Real estate prices...

As summer visitors from the Diaspora hunt for real estate in Yerevan, it is interesting to hear some people complain that prices are too high, and others thinking it is quite cheap. Of course, compared to 5 years ago the prices have gone sky high - though they have been relatively stable the past 2 years. 5 years ago though prices were depressed after a massive ongoing emigration and depressed economy. Gone are those days, thank goodness. So now, prices in the desirable center are about $2,000 a square meter (or $200 a square foot - though this depends on if the place is ready to move in/remodeled or not). At these prices, an average sized flat in the center with two bedrooms (100 square meters) will go for $200,000 US dollars. Compared to prices in Glendale of course, this is still dirt cheap, and of course, the center is the most desirable area... step outside of the center and prices plummet to half or less, depending on the area, and Yerevan does not have "unsafe" neighborhoods, so it's more a matter of proximity and aesthetics. Those who complain about the prices who haven't even considered buying outside the center haven't got a whole lot of room to complain.

The reason I'm writing this is because I was reading a NYT article which mentioned some prices for European capitals. Now Armenia is clearly not economically equal with these places, but considering in a desirable neighborhood in Athens that same 100 square meter apartment (1,000 square feet) would cost you $675,500 and on the left bank in Paris you'd pay about $1.3 million, and it puts prices in Yerevan in a perspective that lets you make some sense of them. Since the prices in Europe are first quoted in Euros, something that is happening more and more often in Yerevan as well, you can also see that part of the price drop is directly related to the crash of the US dollar.

The Super Center

I'd also like to explain another reason for the prices in the center of Yerevan. Unlike a town like Los Angeles, or Tbilisi for that matter, the center of Yerevan is extremely concentrated. It is completely walkable, has most of the places where you'd tend to go for entertainment, dining, culture, etc, etc. So when you're walking around in the center, you not only don't need a car, you don't even need public transportation. It's quite nice. This makes the center much more highly desirable and thus expensive than in other cities, without even taking into account the other huge factor in price increases. You :-) Yes, there are millions of Diasporans and for every 1% of them who buy an apartment here we are talking maybe 50,000 units sold. I have no idea if we've hit 1% or not, we may gone twice that even (since the Russian and Iranian Diaspora communities are big buyers here - much bigger than America for example). If most of those units are in the center, you can see why prices shot up as they did.

The inventory of places for sale appears to have increased, to which the construction boom appears to be contributing. Prices are quite stable as I said for the past couple of years, and build able lots in the center are almost gone now - though conversely a large number of apartments will hit the market over the next 2 years. We don't know what the future will bring, but I think that prices make sense, and the economy is improving, and so I don't think anyone will regret buying an apartment at these prices.

Caveman life in Khosrov Forest State Preserve

For May 28 this year (a holiday celebrating the first republic's independence day in 1918), we took a trip deep into Khosrov Forest State Preserve. I had seen Jacob Majarian's photos of a very cool cave with ruins of an ancient settlement in the cave, and had tried before unsuccessfully to find the cave, but decided to try again - but this time with a guide. Having hiked around in the area in the fall, and seen pictures of the cave before, I knew we were in for a treat, but the day was just magical, from beginning to end...

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and I uploaded more than ten onto my flickr page (a few of which you can see right here). I just couldn't narrow down the number of pictures to any less than that - the views were just so gorgeous (though I can't take the credit for that description :-)

In any case, the day started very slowly, but once the 9 of us squeezed into a jeep in Garni, starting the bumpy ride to the forests, it just kept getting better and better. The hills were as green as can be, the road as bumpy as can be, and the guide as mountain manly as can be. A two hour hike past where the road ends got us to the cave we wanted to see (there were many other caves around, but not quite like this one), and after we got back we had a fantastic dinner at a fish farm along the river, just under Garni. Driving back to the city we saw a lightening storm over Yerevan, and just as we got into town at 11pm, the sky opened up and a massive rainstorm hit...

