, they may also move into an apartment close by.

    If you are an unmarried person such as myself, it is typically your lot to live with your parents until that happy day should come, unless you decide to go away for school.

    When I tell people that there are no such obligations in North America, their faces make me feel a bit judged and I begin to feel defensive and like I have to explain that in North America we really love our parents, but that things are just different there.

    I had a conversation with a man I met in Azerbaijan about this, and I started to do this.

    Me: But, you know, you have to understand. In North America, we really love our parents, but we are just more independent. And lots of people do live close to their parents.

    Him: Well, we are very loyal to our parents and that’s a good thing. But in some ways, maybe leaving them earlier is better. I’m 29 and I’m going to the States next year for school. And you know how to do everything you need in a house, but I don’t know anything. I don’t know how to cook or do laundry or iron. My Mom does everything for me. Last time my Mom was sick, I had to take my clothes to my sister’s.

    He said this without the deep shame that I can only imagine a 29 year old Canadian would feel at making the same admission. Which is reasonable, I guess, because in Azerbaijani culture this is normal.

    Me: Oh, well, laundry’s easy. You just put the clothes and soap in and press a few buttons. Then you take it out when it’s done. If you want to learn how, I’m sure there’s a tutorial on YouTube about how to do it.

    Him: Hey, that’s a good idea! I used a YouTube tutorial to learn how to change the oil filter in my car, but I never thought about it for laundry.

    Me: Yeah, YouTube has everything.

    Him: I also heard you are supposed to separate darks and whites?

    Me: Yes.

    Him: What about ironing? My sister told me that ironing is harder than laundry.

    This brings me to another topic: the humble dryer. As this man will hopefully learn upon arrival in the United States, North America is possessed with this exceedingly handy machine which will perform a number of nifty tasks:

    De-wrinkle your clothes (not perfectly, but maybe enough that you can forego ironing.)

    Dry your clothes.

    Warm up your clothes. There is nothing like a cold winter night spent snuggled up in some pyjamas lifted straight from the dryer, or the feeling after a shower of wrapping yourself in a huge snuggly warm towel.

    Kill bed bugs.

    Alas, rate of dryer ownership in Turkey and the Caucasus is so abysmally low that I have never even seen one. Everybody dries their clothes on a line, outside if there is sun and inside if it is cold or raining.

    I know dryers are big consumers of electricity and that they are taxing on the environment, but when it rains for three days straight, it gets a bit tiring to look at your pants that you washed three days ago and hope that they’ll be dry the next day. It is also mystifying to me that no entrepreneur has said, “Hey wait a second. This dryer thing could really take off in places where people don’t have dryers.

    Alas, no. In a fit of inspiration, I wrote a little ditty to be sung to the theme of that favourite thing song from the Sound of Music.

    Towels that are scratchy and jeans that are damp

    Laundry racks making your living room cramped

    Didn’t think I would say this but I miss static cling

    But in this region it’s just not a thing…

    photo by:
  • Happy Birthday to Me!/La cheville qui enfle

    A few weeks ago, I celebrated my 24th birthday. In Armenia. I had a great day.

    My birthday eve, something managed to get into my boot and sting or bite me on the ankle through my thick wool socks and pants. Many suggestions about what it might have been were forthcoming, including spider, bee, and scorpion.

    Whatever it was, it was poisonous. The epicentre of the bite was a mere centimetre across, but by the time the thing finished swelling it was about 15 centimetres across. The pain radiated even further up my leg and it could not bear weight. I spent the day hopping around my hostel on one foot and texting friends things like, “Woe is me, it’s my birthday, a bug just took out a chunk of my leg, and I might die. Just kidding. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. The swelling is only six inches across, and I can’t walk. But I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.” Most of the texts back said, “You should go to the doctor” but since the only words I knew how to say in Armenian were “no,” “wood,” “eggplant,” and “beans,” this was easier said than done.

    Lest you think this small detail derailed my birthday, think again. On the train into Yerevan, I met an Armenian woman. When I told her it was my birthday the next day, she immediately offered to help me celebrate it. The night of my birthday, she showed up in a cab with a group of her friends and they carted me around town, helped me shuffle in and out of restaurants and cafés, bought me shawarma and cake and got the restaurant staff to play a happy birthday playlist in Russian and Armenian as background music the whole time. They even arranged candles.

    The best part of the night, however, was how genuinely interested they all seemed in me. One of my major self-improvement goals is to learn to ask better questions. It’s something that I’ve actively tried to work on improving this year, and I still have a long way to go before it will be truly easy for me.

