IN SEARCH FOR THE PAST

There is now just another "architectural fever" in Yerevan. To the horror of local connoisseurs of architecture, the old building of Zvartnots airport may be pulled down. Eduardo Eurnekyan, an Armenian businessman from Argentina to whom Zvartnots airport has been given over for "commercial management", has explained that the round terminal of Zvartnots airport is of no value and unfit for operation in terms of safety: the foundation of this structure is very week and therefore it would be more logical to demolish the old building and build a new one instead. 

This evoked a real storm in Yerevan. Both aviators and architects, as well as "proactive intellectuals" stood up in defence of the old airport. They came up with plenty of arguments ranging from statements that the foundation is strong enough, that excessive space can be found and be used to house border guard and customs services to the fact that the old terminal had been awarded a State Prize for architecture back in 1985. 

The relationship between Yerevan and Eurnekyan is certainly pretty delicate. On the one hand, it is just unreasonable in the context of Yerevan's realities to neglect investors, even those from the diaspora. On the other hand, his "commercial management" has led the national air carrier Armavia to bankruptcy. As for the airport, it is a rather sensitive facility. 

In any event, when the collapse of the national air company of Armenia was hot news there, the commentators were saying: "A country 'in blockade' just cannot allow itself to lose its 'air sovereignty' and be left without its national carrier". 

Although no-one was trying on that occasion to raise the issue that the airport's renovation would reduce its throughput. Many people say in the black humour style that high throughput for Zvartnots would rather be a headache than achievement for today's' Armenia. According to the Yerevan-based Lragir online news agency, 34,445 people left Armenia for good via Zvartnots airport just during the first eight months of this year alone. Meanwhile people are leaving Armenia even walking along rail tracks, if what its ex-premier Grant Bagratyan says is true. 

Attempts to demolish or renovate buildings even dating back to the later Soviet period can stir up such a storm in Yerevan that could be aroused in other states by pulling down a monument of centuries-old history. Zvartnots is not the only case in point here: quite recently Yerevan residents took an all-out effort to keep a local market intact. 
It is easy to understand though. They do not like to say this aloud in Armenia but Yerevan is one of those few cities that boast their incredible antiquity but cannot present anything looking like the city's "core" with a fortress and historic buildings. The reason behind this situation is also clear. In his book "Black Garden" British journalist Tom de Waal wrote the following. "In 1905, a journalist named Luigi Villari was captivated by a small city in the Caucasus with twenty-eight thousand inhabitants. The vaulted passages themselves, redolent of all the mysteries of the East, with their dark curtained shops, the crowds of Tatars clad in long blue tunics, and the green turbans of the mullahs passing up and down, are very attractive. In queer galleries and tiny courts huge ungainly camels were reposing. Then through the foul-smelling bazar you come out suddenly on the great mosque called the Goy Jami [Goy Cami in Azeri; Blue Mosque]."

This is the way Villari described the capital of today's Armenia where Armenians were not in majority at that time and for sure did not regard that city as their capital. In 1728, "Turkic Muslims" accounted for 61.2 % of Irevan's population and only 38.8% were Christians about one half of them being not Armenians but Christian Gypsies. In 1828, at the moment when Russia seized Irevan, Azeri people accounted for 75.5% of the population there and Armenians for 24.5%. In the late 19th - early 20th centuries, there were six churches and seven mosques. The mass migration of Armenians from Persia and the Ottoman Empire to the lands of the Irevan and the Karabakh khanates started back in the 19th century after signing the Treaty of Turkmenchay. However, even in the early 20th century, Irevan remained the incarnation of an "oriental fairy tale", architecturally, with impregnations of Armenian merchants' houses. 

