Twenty one years after hitting Gyumri, the 1988 earthquake still continues to leave victims. More than 4,000 families continue to live in domiks, small temporary houses provided for the homeless by the Soviet government for two years, or built by the homeless themselves.
Transitions Online Blogs start functioning again! I’ll be posting for the Caucasus Patchwork blog, and there’s the first post about the Bambir band trying at the local Armenian selection for the Eurovision Song Contest.
The slideshow with my photos of the Bambir backstage has their song Yolk…
I decided lately to go back to more writing, here’s an article I wrote for Transitions Online, on Armenian-Turkish relations.
TRANSITIONS ONLINE: Armenia-Turkey
The Railway Ties That Bind
by Anush Babajanyan
29 April 2009
All but totally cut off from each other, twin cities either side of a closed border sense that change is coming.
GYUMRI, Armenia | A sign on a small streetside booth in central Gyumri advertises, “Tickets to Istanbul.” The head of this small ticket agency, Artur Mkrtchyan, sits near the booth talking with men from the neighborhood. “Opening the border is good unless the compromises made for it are too big,” Mkrtchyan says. What used to be the only crossing from Armenia into Turkey lies just 20 kilometers outside Gyumri. The border was closed in 1993, but now the possibility of it reopening as bilateral relations thaw after years of tension is a lively discussion point in this city that could see substantial economic benefits from the renewal of communications with neighboring Turkey.
Twenty years after the earthquake the situation in the Fountain District in Gyumri, Armenia, has not changed much. On 7 December 1988, as a powerful earthquake struck the town of Gyumri and the nearby territory, tens of thousands of people were left homeless. Many found shelter in small houses that were given by the government or found by the people themselves. The government promised then that in a two years time the people will be given apartments. Now that 20 years have passed there are still roughly 4000 people waiting to get an apartment.
The Fountain District is one of the spots where about 300 households have been waiting for their home for 20 years.
