Northern Avenue
HOW ARMENIA'S FUTURE OUTNUMBERED IT'S PASTS
Yerevan, March 2009. Photos by Karin Grigoryan
In March 2008, Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, a former Soviet republic in the Southern Caucasus, briefly made its way to our television screens. News channels displayed how, after a disputed election, angry masses filled the city’s central streets and squares. Northern Avenue, a recently finalized prestigious development project in the centre of Yerevan, being one of them. After an intense period of daily demonstrations and protest, outgoing president Robert Kotcharian declared a state of emergency and restored order. In response to his aggressive intervention, during which many were severely beaten and imprisoned, citizens made Northern Avenue into the key site for civil disobedience. During several months, mothers with children, elderly and veterans ignored the ban on public gatherings and held daily meetings at five o’clock in this street to demand accountability of the public administration.
Yerevan, March 2009. Photos by Karin Grigoryan
Although the buildings’ mortar is still fresh, the Northern Avenue is the final realization of a city plan, designed by bolshevist architect Alexander Tamanyan in 1924. Tamanyan circle shaped city is based on the fictional Sun City in Tomasso Campanella’s early utopian work La città del Sole (1602). The twenty-seven meter wide Northern Avenue with eight to nine floor buildings on either side is the first pedestrian street in Yerevan. The owners of the expensive apartments are, amongst others, the more affluent members of the Armenian Diaspora. The assortment of shops and boutiques on the ground floor, notably Dolce & Gabbana or United Colours of Benetton and alike, clearly also cater to the high-end consumer. With the Northern Avenue the post-soviet elite of Armenia fulfilled their desire to create a place for all Armenians to be proud of and ‘an earth quake in terms of the architecture of their city.’(1)
Aerial photo of central Yerevan, the circle shaped city.
Indeed, some distraction from daily life of Yerevan seems more than welcome to its inhabitants. The ending of the Soviet Union and the subsequent war between Armenians and Azeris over Nagorno Karabakh (1988-1994) brought the average Armenian a lot of hardship. Not only in terms of war trauma and loss of family, but since 1994 a clan controlled economy, as well as, a blockade imposed by Azerbaijan and Turkey have resulted in widespread poverty. Fifty percent of the population lives below the poverty line. And even though a committed Diaspora guarantees a steady influx of money, really only the happy few live a better life since the political transformation from communism. (2) That said, the Northern Avenue has little to offer for the majority of the inhabitants of the city accept as a shortcut route for pedestrians or as a symbolic place to protest at against the current regime.
Destruction of homes
The city quarter of which the Northern Avenue is part is as large as ten hectare and used to be made up by ‘illegal’ partly wooden houses of one or two stories. These buildings were in bad condition. According to Narek Sargsyan, the city architect, the structures were of no particular architecture and could be considered as ‘a cancer in the city’(3). The privatization of the area in 2000 cleared the way for a radical urban makeover. Approximately 2000 inhabitants were convinced to evacuate from their houses. They were entitled to have a reimbursement of 300 USD per square meter. Interestingly, a bonus system gave people an incentive to abandon their houses promptly: leaving within five days meant gaining 40 percent extra per square meter. Yet, since real estate prices in Yerevan during the last few years rose at an incredible pace none of the original inhabitants of this area found alternative housing in the neighbourhood.
Numbered house, Yerevan 2008. Photo by Aukje Dekker
Not only were tenants forced from their homes and were their houses destroyed, the realization of the Northern Avenue project also meant the destruction of an important site of memory. When clearing the area, bulldozers destroyed the green zone in the nineteenth-century Pushkin Street. The old fruit trees in this street were of symbolic meaning to the inhabitants of the city. They had survived the onslaught onto the city’s greenery during the winters of the early independence years. In this harsh period electricity black outs were so frequent that people desperately burned whatever they could find to survive temperatures of minus 25. Yet, families living in Pushkin Street adopted the fruit trees. They protected them and confined them their secret stories. And over the course of time also many others sought shelter and comfort with these plants. The destruction of the neighbourhood let to protest and to the founding of a National Citizens’ Initiative, which examined potential violation of property rights. Yet, the government muted its efforts by incriminating the lawyer who defended some of the residents.(4)
Numbered house, Yerevan 2008. Photo by Aukje Dekker
Instead, in order to pacify the people, officials promised to preserve some houses on a different location. Indeed, they pledged that the buildings would be carefully taken down stone by stone, stored, and rebuild on a later moment. They envisioned a proper nineteenth century street to be fabricated, a thematic collage from the fragments of the old buildings. Twenty-nine houses were considered worthy of rescuing according to government researchers. And thus, in a truly bureaucratic way – numbering each stone of the houses carefully - the facades of the newly appointed monuments were rescued. Yet, most inhabitants of Yerevan do not believe the government’s story. The only house that was reconstructed until now happens to be the current headquarters of the ruling Armenian Nationalist Party. Still, no one knows for sure what happened to the stones, feeding to the haunted ambiance of the Northern Avenue area.
