Vahe H. Apelian
(Reproduced from 2020 posting)
I visited Armenia for the very first time in the later part of 1960's or very early 1970, in a tour organized by the Soviet Embassy for the students attending the American University of Beirut. The tour was held during the ten days or so Easter break and consisted of visiting Yerevan, Leningrad (now Petersburg) and Moscow.
I, along many of my generation in the close-knit Armenian community of Beirut, was brought in a cocoon that was Armenian conjuring a velvety image of an Armenia that never was nor could it ever be. Consequently, I was eager to absorb everything I saw from the moment the captain pointed to us Mount Ararat as we entered the sky above. It did not take me long to understand that I had stepped in a country that was far different from the one I came from and that I could not do shopping there as there was practically nothing on the shelves to buy but our relatives, who had repatriated from Kessab in 1947 and who hosted me royally, knew how to shop and were eager to buy for me the things I wanted to take home with me, including a Soviet made camera for the young sister of my classmate who had wanted to have one and who, years later, would become my wife.
The tour was meticulously organized round the clock that included visiting Lake Sevan. On our way there we passed by villages and in one them the bus stopped, I do not recall why. We stepped out and I saw a young girl tending to her chores. I asked her if I could take a picture of her. She accepted it and stood still for a picture I took a snapshot that became to me akin to the famous Afghan girl who made the popular cover of the National Geographic Magazine with one difference. Years later, the photographer of the Afghan girl tracked her down and found her a married woman and mother of children. i did not.
Upon my return I had the film developed and shared her picture with family and friends and tucked it away. A few years ago, I came across the picture and I posted it on my Facebook page noting: “To this day and especially with the economic hardship affecting most in Armenia, I wonder. Who was she and what happened to her?”
Much changed in this fast-changing world since my first visit to Armenia. In fact, late 1960's may be considered ancient history that has not much of a bearing with the current reality. During these past fifty plus years that young girl in a village on our way to lake Sevan lived through the devastating earthquake in 1988, the collapse of the Soviet Union; through the Karabagh conflict and the re-emergence of the free and independent Republic of Armenia on September 21 1991. There followed almost three decades of presidential rules in Armenia under Levon Ter-Bedrossian, Robert Kocharyan, and Serzh Sargsyan each marked by political upheavals of their own. Then there came about the Velvet Revolution led by Nikol Pachinyan followed by his prime ministership since 2018 during which Armenia defended itself against the unprovoked blitzkrieg attack the TurkaBaijan forces unleashed on her on September 27, 2020. The attack was halted with the catastrophic defeat of Armenia accepting the dictates of the victor in a trilateral agreement between it and Azerbijan brokered by Russia. As these events unfolded, that young girl likely married, raised her own family and if nature remained kind and considerate to her, she is now a much-tested proud grandmother or even great grandmother.
Behind each picture there is a “picturer", not to use the official term, a photographer. I was the one who took that snapshot. But, unlike her I lived in the Armenian Diaspora, which also changed in fundamental ways and has no bearing of what it was when I took that snapshot. The civil war that erupted in Lebanon in 1975, gravely wounded the Armenian community of Lebanon which, in its hey days, embodied the best that a diaspora Armenian community could possibly aspire achieving. Reports claim that the overwhelming majority of the Armenians, much like I, left Lebanon after the civil war that ended fifteen years later in 1990, fundamentally altering the demography of the Lebanese Armenian community and the landscape of the Diaspora. Two decades later, In 2011, civil unrest shook the foundation of Syria and the once thriving Armenian community there, Aleppo, the epicenter of the post genocide diaspora, stands now gravely wounded and emaciated. There also, the overwhelming majority of the Armenians left the country for good gravitating not to Armenia but westward.
As to Kessab in Syria, the last member of our extended family, my paternal cousin Stepan, left Kessab after the devastating onslaught from Turkey on March 21, 2014. He left behind the graves of my maternal and our paternal grandparents, the graves of my paternal uncle and maternal aunt whom I did not have the pleasure of knowing as she died young and also the graves of many other relatives. Nowadays in Kessab, there remains our family’s ancestral family home vacant. It is built in the later part of 1800s, by layering two rows of stone after stone.
“Life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday” says Kahlil Gibran’s sage prophet. As life moves forward I cannot dismiss from my mind and wonder what happened to that young girl in that village in Armenia on the way to Lake Sevan? She might have been tending with her family in a Soviet era collective farm. I feel a strong kinship with her although our encounter was momentary. After all, she from Armenia and I from the diaspora, lived through the most tumultuous period of our most recent history.
