Red beads, golden earrings
This is a [yet] poorly structured pre-memoir about the village where my parents come from and where my sister Nara and I spent 2 summers and 1 winter. This is an effort to write all I remember about the unique world of an Armenian community that found a new home in the South of Georgia following the 1928-30 displacements of Armenians from the Armenian regions of Erzrum, Mush, Sasoon (modern-day Turkey) following the Russian-Turkish war. This world has nearly disappeared now, and I was lucky to have witnessed it when it was still brimming with life.
Written by me, edited by Nara.
Once I asked Tih, "You were poor back then right? Did you even have a wedding?" "Oh, we did!" she said, "We slaughtered a huge cow!".
They loved one another. I rarely ever saw them argue. Apteh was a very kind man, but he had a short fuse. In moments of anger, he would start swearing heavily, telling his donkey Sarukhan what he would do to his mother’s hooves. Tih would roll her eyes and call him satan's d*ck. Apteh was half deaf, not sure he ever heard her say that.
Tih would call him other names as well, like chkmaz, referring to his temper (maybe a distorted version of Turkish çıkmaz - a dead end. This is speculation, but they used a lot of Turkish words, so it's possible).
When Tih once broke her leg Apteh would look at her with a smile and call her his limping butterfly.
Heshtia or Eshtia (Georhian: ეშტია, Armenian։ Հեշտիա) is a village in the Samtskhe-Javakheti region of Georgia, with several villages mostly populated by Armenians of Western Armenia who were displaced or fled to this region in the 19th century.
My last name is Aroyan, and there is an Aroyans' neighborhood in the village. I know that our ancestor after whom the family is called Aroyan was called Aro and he was a big man. That's the only memory of him that has survived.
The Wikipedia page about Heshtia says that the village can be found on Claudius Ptolemy's map under the name of Shtea. I examined every source I could get my nose into. I wasn’t able to find any proof, but it would be cool if that were true.
A few months ago I traveled to Heshtia for the first time in over ten years. This place is calling me although I wasn't born here and my parents left this place when they were 17. Until lately, I couldn't decide where my Motherland was. I was born in Russia and I only started speaking Eastern Armenian when I was 9, two years after we moved to Armenia, which wasn't a birthplace for any of us. Before that time the only Armenian language I knew was Heshtia's Western Armenian dialect, a language that no one in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, would understand. Over time, Armenia became my one and only home, but my identity, or whatever you may call it, is still scattered across several cities, towns, villages, and languages.
Seems like that one language and that special way of living, copied from Western Armenia and pasted into a similar landscape thousands of kilometers away were preserved with memories of my ancestors, their domestic rituals and habits, air and sun, and even the “Soviet Enlightenment” didn't manage to change them much. I visited Heshtia as a kid and I started speaking the language at 3. Still, I truly discovered it after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the village had no telephone landline, no TV or radio, not even electricity (only 1 or 2 hours from 9 to 11 pm, hell knows why). "Before Sahakashvili" the village was hibernating in its own space and time, with its own beliefs, saints, superstitions, and everyday magic. Yes, magic. Because the sensory level of the people I knew was mind-blowing. But that's another story for another time. A good one too.
The plan was simple: to see the village, my grandpa’s plot of land, the church, one of the many-many popular hilltop holy sites, and spend some time in my paternal and maternal grandparents' homes, where no one has lived for more than 2 decades. This trip would have been quite sad for me, had it not been for my two friends, Lilit and Achod, who joined me on this journey to see the place I told them so many stories about.
The church was under renovation. Every once in a while a rich guy born in Heshtia with a bunch of construction or property businesses in Russia either donates money to renovate the church or builds a small chapel in the yard of his parents' home.
After the church, we went to Aroyans' neighborhood (Արոնու մայլա) to see my paternal grandparents' house.
Tirun, Habet, my dad, Mary, and Jesus.
Tirun's father and brother were killed in the fields of World War II and Tih had to quit school at 12 to help her widowed mother to take care of her many siblings. Apteh quit school too, but, he loved reading and had books and hundreds of magazines and newspapers from the Soviet times. Unlike Tih, who despised books and people who read them - especially if those people were women, he would never tear a page from a book to light a fire or wrap food.
Tih and Apteh’s house, the common room. I had heard that the house was in a shabby state and needed renovation. Little did I know it was almost in ruins. From the outside, it looked okay, but the cowshed had been demolished, and a huge part of the earthen roof between the old and the new parts of the house had collapsed. Everything was moldy and decomposing here, only two rooms were still okay but somehow scary to live in. Actually, every second house in the so-called Aroyans' neighborhood is abandoned. On our street, there was only Zaveta, her husband Hovhan, her son Napoleon, and another family of our distant relatives. Zaveta keeps the keys to Tih’s house and uses what's remained of the house as a granary. None of my three aunts took care of the house, and neither did my dad.
Our kitchen is now a storage for neighbors' wheat.