Death in police custody

Though it's not uncommon to hear of beatings by the police, the death of Levon Gulyan caught me off guard as he was only a witness being questioned, not a suspect. This is a candlelight vigil in his memory, and to demand answers from the government... the police unsurprisingly deny the charges of beating him.

The gods must be crazy...

I woke up this morning already feeling hot and sticky, and by 10 was seriously considering turning on the AC... crazy considering that exactly 1 month ago it was snowing much of the day. Spring is usually short here, but this year we seem to have just skipped the Spring season entirely. Well, better summer than winter!

Interview with Sibel Edmonds, former FBI Turkish Translator

She has an incredible story of being fired by the FBI for uncovering wiretaps of bribes to Congressmen from Turkish organizations in Washington, including in 2000 for blocking the Armenian Genocide Resolution. I blogged about it quite a bit when the story was published in Vanity Fair in their September 2005 issue.

See what she has to say about her case today in an interview with Hairenik TV.

Elevator Acrobatics

The lifts in this country have been notorious since before Mr. Otis can remember, but in the seventeen years that I've been visiting and five since I've been living in Armenia, I'd heard all the getting-stuck-in-the-elevator stories, but never once had actually fallen prey to the phenomenon.

Until today, that is.

I won't go into the details, but, suffice to say, there were five of us going into a building together, with a lady already in the rather spacious lift. So, up we went, but the doors refused to open, one floor after another. Finally, after numerous tries and many minutes, we asked the lady, who lived there, to call the good people at home to give us a hand. The men caught us in between the eighth and the ninth floor, and explained the situation to us.

We were too many, and the elevator is apparently not used to handling such weight. So, what do we do ? There were a couple of handlebars running each side of the elevator, and we were told to actually lift ourselves up, exercise our arms and balance our bodies when the thing came to a halt. For an arguably Orthodox country, this was, quite factually, an unorthodox solution. But, of course, it worked!

Now, I was never brilliant at physics; I actually flunked the subject at school. However, unless I'm much mistaken, the weight within the elevator didn't quite change by three people heaving themselves up, now did it ? It was lovely to try one's hand at gymnastics in a dank shaft in the middle of Yerevan (I like doing things I've never done before, and would never have imagined I'd get to do), but the logic behind it escapes me.

Thankfully, we escaped the lift, and lived to tell the tale. However, this place called Armenia remains an enigma yet. It's so lawless, even the laws of physics refuse to be applied...!

Georgian short term memory loss

Meanwhile, today on wikipedia I was reading about the start of the Abkhaz independence war... Let me give a quick background. The Georgians were a majority in Abkhazia. Many felt discriminated against and wanted stronger ties to Georgia proper. Georgian students petitioned the university to seperate the Georgian section of the university into a branch of the Tbilisi State University. They started demonstrations, and there were demonstrations in Tbilisi, too (which evolved into independence from the USSR rallies Finally Tbilisi decided to go ahead and create the seperate Georgian university branch of the Tbilisi State Uni. The aftermath, not so important to my point, was the Abkhaz war of independence which was defacto successful, but has not been diplomatically so yet.

Why do I bring this up? Well if you know the situation of the Armenians in Georgia - especially Javakhk, you'd notice that the situation is virtually identical. Armenians there are a majority, they are adjacent to Armenia, the feel discriminated against, they have their own universities which are facing problems and have ties with Armenia... but most Georgians don't think back to when they were in the same boat and how bad it was for them. They don't sympathize at all with situation or see the parallels. They only look at the Armenians as provocateurs. It's a shame. I wish they'd open their eyes and see that if they treat the Armenians the way they themselves would like to be treated - it would not only be the right thing to do and possibly prevent future conflict, it would also make the Armenians of Javakhk feel more closely tied to Georgia.

Pari Kalust new bloggers

A warm welcome to two new Diaspora bloggers - what with all the repatriation, their ranks had been diminished, so fresh blood was needed. New writers for any of the blogs are always welcome, as they give interesting new perspectives, stories, experiences...

