Central Yerevan glitters amid the general poverty during café season
By Vahan Ishkhanian
ArmeniaWeek correspondent
A walk in the park isn’t what it used to be.
Concrete has replaced green lawns and trees are no longer the sole shade from rain and sun, supplemented now by bright umbrellas with cigarette, beer and soft drink logos.
And where park benches might have welcomed the weary but penniless, now there are plastic chairs where comfort comes with at least a 200 Dram (about 35 cents) cup of coffee.
Cafes have taken over the parks of central Yerevan, where the population of the district is 175,000 and there is one café per 431 residents.
The boom began in 1998. Until then, according to statistics from Yerevan Central Community, there were 197 cafés, bars, and restaurants (in Soviet times they were called “public food places”) in the center district. Now there are 415, and the number increases each month. One hundred new cafés, restaurants and bars were added during the past year.
In Opera Square alone, an area of about 50,000 square meters, there are eight cafes with 186 tables. In the evenings about 400 customers sit in those cafés and it becomes difficult to find a vacant place in Magnolia, Melody and other overlapping establishments.
“The average business doesn’t develop, it is difficult to produce goods competitive in the external market. The market is small, the country’s borders remain closed,” says Lyudmila Harutiunian, head of the sociological department of Yerevan State University.
“Since the service field requires less investment capital, people start up cafés. If it is possible to earn money from anywhere, they do that.”
An average monthly (gross) income of a café or bar in the center of Yerevan is $12,000.
Yerevan didn’t look like the poor country its economic statistics suggest for many delegates attending the Armenia Diaspora Conference last month.
Aviation engineer Aram Meshkanbarian from Los Angeles was on his second visit to Armenia.
“I don’t get an impression of a poor country in Yerevan,” Meshkanbarian said. “I see quite a lot of cafés. They are full, and restaurants are full. From TV I learn that the social conditions are bad, but I don’t see it here. I see many new shops and construction.”
According to data from the World Bank and United Nations, Armenia is the fourth poorest among the 12 nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Fifty-five percent of Armenians live below the poverty level, spending about $2 a day for expenses that include food and utilities.
The average family spends 60 percent of its income on food while the poorest spend 77 percent on food. About 23 percent do not earn enough for food. Only one-third of Armenia’s students study beyond high school because most cannot afford it.
But on a summer evening where cafes are overflowing, central Yerevan looks like the center of an economic boom.
“Yerevan reminds me of a movie location in Hollywood,” said Hrant Tink, editor of Akos newspaper in Istanbul, who came to Armenia for the conference. “When you pass decorated luxurious buildings, there are empty territories behind. One needs an effort to see that emptiness.”
Ninety percent of the country’s markets are in Yerevan. Seventy-seven percent of service-oriented business is done in the capital, where income and spending figures are influenced by international organizations that pay average salaries 10 to 20 times higher than the national medium. (According to the Strategic Project on Overcoming Poverty, the average national monthly salary is 22,706 drams, about $38, while the minimal salary is 5,000 drams.)
“There is an extreme polarization of incomes,” says Ashot Kakosian, head of the department of mathematical modeling of the economy at Yerevan State University and leader of a group called the Strategic Project on Overcoming Poverty.
“Armenia is one of the CIS countries with the greatest inequality of incomes. Incomes are concentrated in 15-20 percent of the population. And the majority of those rich people are in Yerevan. This is one reason for the abundance of entertainment places.”
The relatively highest level of poverty is also in Yerevan. One fourth of the country’s poor live in its capital.
Just as there are two Armenias – Yerevan, and then everything outside – there are at least two Yerevans: the center, and then all that surrounds it.
(Paplavok - at night )
Cafes are significantly fewer in the suburbs. In the district of Ajapaniak, about five kilometers from the center, there are only 18 cafes for 126,000 residents – about one for every 7,000 residents.
“Earlier, during Soviet times there were jobs. Banquets and evenings out were often organized. There was a protocol of public celebrations. Now the only place for meetings is cafés,” sociologist Harutyunian says.
“This is not a western way of living, when a family goes to a café to have dinner. Here food is cooked at home. Public food does not serve as a way of easing everyday life yet, and a woman’s housework is still very hard. Visiting cafés is a reflection of Mediterranean culture in Armenia. In this culture public life is usual. Armenians like living in a community, which is not common for northern nations.”
