Category Archives: Armenia

view from gyumri of mount aragats

07 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by in Armenia, Illustration and art

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view from Gyumri of Mount Aragats

Everyone talks about Mt. Ararat as a glorious mountain because it’s out of touch, but Aragats is the mountain I love. It was where I went to wander one dark, dark December night until the battle-fey found me. I was 26 and wanted to fade away in the blizzard that shut the mountains down and I decided to walk to Yerevan from Gyumri because I couldn’t live with the weight of having the children I tried to take care of in the orphanage die.

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in love with color: mariam aslamazyan

02 Tuesday Apr 2013

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Mariam Aslamazyan1

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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I am working on an article about the Armenian painter Mariam Aslamazyan, from Gyumri. I use to live near her studio on Abovian street. She is amazingly talented, working in oils and ceramics. I’ll post the entire article when I’m done, though it is a bit slow since there is hardly anything written about her in English and it takes forever to get the Russian magazine articles translated. Cheers!

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magic bus

02 Tuesday Apr 2013

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onearmenia1

Ah, this photo brings back so many memories of having to stand the entire 4-5 hours it would take to get from Yerevan to Gyumri. It wasn’t that I didn’t arrive early for a seat but that there would always be some 89 year-old tatik who was obviously going to be forced to stand the entire ride. At least back in the 1990s there was a lot of lip-service paid to how important the elderly was but I never saw in the two years I was there anyone ever doing so much as give up their seat for their own grandmother. My mama-jan didn’t raise no rude boy so I spent a lot of time standing. Such is life.

from OneArmenia.

does anyone know if the lion in the gyumri zoo is still alive?

01 Monday Apr 2013

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Does anyone know if the lion in the Gyumri zoo is still alive

I love Armenia but at least during the two years I lived there (1995-97) the country had a terrible record when it came to animal cruelty. In 1995 I was taken to a bar in Yerevan full of caged monkeys where the patrons would get the monkeys drunk on beer then put their cigarettes out on their out stretched arms. The fact that there is a caged lion in Gyumri probably means it will starve to death as soon as it becomes unprofitable to feed it, if it hasn’t already. My prayers go out to that poor soul, what a hellish fate.