Elections: The Day After

Well, I've been out and about today, and I've been hearing some pretty bad things. Plenty of not-so-nice activities related to the elections, as usual, even if - as many other fellow-observers have related - individual polling stations held their voting without any untoward incidents.

There was a rally at the Opera Square just now, with representatives of a few political parties and a relatively big crowd of upset citizens. It wasn't terribly huge, but what the politicians had to say got me thinking, got me confused... I was more or less pleased with my experience yesterday, and I feel reassured, as I said, that we can really and truly hold free and fair elections in this country, but things have happened, and certain would-be leaders are rightfully upset. At the same time, I wonder how noble their intentions are. If, indeed, as one of them said, the powers that be now have come to where they are by illegal means, and that's the only way to get rid of them, I am not certain how professional, capable and transparent the new leaders that come replace them would be. It's confusing...

One thing I forgot to mention about the elections yesterday was how much of an ecological disaster it was. SO MUCH paper went into it - ballots, envelopes for the ballots, huge paper bags to fill with used and unused ballots, unused ballots that were purposefully torn so as to not be re-used... It broke my heart to see all that go to waste. I mean, like I said, there really must be a better way, technically and logistically, of carrying out elections., besides just the counting late into the night. How do they do them elsewhere ?

Results...

Well all the results appear to be in. First the easy one - Hayko got 8th place in Eurovision, and thus guarantees Armenia a place in the final next year. This is quite nice, but the difference between first place and 8th is huge, as 1st place means you get to host the next Eurovision in your country, which would be a massive boost to Armenia's tourism... though at the same time I don't know if it could handle so many visitors at once.

Next for the elections - I know a bunch of the observers, and, well, it seems things have improved... though they are still far from what I would consider acceptable. It seems the primary method of cheating this year was through buying votes. This was done on a massive scale by the governing Republican party and by Dodi Gago's "Prosperous Armenia" party. They came in first and second by a long shot. Only two other parties squeezed in enough votes to qualify for any seats in parliament on the party ticket - and those went to the former speaker or parliaments party, Orinats Yerkir, who was recently recorded having a very interesting conversation with the British Embassy, as well as former foreign minister Raffi Hovannisian's Heritage Party, which officially got 6% of the vote. So it is nice that he'll be in parliament and have parliamentary immunity as well.

The OSCE declared the elections something like pretty good. I don't know if there's an ulterior motive for that or not, but in any case the opposition is not impressed, and had a demonstration tonight already, promising another in 5 days time.

Look at Me, I'm Observing!

It was parliamentary elections yesterday, and I got the chance, thanks to the "It's Your Choice" NGO and Transparency International, to be a full-fledged elections observer! Well, me and lots of other people, including a number of Diasporan-Armenians, but I guess I was a bit over-excited, because, honestly, at the end of the day, I think it's pretty cool. I like doing things I've never done before.

So, the day started early, because polling stations were to run from eight a.m. to eight p.m., and everyone at the stations - nine members of the local electoral committee (if that's the right word for it), plus representatives of parties, individuals running and just plain ol' observers - needed to be there an hour early. My spot was a school down the street from my house, and I got there to see everyone there already, on time, which was reassuring.

Everything went so smoothly, I can't tell you. The team there was headed by a particularly active and capable lady, and she knew all the ins and outs of the process. Voting started on time, even a bit early, actually, and continued on and on and on and on... Ah, yes, that was the tedious part, or so I thought, all the waiting, hanging around, for twelve whole hours. I had opted for a full-day shift, because I really wanted to do this thing and do it properly, so, yes, especially as there was absolutely nothing fraudulent going on at my polling station, it got a bit tiring.

We finally ended at eight exactly, having received 1016 votes for the day.