Irevan became the capital of Armenia thanks to a concession made by the delegation of the Azerbaijani Democratic Republic in 1918. Efforts to "shape" the capital of Christian Armenia out of it started only in the 1920-30s. Although the process was quite euphonically dubbed "reconstruction", in actual fact it was a falsification of unprecedented scale. Specialists testify that the history of mankind has seen plenty of falsifications. Coins and sculptures, pictures and historical documents have been counterfeited. But never before had history seen an entire city counterfeited. Thus for instance the khan's very beautiful palace with a mirror floor in which Alexander Griboyedov's comedy "Woe from Wit" had been premiered got bulldozed. The magnificent Irevan fortress was ruthlessly ruined as well as the mosques, the public baths, the houses of Azeri aristocracy, in a word, whatever things reminiscent of the city's true historical roots… In the place of the destroyed capital of the Irevan Khanate, architect Aleksandr Tamanyan was building his capital of Armenia where, indeed, there were quite a lot of interesting landscape and design solutions ranging from radial planning to the Cascade and houses made from pink tufa but none of them could play a "historical" role. Processes of this kind were going on not only in Yerevan: the Sardarabad fortress and plenty of other historical and architectural monuments were destroyed. 

When the "ethnic purge" was over in architecture, they got down to the population. They started systematically banishing and "ousting" from Armenia first Azeri people and then, by the end of the 1980s, Jews, Russians, Kurds… 

Now it appears that people in Yerevan have become concerned with the absence of "historical buildings" in the city and decided to mould it from what is available. 

It would come to ridiculous things. A few years ago, it was decided in Armenia nothing more or less than create a unique architectural complex in central Yerevan and move to it buildings of historic and architectural dating back to the late 19th - early 20th centuries. Such a new old city pieced together from individual elements and based on the principle of the Lego toy construction set. Moving old buildings is certainly no new practice in the world: entire houses were moved and turned about in Moscow in the 1930s even without moving out their occupants. In "millionaire quarters" in the USA, one can see European feudal castles first taken to pieces, then brought overseas and put together again. Yet "old city construction" is in essence an oxymoron. And so is the selected period: the "house moving architects" set sights solely on 19th-20th century buildings whereas most architectural and historical monuments in Azerbaijan date back to the 12th-13th centuries. The turn of the 20th century, to put it bluntly, is not history for the South Caucasus and, unlike Baku, there was no architectural boom in Yerevan in those years. But it is precisely in the early 20th century that the Tsarist government's policy for the mass relocation of Armenians from Iran and Turkey to the lands of the Azerbaijani Khanate of Irevan reached its peak. It is in those very years that the "Armenian impregnations" appeared amid the Muslim architectural complex of Irevan. 

As practice shows, having some sleight of hand and a receptive audience, one can declare that the city founded on the Zang river bank on Shah Ismail's orders is "ancient Armenian Erebuni". One can take a file and retouch coins of the dynasty of Eldegizids and then try to pass them for ancient Armenian ones as Yerevan's historians did thereby horrifying Academician Piotrovsky. One can declare Azeri tombstones "ancient Armenian petroglyphs". One can even counterfeit a whole city by razing it to the ground and then building it again but now with no fortress, no khan's palace, no mosques and no houses of Muslim aristocracy. Yet it is basically impossible to destroy and counterfeit all the "cultural strata". 
And now traces of a wolf cult have been found in the environs of Ashotsk own (historical Azeri name Qizil Qoc) in north-western Armenia. As was explained to journalists by Larisa Yeganyan, chief of the department for Shirak and Aragatsotn regions of Armenia's monument protection agency, excavations have discovered a settlement with multiple traces of cult objects. "During the excavation we found animal bones. They included seven wolf skulls," she said. 

As one should expect, Yeganyan is trying to present the find as evidence of the "Indo-European wolf cult". Yet one thing is beyond doubt: obviously against their own wishes, they dug up in Armenia a new proof that this country was created on Turkic or, to be precise, Azerbaijani historical lands to which the mass migration of Armenians started in the first half of the 19th century. Because the wolf cult had existed amid the Turkic nations since times immemorial and any historian would cite more than one dozen proofs. 
Simply no-one has so far succeeded in passing a fake as an original for a fairly long time and doing it convincingly.