    But I’ll be darned if these people didn’t ask me loads of good questions. Things like, “What dreams do you have for your life?” and “What are the most important things you’ve ever learned?” and “What do you think about God?” When I answered the questions and returned them, they were game to engage as well. Their serendipitous sincerity and interest completely eclipsed the bug bite as the main detail of my birthday. At the end of the night, they all said things like, “Wow, you’re a really good person, we’re really glad we met you.”

    I had worried about celebrating alone or with people I would turn out not to like. In the end, I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday. Not only was I really impressed by these complete strangers, I felt totally loved by them. They had no particular reason to do something so nice for me or to be interested in my dreams, and they still were.

    They also offered to take me to the doctor if the bite got any worse. Thankfully it was visibly better the next day so I didn’t take them up on the offer. I am now walking around with ease, although I can still feel a bump where the bite was two weeks later.

    P.S. To all my other friends who sent me birthday wishes, I love you all too.

  • Noah’s Ark, Mount Ararat, Drunkenness, Rape, Incest, and Armenian Pride

    Mount Ararat from Armenia

    The snowy peak of Mount Ararat rises imperiously above Yerevan and greater Armenia and, despite being officially on the Turkish side of the border, it is a major symbol of Armenia and has been on the Armenian coat of arms since at least the Soviet period.

    Armenian Soviet Coat of Arms

    Please excuse the checkered background and focus on the hammer, sickle, mountain, and grapes.

    But in this post, I don’t only want to talk about the mountain. See the grapes on the bottom of the coat of arms? Well, those have a special significance for Armenia. A delicious, intoxicating, darkly comedic significance.

    On my way to Armenia, I met a woman on the train. “Armenia’s very famous for its wine,” she said. “It all started in the Bible. After the great flood, Noah’s ark landed on Mount Ararat, and when he came down off the ark he planted vineyards and made wine. And then . . . well, we don’t have to talk about what happened after that. But wine is still being made there today! It’s delicious. It’s a really great thing about Armenia. You should taste some while you’re here.”

    It’s true. We don’t have to talk about what happened after Noah made wine on Mount Ararat. But we can, because the black humour of this story turning into a source of Armenian national pride is too good to pass up.

    So, as my train-buddy said, tradition has it that God sent a great flood in antiquity to punish a world rife with evil. Noah was the only good person in the whole world, so God let him in on a little secret. “I’m going to punish everybody,” God said, “and send a great flood. Everybody’s going to die. Except you, because you’re righteous. So in order to prepare for this event, build a vast ark and take animals from each species so that they might repopulate the earth after I’ve finished making it rain.”

    So Noah did. Everybody looked at Noah like he was utterly crazy as he was building the ark, but when it started to rain everybody drowned except Noah because Noah was better than everybody else.

    When the waters did go down, the ark landed on top of Mount Ararat. General scholarly opinion holds that, if the flood story is based in historical fact, the biblical Mount Ararat was probably not located in modern-day Armenia. This is not important, however, for the traditional signification of the mountain. In order for the story to take on the trappings of reality, all that has to happen is for people to believe.

    So, let’s say for the sake of argument that Noah’s Ark really did land on top of the Armenian/Turkish Mount Ararat. Noah and his sons climbed down off the snow-covered summit, God sent them a rainbow as a sign that he would never again send such a great flood, and then Noah got down to the business of planting the vineyard that would become a symbol of a small landlocked country called Armenia several millennia later.

    After the grape harvest, Noah made himself some wine and got so drunk he passed out, naked. His son Ham entered the tent and “saw” Noah lying there. Ham went out and told his brothers Shem and Japheth about Noah’s nudity. Shem and Japheth, rather than going in to “see” for themselves, went in backwards with a blanket and covered their father up.

    After Noah woke up from his drunken state, he cursed Ham and Ham’s descendants. Why, you ask? Just for seeing him naked? Well, my heathenistic friends, the general consensus is that “to see” functions as a euphemism for sex. So Ham raped his father.

    If I were told this story about a major landmark of my country, I would be like, “whoa now. We should just get rid of grapes. Like, all grapes. Can’t have things like that happening. Rape is bad. Cursing descendants who didn’t do anything wrong – also bad. Let’s just. Uh. Yeah. No. Okay, if we’re going to continue to have wine in this place, we might just want to keep it on the down-low. You know, because of that terrible bad thing that happened. Which probably happened on another Mount Ararat. Yeah.”

    And yet the Noah’s Ark imagery seems to be everywhere. A major wine and brandy company in Armenia is called “Ararat.” I went to their factory, which contained prominent signage about the origins of winemaking in Armenia being when Noah’s ark landed on Mount Ararat.

    Ararat Brandy (Distilled Wine)

    Ararat Brandy (Distilled Wine)

    I like to imagine that Armenians, when told this story are all like, “well, that sucks but . . . wine.”