And then... Well, that's when it got REALLY tedious. Excruciatingly painstaking, I can't begin to tell you, because we had to count, count each and every single piece of ballot paper, in the presence of twenty people, one by one, bit by bit... Now, I'm an early sleeper, and this thing literally went for hours. First we had to count the party votes - the proportional list - and then the chaps running individually... This was just so bad, it got irritating. I mean the people were very nice, but the relentless tide of counting, add to that the smoke from the inevitable cigarettes, the crankiness from lack of sleep...

Suffice to say, well before six in the morning, which is when I finally got home, I was thinking, "There HAS TO BE a better way of doing this". What, nobody's heard of computers around here ? Is electronic voting so hard to get together ? Or at least electronic counting, you know, like banks have cash counting things... In the late eighteenth century, we had a brilliant compatriot in Madras, in India, one Shahamir Shahamiryan, and his idea was to establish a republic in Armenia, the voting of which would take place by the baklan system, that is, with beans. Each candidate would have a jar to himself, and the electorate would place beans in the corresponding jars. By eight p.m., just by looking at a jar, or weighing it, I guess you'd be pretty sure who'd won...

Well, it was awfully tiring, but I have to say I was terribly impressed, and felt proud, because, before going in as an observer, I was expecting to see the most khaydarag, utterly ridiculous things as usual, and I was even looking forward to a nice fight with the authorities, but things went so smoothly, it was so clean, so just... I mean, I've been hearing reports from elsewhere, and the Lord alone knows what we are to expect in the next few weeks in terms of accusations and rallies, but all I know is, I have not lost my faith in the Armenian people and democracy, as I expected I would.

You can't get here from there

I was talking to friends yesterday about overland routes to Armenia from India. I was not crazy about the prospect of crossing Pakistan, but even if I was to brave that, the roadblocks were just crazy...

I cannot count on crossing Iran, due to my US passport. They have told me before not even to bother apply for a visa.

I cannot cross Azerbaijan, due to the -ian at the end of my name. I have been rejected by them for a visa in the past.

I cannot even go around from Russia to Georgia. The Russian-Georgian border is closed.

The only way I can get here from India by "land" is to go through Central Asia to Russia (another difficult, time consuming, expensive visa) to Ukraine, take a ferry to Georgia, and then cross to Armenia. Or if I wanted to stick to land, From Ukraine to Romania to Bulgaria to Turkey to Georgia to Armenia.

When I can finally pick up a real Armenian passport, I can just cross through Iran without any problems, nor will I need a Russian visa. I can't wait!

Elections...

Well today (May 12) was the big parliamentary elections. The outcome is still not final, but the fairness of the voting is of course as big an issue as the victor(s). The elections seem cleaner than in the past in some respects so far... but we'll know more for sure tomorrow. There was definitely some vote buying going on, and at sometimes $50 a vote, it's not a small sum, but I haven't read reports of ballot box stuffing, multiple voting, dead voters, etc up to now. The brief initial results I saw had the governing parties doing well - but I only caught results for various villages, no overall results. Election coverage is a bit primitive still, with Armenia TV doing live coverage. H1, the state station is instead broadcasting the Eurovision contest live. The Armenian contestant hasn't sung yet, and I dunno if I'll stay up to wait for him...

Victory Day

It's been a few years since I spent Victory Day in Karabakh, but this year it just conveniently happened. A Sunday afternoon invite, a Monday departure, and my first overnight stay in Shushi... The road was long as usual, with wildflowers in the Ararat Valley and snow at the Zangezur Pass.

