Supplement to Armenia Travel Notes

A while ago, I saw on a hot search that the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh region has been declared over. As the defeated party, Armenia wants to return part of the land in the Nagorno-Karabakh region to Azerbaijan. Local residents set fire to their houses before retreating, saying that they would not let any property fall into Azerbaijani hands.

I have no intention of commenting on the nature of this conflict, but seeing those familiar yet unfamiliar rural stone houses devoured by raging fires in the video, my thoughts were suddenly dragged back to the winter a year ago.

I have not been to the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Although it was very convenient to go there from Armenia, I finally gave up due to schedule reasons. But the shadow of Naka is always with me. Not long after I entered the country, when I took a fixed-price private car down the mountain, the driver asked me in broken English where I planned to go, and then he said: "Let's go to Nagorno-Karabakh, it's very interesting there!" "

The symbol of Nagorno-Karabakh is the statue of grandparents. In the capital Yerevan, apart from their sacred mountain Ararat, the most common image seen is the image of the statues of grandparents. When I went shopping at the local Carrefour before returning to China, I saw that almost all the products on the shelves displayed these two symbols. Even the gift box version of Ferrero Rocher chocolates was made into a set in the shape of Mount Ararat and the statues of grandparents. . Sadly, neither of these places belong to Armenia. Mount Ararat is located on the eastern border of Turkey today. If you come to the Pit Monastery on the Armenian border and look west, the outline of the Holy Mountain is clearly visible. As for the statues of grandparents, will they be returned to Azerbaijan after this conflict?

There was heavy fog in the morning when I went there, and the outline of the snow-covered mountain tops was only revealed later.

 

From today's perspective, the Armenian nation seems to be at the point of decline. Since they were massacred by the Turks at the end of the 19th century, their living space has been gradually eroded, and a large number of people have fled overseas. What followed was the annexation of the Soviet Union, and local ethnic and religious conflicts were suppressed until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Clearly, the complex local conflicts have turned into absolute hatred, and the latest conflict is just another nail in the coffin.

In my impression, the time in most areas of Armenia seems to be sealed in the 1980s. Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, which houses half of the country's population, is the capital built by Armenia's entire country. Not only is the architectural style here a mix of European and Soviet architecture, but all other elements seem to have been mixed together out of time. Fashionably dressed young people sit in the old Soviet-style minibus Marshrútka. Modern self-service coffee machines and cute mobile ice cream trucks coexist on the street. The colorful Lada cars on the road stand out among the black and white modern cars. Very prominently, the flea market next to the square's modernist sculptures is paved with Soviet medals.

I'm more interested in the city's past than in its homogeneous modern products. Whether we realize it or not, almost all of us today live in the ruins of the past, especially in cities filled with artifacts. Obviously, when a building is completed and has quickly fulfilled its mission, what awaits it is a long process of dilapidation, while we continue to consume their bodies until they are torn down and buried with our memories of the past. Of course, this phenomenon is universal whether it is buildings or all other creations. On the other hand, since memory is difficult to rely on, we can only rely on external objects we create to prove that our past does exist.

Yerevan’s flea market is a place where time flows. When the weekend comes, the shelves and stalls surrounding Vernissage Square will take this place back to the 20th century, an era full of turmoil and pain everywhere in the world.

Entering from the northwest, the outermost area is a row of open-air used books stalls. There are Armenian books sold to locals, as well as many large-format English books carefully wrapped in plastic paper, obviously sold to tourists. The owners of the bookstalls are all grandfathers. I don’t know how they collect these books and why they set up stalls here every weekend. Half of the subjects in those large English-language books are about the Armenian Genocide. These book covers with white letters on a black background are printed with GENOCIDE one after another, which is particularly conspicuous in the morning sun. In addition, there are some architectural books introducing local monasteries and some travel albums. When I stopped in front of the bookstall, the stall owners would enthusiastically introduce these books to me, and some would tear open the plastic covers and hand them to me to read, which made me very embarrassed.

One of the old men was particularly good at chatting. I don’t know whether he was attracted by my behavior of stopping reading or for other reasons. He opened his chatterbox to me. At first, the old man told me that he was translating Armenian poetry. He took out a self-printed poetry book, and the inner pages were stained with stains. I have forgotten the specific content of the poem, but I only remember that it was a theme praising the Armenian language. So he showed me another old book, which seemed to be a colorful picture book introducing the Armenian alphabet. Each page had a story for each letter.