    And so wine and brandy are a great source of Armenian national pride, and nearly every Armenian I meet finds a way to tell me about how good they are. And they’re right – they are good. Just . . . enjoy responsibly and make sure you educate your children to know that drunk means no and …. incest also means no.

    photo by:
  • Till Divorce Do Us Part

    When I first arrived in the Caucasus, I stayed at a guesthouse run by a Georgian man in his late forties or fifties. Over a dinner of potatoes, alcohol, coffee, and cigarettes, he popped the question.

    “So, when’s your wedding going to be?”

    I answered as I always do. A noncommittal shrug and a “No idea.”

    It struck a nerve.

    “You have to get married! When I was your age, I already had my daughter! You’re 23 already! If you don’t hurry up, you’ll never get married!”

    What does one say to this stuff? Fortunately, it didn’t matter. After telling me that the end of my period of eligibility was nigh for a while, he asked a question that I could answer.

    “Do you have a boyfriend?”

    “No. No boyfriend.”

    He looked crestfallen.

    “Have you ever had a boyfriend?”

    Fortunately I have had a few boyfriends and was able to assure him that my current lack of prospects has little to do with my ability to attract men in general. I then explained that none of my boyfriends had worked out and that if I did marry I would want to be with somebody that I would be happy to call the father of my children because, if I have them, it’s important to me that I give them the best.

    Suddenly, the entire tone of the conversation changed. He said, “Good for you!”

    It was a first conversation in a series about the culture of marriage and divorce in the Caucasus. I get asked if I’m married and when I plan to marry a lot here, much more than I do in Turkey. From what I have gathered, people in Georgia and Armenia tend to marry young – around 20 – and women are considered rather old to be married around the age of 25. But people who refuse to live in a bad marriage appear to be respected. It’s strange.

    In Tbilisi, I met a woman at a guesthouse I was staying at. I would have pegged her at around 32. A man around my own age came into the kitchen. Since this woman lived with her parents, I took him to be a brother.

    “This is my son,” she said.

    I looked confusedly from one to the other, and then curiosity got the better of me.

    “How old are you?”

    “I’m 36,” she said. “And my son is 22. I got married when I was 13 and had him when I was 14.”

    “Are you still married?” I asked.

    “No!” she said. “I only lived with that husband for about one year, but it was enough time to have a baby. When I got married, it was the old days. Everybody got married very young. And I didn’t know nothing – about sex, about being a mother, about love. The marriage was arranged, so I just went and then I hated it. But – and now it is not like this – in those days people talked. If I left my husband people would say that I wasn’t a virgin and that nobody else would marry me. But I was so unhappy that I called my parents and said, ‘If you don’t let me come back home, I will take my baby and move to Europe.’ So they said that I could come back home. It used to be very bad. Even when I asked my mother if she loved my father when she got married, she said no. But now I have a second husband and he is younger than I am and he has helped me live like I’m younger.”

    In Yerevan, I met a woman at the post office. She asked me where I was from and then started telling me about her children. One of them lived in Brazil, the other in Moscow. “I love to travel,” she said. “And it’s hard when you have kids, but now that my kids are grown up I can. And it’s so good that you are travelling now and that you are able to take advantage of your youth.”

    I asked, “Are you married?”

    She said, “I’m divorced,” as though it were a point of pride.

    “I married my husband when I was 20, and I was far too young, but in our society we got married that young. A girl that young – she wants to go to the theatre, to go travel, but I was just married. And I divorced my husband when my kids were 8 and 6. I took them by myself and it was hard – very hard. But I gave them a very good education, and now they both speak English very well and have very good jobs. My daughter went to the American University, which was the best university she could go to, and she is married but she is waiting longer to have children. She is only 28. She has some time. It is better, I think. When my kids tell me that now I can have my own life, I tell them that I am older and it’s not the same as having a life when you’re young. I still feel like I missed out on having youth.”

    In Ijevan, I met a two women, neither Armenian. One was Swiss but lives in Armenia; the other, Lena, was on vacation from her home in Moscow. The two reported also being frequently asked about whether they would soon be married.

    Lena said, “At first I would say no, and they would say, ‘No! You shouldn’t think like that! You’ll be happier if you’re married and it’s getting late for you. Why don’t you want to be married?’ So then I started telling them I was divorced, which I am, and the conversation completely changed. People reacted more like ‘respect for getting out of your shitty marriage’ or ‘men are such complete morons,’ or ‘we understand you.’”

    These three conversations were fascinating to me. I wouldn’t have expected the two attitudes to coexist in this way, nor do I understand how a society where people seem to understand why living in a bad marriage is not ideal seem to still promote young marriage. Or perhaps they don’t. Perhaps these conversations are the natural outcome of a society in transition, where people cannot figure out whether their culture is in favour of the old way of doing things or the new.