Tuesday, the 8th was my chance to check out a hike I wanted to add to the Janapar trail. There's a village below Shushi named Karintak, which I stayed in one summer, and we tried hiking to a waterfall... but never made it. So now that I'm working on this trek across Karabakh, I remembered the waterfall, and plus knew the canyon was breathtaking... but with no road going through it I didn't know if you could continue on to the next village. We headed down on the 8th and with some initial guidance and advice ended up at the waterfall, which was absolutely beautiful. A mossy drippy thing with a small cave, right by the river, with massive cliffs in all directions, you felt transported back in time. From there we headed to an old footbridge in the ruins of a village time and roads forgot, before climbing up the cliffs opposite Shushi to the village of Mkhitarashen, where the Victory Day celebrations had begun a day early, and there wasn't a sober man in the village to take us back to Shushi. Luckily, with cell phones and taxis, we quickly used the 21st century conveniences to get us back home to a cold shower, and hanging with a bunch of friends from Yerevan.

Victory day was a whirlwind of events, with the Presidents of Armenia and Karabakh seemingly everywhere we went. Ghazanchetsots Cathedral in Shushi was one center of activity, then the new city plan for Shushi was unveiled, then after eating at a really nice restaurant that opened last year we headed to the huge concert. To say that there was tens of thousands of people there is no exaggeration, I even wonder if it hit over 50,000. It was the 15th anniversary of the capture of Shushi, a major victory and turning point in the Karabakh, and the concert was huge, the crowd was huge, the fireworks seemed to never end... a good time was had by all.

It was a very photogenic trip, and I've uploaded a record 18 pictures from these past 2 days - so go to my photo page and enjoy...

Pictures of May 7, 2007

The kids train along the Hrazdan River... always a crowd pleaser.


An electionmobile for one of the parties... a few of the parties are using them.

Tribeca Film Fest Winner

Armenia's Vardan Hovhannisyan was chosen as the best new documentary filmmaker for "A Story of People in War & Peace."

Congrats to Vardan and all the people at Bars Media who worked on this labor of love. This award means we'll definitely be hearing a lot more about the movie...

CONGRATULATIONS BARZ MEDIA!

Take a look, Barz Media's Vardan Hovhannisyan won the Tribeca Film Festival Award for Best New Documentary Filmmaker for his film A Story of People in War and Peace. My congratulations go to Vardan and all the people over the last 12 or so years who worked on the film. It is an incredible film and very much deserved the attention it has and will continue to earn.

Genocide Reparations

I meant to write about this during April, but never got around to it. Since Turkey hasn't recognized the genocide these past two weeks, though, and reparations haven't been settled on, it's still not too late! (ok, that was sarcasm)

I'm sure every Armenian in the world has thought about this matter at least once. The day of recognition is coming, and now the enormous fault lines and cracks in the Turkish government's denial campaign, as well as the slow opening up of the topic in Turkey, the issue of reparations becomes ever more relevant.

The first question is whether, when they apologize for the genocide, AND the century of denial which followed, whether they themselves will have the decency to offer up reparations. The easy ones of course are cash, Mt. Ararat and Ani. But I'm sorry, for me, that's not quite enough. Massive lands, property and culture were stolen from us, and of course the lives which can never be returned. Some non-Armenians have said that it was "a long time ago" and we should forget about reparations. I'm sorry, but if someone keeps spitting on a victim for a century, I consider that a continuation of the crime, keeps it present, and should NEVER be rewarded by absolving them of responsibility. Governments today should not learn that they only need to deny the truth long enough, and they'll get away with an insincere "I'm sorry", just like we're in kindergarten. If you are sorry, you show it with reparations, not empty words.

So what do I want exactly? Well, to go back to the argument that "it was a long time ago", that much is true - and everybody knows it. At this point the reparations need to be both realistic and fair (fair to us, and meaningful to Turkey). Having had this conversation with a lot of people, it seems to me, land has to change hands. We got royally screwed out of a massive homeland, which I've traveled across, and the loss is unimaginable. But, since there are now no Armenians left there, what lands are returned can be totally up for negotiations, and how much land is obviously up for negotiations. So yes, back to what most people seem to agree on. Armenians need to be given a land corridor to the sea. A port. Let it no longer be landlocked. So basically, we need the land leading to Hopa, and some coastline on either side of it.

