Alaverdi: Recovery and Rebirth
RECOVERY AND REBIRTH: NORTHERN TOWN STRUGGLES WITH REALITY OF UNEXPECTED TIMES By Marianna Grigoryan and Arpi Harutyunyan ArmeniaNow reporters
When the residents of Alaverdi get chocolate or wine from Vachik's small outlet that resembles a kitchen, it means there is a special occasion.
And special occasions, unlike the past `good times', do not happen that often in Alaverdi.
`Champagne and wines are rarely taken from the shop windows,' says Vachik Matevosyan. `People buy the most essential things - bread and macaroni. Nothing has been left from the old Alaverdi.'
In the Soviet times Alaverdi used to be a center of metallurgic industry in the South Caucasus, with a population of 25,000. Fifteen enterprises operated in the town providing jobs for both men and women.
The situation has changed today. Many apartments in the multiple stored buildings are safely locked in a town that once led an active life.
`Part of the residents have left for work abroad, the other part has left seeing no perspectives in their native town,' says the Head of the Program and Analysis Department at the Municipality Gor Hovvyan.
Hovvyan says the official number of the population in the town is 22,000, but the real number of people living in the town is less for 5 to 6,000.
`People leave the town because they do not have jobs. And the young people do not see any prospects. Although some ten years ago, the situation was worse. Almost all the buildings were half empty and seemed like there was a war situation in the town. It seems a bit better now,' says the newly elected Mayor of Alaverdi Artur Nalbandyan.
Nalbandyan says they do their best to change the life, but it seems like Alaverdi, 191 kilometers north of Yerevan, is distanced from the capital in terms of not only its location but also the living conditions and the routine life.
The cars along the roadside differ not only in their color and old age, but also in their owners and histories. But their aim is one - to earn the daily bread with the help of an orange sign `TAXI'.
The taxi drivers say neither the work, nor the income is stable. There can be nothing for this day, and there can be a bit of something to get along for another.
Gray haired Karlen Evoyan does not try to join his `colleagues': he is on his own.
`Sometimes people who get into the car look in the mirror with amazement. I tell them, don't get amazed. It's me. It is not always that we dictate life conditions,' he continues, trying to touch upon philosophical and political topics with his clients and to analyze.
Evoyan once used to be a high-ranked official in the famous Sewing Enterprise of Alaverdi.
The enterprise that had more than 2,000 employees was declared bankrupt and was closed after independence. Evoyan, like thousands in Alaverdi, began searching alternative ways of surviving.
The Mayor insists in former times, unlike today, the word `unemployment' was almost absent in Alaverdi.
Besides the copper-casting plant and sewing enterprise, Alaverdi once had a textile, bulbs, beer and non-alcoholic beverage plants as well as bakeries.
`Unemployment today is the most painful issue in our town,' says the Deputy Mayor of Alaverdi Artavazd Varosyan. `Non-officially more than 60 percent of the population is unemployed.'
In the town that was once a center of industries, though, the main enterprises providing the workplaces do not operate. The only working enterprise is the copper-casting plant that provides jobs for 500 with the average salary making 50-70 thousand drams per month (in the Soviet times the plant had more than 5000 employees).
In the atmosphere of total unemployment, the residents of Alaverdi try to find alternative means of survival in the `new age'.
The most essential of the ways is the Bagratashen market that is located on the border between Georgia and Armenia, where the people from Alaverdi buy cheap fruit, vegetables, clothes and other everyday life goods and bring them to sell at slightly higher prices.
`When the year is fertile people in Alaverdi get income also by selling blackberry and raspberry from their gardens. They also do fishing,' says Hovvyan.
The fishermen do the fishing in the only river in the town - the river Debed - that changes its color for several times a year due to the falling sewage waters, exhaustions of the Vanadzor chemical and Alaverdi copper-casting plants.
`Alaverdi is one of the forgotten corners of the world,' says the former acting Mayor Larisa Paremuzyan, who is at present the president of the `Women Support Center'. `The condition of Alaverdi residents is so bad that more than 20 women have become prostitutes at the border to survive. Nothing of this kind has ever had a place. This is a core issue that needs solution.'
With a town budget of 40-45 million drams (about $87-98,000) and some 75 million drams ($163,000) more as subsidies, the Municipality of Alaverdi today is concerned with getting solutions to the problems of half-ruined sewage system, roofs of the residence houses, the environmental crisis caused by the plant exhausts, unemployment, emigration and a number of other problems.
And in recent times a new problem has come forward: it is the problem of cemeteries. People do not know where to bury the dead.
`There is no place left in the old cemetery in Haghpat. And the cemetery located near the Sanahin station has become a true scourge for the residents: the damaged graves are sliding down because of landslides into the river Debed running below,' says the mayor.
The metal fences of the graves here and there resemble the ruins after an earthquake. Many people, concerned with a similar faith awaiting their relatives' graves, have begun moving the corpses to other places.
`It is a terrible thing: people do not know what to do. They go one after another and take their parents' and relatives bodies to save them from falling into the river,' tells Hovvyan. `One of my acquaintances, an old man, went to move his parents' corpses to another place. The coffin had fallen into parts before his eyes and the man fainted. Luckily there appeared someone by his side all of a sudden.'
Hovvyan says one can only re-locate the graves when they are not sober, since it is `unimaginable'.
`We live in a place where there are no lands - only ore mines. It is impossible to find place for a cemetery. We need to find a place in the neighborhood. But it's too expensive so we try to find other ways,' says Nalbandyan.
But if there is a solution to the problem of cemeteries, the problem of emigration among young people and the annually decreasing number of births are more complicated.
`Young people do not want to have many children,' says the Senior Doctor at Alaverdi maternity hospital Amalia Azatyan. `Many go to study and do not return, and the young people who get married refuse to have more than one child mainly because of bad social conditions.'
To encourage the young people the Municipality has decided not to save its small budget.
`Starting from this year the Municipality will award 10,000 drams (about $22) for each new born child. It might be a small sum but it is still a big thing both for the parents of the baby and our budget.'
The mayor is confident the result of their offer will become obvious next year.