The old man kept talking. He must be very old. I noticed that there were not many teeth left in his mouth and there was a blister on his tongue. He kept introducing Armenian language and poetry to me in difficult English, asking me questions in a measured tone, and then answering them with a smile. "Where are you from? Oh China. I was in Moscow when I was young and studied at university there. Mao Zedong and Stalin were both in Moscow at that time." He started to talk about his experience, and then seemed to mention that he also met the two I even have some records at home now, but unfortunately I didn’t hear them clearly.

"You are the first person who is willing to listen to me. In the past, tourists would just come and visit, and no one would stop to talk." The old man said excitedly. I ended up buying a Yerevan sightseeing book from the 1980s from him.

This book, published in 1982, introduces Yerevan, the then capital of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, and other scenic spots in its territory in English. The inside pages are also equipped with beautiful color printed photos. The book is clearly intended for Western tourists who want to visit the Soviet Union. Is its birth a microcosm of the end of the Brezhnev era? How many tourists would go to the Soviet Union in the Caucasus at that time? I had no way of knowing, but a small card tucked into the book revealed another piece of history from the recent past.

If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I would have forgotten that I bought it at a flea market. This naive little bear is called Misha and was the mascot of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Judging from the back of the card, this should be a small material produced by the Soviet Union through a Swiss company and sent to the West to promote the Olympic Games. The Soviet Union at that time was just as eager as we were in 2008 to let the outside world have a glimpse of the country. However, because of the invasion of Afghanistan a year ago, six years of preparation only resulted in a war that was boycotted by 64 countries. Olympic Games. At the closing ceremony of an Olympics clouded by politics, Misha delivered one of her most heart-wrenching and memorable moments, shedding a tear on the backdrop.

At the other end of the flea market, I was sitting on a bench to rest after being tired from shopping. An old woman also sat next to me carrying a bag and handed me some fruits with a smile. She also started chatting with me enthusiastically, introducing herself as a Russian teacher at a local primary school, and eagerly pulled out a drawing book from her bag to show me the pencil drawings of her students. "Do you know this? Asclepius, Hippocrates!" As she said this, she tore off the page, wrote a message on the back and gave it to me. "Get your camera and take a picture!"

These two chat experiences surprised me. Entering Armenia from the ruined south, I had no communication with the locals along the way. I didn't understand the language with them, and they seemed to have been numb in their own lives and indifferent to everything outside. Is it caused by decades of unchanging environment, or is it weighed down by longer shared memories? I don’t know, but from the exchanges in Yerevan, I know that in the belly of everyone I meet on the road. There are stories to keep you entertained all day long.

My last days in Yerevan were also the last days of 2019, and the whole city was already in a festive mood. I followed everyone in the crowded supermarket to buy New Year's goods (for them, it was Christmas shopping). The shops along the street were decorated with lights and Christmas songs were playing all the time, and everyone's tightly wrapped face could not be hidden. smile. 2020, these four numbers are endowed with infinite beauty and hope at this moment, and have become symbols full of magic.

When people want to try their best to abandon the pain of the past and welcome the future, we will be highly consistent in looking at the almost unpredictable time and space with a high degree of optimism. If they could know what was going to happen in 2020 in advance, would they still celebrate the arrival of the year like this? Maybe, after all, when the sword of Damocles hangs over your head, there is nothing more attractive than the joy of living in the present. Even on Christmas Day in 1914, didn’t the warring parties on the Western Front go to no man’s land to exchange Christmas gifts?

But how do we celebrate the arrival of 2021 when we are in pain? If shame in a moral society forces us to withdraw our blind confidence, we will be swallowed up by the emptiness and depression that have been waiting for us for a long time. Then you might as well use a certain time and space that belongs to you in the past as a temporary refuge for your thinking, where everything is still normal.

My thoughts returned to Yerevan at the end of 2019. There were two Chinese people working at the Confucius Institute at KFC there. They happily chatted with me and told me that the Armenian teacher told them: "These children are unwilling to study, and our country has no future." In the hotel where they stayed There was a Korean who chatted endlessly with me about Lu Xun as soon as he found out that I was Chinese. He said that he had visited Shaoxing and typed his name in Chinese characters using the pinyin input method on my mobile phone. There are also three tourists from the Tibetan government-in-exile, probably a family. When I first asked them, they shyly said they were from India and would greet me warmly when I met them on the street.