Whatever land does change hands however, as part of the reparations, the current residents need to be given new homes in Turkey proper - a minority issue should not be created. Some people have acted like this is the worst thing that has ever happened. I want to point out that China has relocated over a MILLION people because they built a big dam. Turkey has relocated hundreds of thousands, if not a million Kurds simply to make areas easier to patrol. This is not such a big deal.

Aside from the lands I mentioned, they should also return the island of Akhtamar, and perhaps an enclave in Cilicia like Musa Dagh. And finally, in addition to all this, I think EVERY single Armenian monastery should be rebuilt by the Turkish government, exactly to what it was before the genocide, and a standardized monument placed where churches used to stand, as monuments to the people whose presence has otherwise been erased off the face of the earth.

So there you have it, I've listed all the minimum reparations I think are only fair.

Mt. Ararat

Ani

Hopa

Akhtamar

Musa Dagh

relocate current residents of the lands

rebuilt monasteries/standardized church monuments

and of course, cash. lots of cash to preserve much of the culture, pay the costs of Western Armenians to want to move back to the returned lands, and other similar needs.

Now it's funny, most Turks won't admit the real reason many of them won't admit to the genocide. Fear of having to give back lands. I can't tell you how many Turks I've encountered who after arguing with me that there was no genocide, and clearly losing, end up saying to me flat out... "And if there was one? So what? You're not going to get any lands back". Unbelievable. If you believe there was a genocide, wouldn't you want to make things right as much as is reasonable? In any case, if you pull out a good map of Turkey, and look at what I'm talking about land-wise, you'd also notice that while this land would finally end Armenia's dependency on the Turkic nation for contact with the world (a position they have demonstrated they are not capable of being in without abusing it), it would not even make a scratch in the massive size of Turkey. On an ordinary globe, the amount of land we're talking about is virtually only as wide as the lines indicating countries borders.

Another huge issue is going to be who will negotiate with the Turks on behalf of Armenians. The Armenian government? Diaspora leaders? The church? All of the above? I'm sure that with the current state of the Armenian government, many if not most Diasporans - the descendants of the genocide, will be hesitant to trust the Armenian state with this matter. Can you imagine an Armenian taking a bribe in order to agree to lesser reparations? Until the corruption issue here is tackled with some success, I don't know if I would want the Armenian government to represent the genocide victims, or even to govern any new lands...

Spring in Armenia... cafes, elections, Karabakh, hiking

Spring is definitely here - finally. Also, because of the way outdoor cafe seating works (they get taxed by the month), today will mark the opening a huge number of cafes and outdoor restaurant seating. A few are brave enough to open April 1, but May 1 definitely transforms the city. For those of us sick of smoky establishments, this is the day of liberation. It is also May Day (or Labor Day) in Armenia - and many people also had yesterday off, making this a four day weekend.

The election campaign is in full swing. I have never seen such a campaign before... the city is plastered with billboards and posters for candidates - they are developing strategies and opening offices absolutely everywhere. I am also hearing very interesting speculation as to what the results will be - massively differing views of what will happen. I'm really quite curious now as to how things will go and who gets how many votes - it promises to be one of the more interesting elections Armenia has ever seen, setting the stage for the next presidential elections.

After the elections, we will also start to hear about a Karabakh peace deal again, as talks have been postponed until after the elections. Yet again they are saying we have a perfect window for a peace deal, and that they are close, etc. We'll see, they've raised hope too many times before to get excited, plus with Azerbaijan spending hundreds of millions to build a railroad around Armenia, I don't believe they intend to sign a peace deal anytime soon.

Speaking of Karabakh, I am running a project which is building a hiking trail all the way across Karabakh. The main trail will take 2 weeks to hike, and there will be homestays available every night for hikers. The first few sections will be marked in the coming weeks, and the website, though up an running, needs a little more work before I share it with you. But if you are planning on coming this year, and this sounds good to you, set aside some extra time, and bring along some friends to hike the Janapar!