My grandpa's working corner between the barn and the house bakery (tonratun) was a desk with all sorts of instruments by a tiny window and this small mirror cemented into the wall where he shaved every morning, shining, cheerful, almost toothless.
Ertik (left) - the only window in the earthen roof above the tonir (right) - the stone oven in the ground for baking bread, melting butter, and cooking. Odah (center) used to be the first area of the house where the entire family used to live, eat, and sleep together. It wasn’t until the late 50s when my grandpa built the rest of the house - 2 bedrooms, a kitchen, and the common area or living room. The toilet was outside, like everywhere else in the village.
I left the house speechless and went to see the fields, drink from the ice-cold spring called Hono’i dzor (arm. Hono’s gorge), and later climb up the hill to one of those holy sites that people visit more than churches - Glo’i ukht (arm. Glo’s chapel).
In Armenia, the Armenian Apostolic Church is dominant with a long history of Iconoclasm and condemning saint worship... Armenians in Heshtia are Catholic. Hence along with the holy Trinity people worship saints and build small chapels called matour or ukht in places where hermits are believed to have prayed themselves to death. In Heshtia there are at least 5 matours where people bring images of Jesus and Mary, Biblical scenes, rosaries, crosses, and candles. If an infertile woman wants to get pregnant or if she wants to give birth to a boy, she will come to a place like this, take a handful of sand from the saint's grave, put it under her pillow, promise to name her boy (it's always a boy in these stories) after the saint. And it works! No one ever doubts the power of these saints.
Tih had her own special relationships with the saints. Before bed, she would go outside, cross herself, and distribute tasks to Saint Karapet, Saint Khachatur, and Saint Anton the Anchoret, as if she were their boss.
My maternal grandparents, Maro and Martin's house from outside (left) and view from inside (right). If Tih and Apteh’s house was a ruin, Martin and Maro’s - was a ghost.
This house is in the Vietnam neighborhood, called so during the Vietnam war, for the large number of violent boys and frequent quarrels between the neighbors.
Unlike the dusty and rocky Aroyans' neighborhood, Vietnam is green and soft with a lovely mountain view, murmuring streams, and moist meadows full of flowers, frogs, and butterflies.
Legend says, Maro, 7 months pregnant with my mom, was rinsing her laundry at the stream behind the house when her labour pain started. Maman had and still has a mystical connection with that stream, she always sees and hears it in her dreams, and it's the most cherished memory from her childhood.
Maro didn't want to have my mom because my uncle was still a toddler. She did everything she could to induce a miscarriage - from jumping and lifting weights to taking large doses of quinine (the folk remedy against unwanted pregnancy), but my mom was determined.
Grandma Maro, Grandpa Martin, and their bedroom. They were both teachers, Martin was the school headmaster, an introverted mathematician, a bookworm with a cigarette glued to his lips. Maro was a beautiful, charismatic woman with a long and thick braid of hair, green eyes, and a "snake's tongue". She would have become a political activist be it our times, but all she’s left behind is a handwritten collection of poetry, an old Bible, and a couple of golden rings.
These two were so different, but they were one of those rare loving couples that had a Romeo & Juliet-like love story with a happy ending, secretly seeing each other in the evenings, where Grandpa Martin had to stand on his friend Ludwig's (Tih's brother) shoulders to reach Maro's bedroom window. They were so romantic they wanted to name their firstborn Marmar (first syllables of Maro and Martin, also Armenian word for marble), but somehow they named their baby boy Samvel.
The dining room in Maro and Martin's house. It used to smell of pickled beets and potatoes fried in pork fat.
A bedroom in Martin and Maro's house. In the pictures: Uncle Armik (Amen)as a kid (left), Grandma Maro and Jesus Christ (center), Armik with his gun (he's a hunter and Afghan war veteran).
Heshtians are Catholics, but they are also Armenians - forever pagan, forever Christian, a little eastern, a little western. My sister calls our religion Armenian Apostolic Feng Shui. Everyone in Heshtia prays with the rosary (in Armenia we don’t) and the Virgin Mary is the most popular member of the Holy Family. This 17th century* statue of Mary is deemed a treasure in the village because it was brought from Italy. In the Soviet times when churches were illegal, local authorities came to Heshtia to take the statue to a museum in Tbilisi, but the villagers "welcomed" them with pitchforks and rakes, and the Mother of God stayed with her devoted servants.
The gypsum caryatid on the right is no less symbolic. Almost everyone in Heshtia has her sisters in their homes. These pagan-looking beauties first “invaded” Heshtia in the mid-90s when most men in the village became migrant workers in Russia and earned their first money as good old merchants or construction workers. Next came the VHS cameras, Teflon-coated kitchenware, Casio synthesizers, angora sweaters with shoulder pads, Adidas sportswear, hairdryers, electric kettles, heart-shaped Lancôme makeup boxes, and Barbie dolls.
* to be verified
To be continued…
P.S. I named this project in memory of red beads and crescent-shaped golden earrings that every woman in the village had. But that’s another story for another time. A good one.