Dreams of the future
‘This street makes me afraid’, remarked Vardan Azatyan, a local art historian.(5) According to Azatyan the new avenue, connecting Republican Square with the Opera House represents a new type of totalitarian politics, which came about since the ending of the Soviet Union. The street’s architecture is the product of an agreement between the post-soviet political regime and the capital from the Diaspora and Russian developers. The cultural vision transpiring from this agreement seems to be based on a complex set of Armenian experiences. The Northern Avenue could namely be understood as inspired by a four-vectored dream of the Armenian future: to the left – based on the remnants of the country’s Soviet legacy, to the right - celebrating the country’s national traditions, backwards - into the mythical Christian past and forward – firmly embracing market capitalism.(6) And, as such, the realization of Northern Avenue is an attempt by the Armenian elite to fix the post-soviet identity.
1.
2. Northern Avenue, Yerevan 2008. Photos by Aukje Dekker
Indeed, strangely enough, the design of Northern Avenue is inspired by Stalinist architecture but becomes carrier of new type of Armenian nationalism (7), ‘high technological nationalism’, according Azatyan. To Sargsyan, the architect of the city, the Northern Avenue is, first and foremost a stylistic synthesis of the Neo-classicist Opera House and Modernist Republican Square. Yet, in explaining the origins of the project, he firmly places the dream to finalize Tamanyan’s city plan in the period of the nationalist war with Azerbaijan. It was in 1990 that Sargsyan and his colleagues were under siege in Nagorno-Karabakh, when he decided that Armenians all around the world needed the Northern Avenue as a new national symbol.(8) For Diaspora Armenians their visits to Yerevan could be seen as a spiritual experience and, align to this, their contribution to the city’s renewal a way of paying redemption for their absence. Financing the Northern Avenue is a way for them to re-root or regain a home they were once forced to abandon.
Northern Avenue, Yerevan 2008. Photos by Aukje Dekker
Mourning the past
Paradoxically, due to the construction of Northern Avenue again a part of Armenia’s past is lost, namely that of the Pushkin Street quarter. The realization of the street exemplifies how one man’s dream can be another’s nightmare. Moreover, it displays how the destruction of habitat appears to be a returning element in the Armenian history (e.g. the Armenian genocide and the loss of the national symbol, Mount Ararat). Azatyan detects a strategic mourning amongst Armenians leading to an extreme spiritual seclude in terms of the national collective experience, namely a focus on the exclusive role of the Armenians in the Christian history and the suffering they had to endure. Explaining the remaking of the capital, he argues that Armenians make their own suffering last longer by a perpetual destruction of their own cultural environment. As such, Northern Avenue can be seen as cutting open an old historical wound.(9) And, as a result, the every day memories of the old neighbourhood are erased by mythologized history of collective survival.(10)
Northern Avenue, Yerevan 2008. Photos by Aukje Dekker
Northern Avenue constitutes a particular dream about the Armenian future, align to a nationalist ideology; the numbered stones of the houses are the evidence of a more fragmented past. The memory the neighbourhood only lives through in oral history of the people. Consequently a question comes to mind, namely: who owns the Armenian past? And, would there be space for a different politics of hope? Instead of contributing to a further marginalization of the urban poor, urban professionals could give an incentive to deal in a more profound way with the socio-economic and cultural challenges of post-Soviet Armenia. Could the Armenian dream encompass an ambitious urban agenda and a vision on human rights and social justice? At the moment, the first people move into the new apartments above the fancy storefronts of the Northern Avenue. As their first act they could reconcile with the old inhabitants of the place, which pasts were outnumbered by their vision on the Armenian future.
By Christian Ernsten and Joost Janmaat
Sources
1. Interview with Narek Sargsyan, 29 May 2008.
2. URL: http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=2454&l=1 (5 October 2008).
3. Interview with Narek Sargsyan on 29 May 2008.
4. URL: http://oneworld.blogsome.com/2007/02/28/protest-outside-presidential-palace/#more-1388 (12 October 2008) and URL: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR01/017/2006/en/dom-EUR010172006en.html (12 October 2008).
5. Interview with Vardan Azatyan on 17 Januray 2008.
6. Idem.
7. Interview with Vahram Aghasyan on 22 January 2008.
8. Interview with Narek Sargsyan on 29 May 2008.
9. Public Culture 2 (2008).
10. Interview with Vardan Azatyan on 17 Januray 2008.
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