Even in Soviet times, when life in town was monotonous, Yerevan differed from other cities of the Soviet Union by the abundance of open-air cafés, which were attracting the attention of Russian journalists.
Then, too, the same people were sitting in cafés with a cup of coffee and a cleaner shouting from time to time: “Those who have been sitting here since yesterday, leave.”
Now the number of cafés has increased and even the new places have found regular visitors.
In Magnolia café in front of the Opera building, except for foreigners sitting at two tables, all are everyday visitors. Schoolgirls Tania and Nata, daughters of shopkeepers, come to Melody almost every day and order tea. But today all places are occupied and so they move to nearby Magnolia.
Lilit and Lena are pediatricians and live in a nearby building. While they are talking and drinking coffee, Lena’s child is roller-skating in the square.
“With the coming of spring we are here almost every day,” says an engineering student named Armen whose father works for Yerevan municipality. “It is a free place, where we can communicate and feel comfortable with little money.”
Asked how they can afford to come every day, Armen gets a wink from his friend who says: “We, too, don’t understand where this money (we spend in cafes) comes from.”
In a society where multiple generations may live in one apartment, a 35-cent cup of coffee becomes the price of privacy for young couples with notions of romance.
At Duet bar, on Nalbandian Street, summertime means a decrease of customers, as most prefer the open air cafes. In the evening hours, however, Duet stays busy.
Tables at Duet are surrounded by high backs, offering seclusion for couples seeking privacy.
“The visitors are different,” says manager Ara Nazaretian. “One undresses his girlfriend exposing her breasts; another asks for a candle in order for a waiter not to notice his kiss by the dim light.
“Customers that come in the afternoon differ from those that come in the evening. Afternoon visitors are mainly regular ones, mostly students. They do not order much, not more than 500-1000 drams. After 4 p.m. visitors change. Sometimes an evening visitor spends more than all students sitting at all tables in the afternoon taken together. All the visitors are young, under 30.”
The offer to go to a café sounds like this: “Let’s go to drink coffee.”
But whether looking for candle-lit kisses or simply for a place to escape the dead air of summer, when it is café season in Yerevan, a “cup of coffee” is rarely just “a cup of coffee”.
One of the oldest cafés for “a cup of coffee” is on the second floor of Poplavok, which officially is called Al Aragast (scarlet sail).
Before, visitors of this café were intelligentsia, mainly lecturers and writers who found a bohemian atmosphere at the simple cafe.
Two years ago Aragast was renovated from quiet and unpretentious, to a neon-wrapped café with synthesized music.
But even after construction the same customers continued going there by habit, spending hours over a “cup of coffee”.
“Waiters hardly controlled themselves not to hit them over the heads with a cup,” says former waitress Gayane Martirosian. “They were asking for a spoon but waiters were not bringing, and they stopped coming.
“But if a rich man came, they would start pulling each other to be the one to serve him. And then they would be hissing after the one who succeeded. A rich man could leave a $10 tip. But in general it is mainly the intelligentsia who visit the cafe, people who used to come here before. Now they own public organizations and get grants. Waiters are satisfied with them.”
And the reason she is a “former” waitress, is that Gayane, too, applied for a grant from an international agency and established an NGO. Now she can live the café life instead of make her living from it.
Side bar: A true picture?
In 2001 Armenia had an economic growth of 9.8 percent compared to 7.2 percent this year. However, the level of poverty in the country hasn’t decreased. The World Bank calls this phenomenon Armenian economic growth paradox.
The Country Assistance Strategy of the World Bank explains that production growth was registered only in Yerevan and only in a few branches (for example diamond processing). Growth was registered also in service and construction fields, which does not cut down the level of unemployment.
According to Vigen Sargsian, who is in charge of public relations for the World Bank, a small group of rich people becomes richer due to this growth.
“Polarization grows, the number of luxurious cars increases, the level of poverty doesn’t change,” Sargsian says. “Let foreigners come and get a 6,000 Drams monthly pension and try to live a week on that money. Then, let them decide whether the country is poor or rich. Yerevan will go on glittering more and more, but it won’t cause a fundamental change.”
Photos by Mkhitar Khachatrian
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