December 7

[Ani]

ays aritov Aramayis Sahaykan@ grel e:

 

Ays inc katarvets hayots ashxarhin

Voghbergutyun e hamashxarayin

Mi bur azg einq, dartsel enq kes bur

Isk ayd kes burn el, artasuq e lur ...

 

(sharunakutyun@ chem hishum)

 

Bayc inchu misht el aydpes e stacvum

Karkut@ cecac teghn e misht cecum...

 

[Arpa]

A SELF FULFILLING PROPHECY?

Look above at my rantings and tell us how we did not bring about that

SELF FULFILLING PROPHECY?

We speak about nature, we speak about God’s Will, we speak about bad luck, we assign blame to this and to that, we pass the buck to Mehmet, Vlad and who know who. How much backward are we that when a similar eathquake happened in India of over a billion peopale onlt a dozen died. Compare that to 50,000 in acountry of 3 million(?)

Yes, yes we know tha Soviets and the Russians are corrupt. Wait till we show the world how we take the "FIRST" prize( along with being the FIRST "Christians"?) in "corruption".

I have yet to see someone, anyone profess their sins. I have yet to see someone, anyone brought to trial for causing all that casualty. It has been said that - “Earthquakes don’t kill, buildings do”.

Who built those buildings? Who supervised them? Where did they place the ill gained profits from those thefts of cement?

How did we not see the impending disaster from those so called buildings built on and with r aw“sand”?

On a similar note. We have tens of thousands of posts under the subject topic of GENOCIDE. I have yet to see someone any one tell us the bitter truth. WAs the Genocide another SELF FULFILLING PROPHCY?

We had ten years, no, 100 years, no, 1000 years to see it coming, ever since those SOBs set foot on our lands. How could we not have seen it? What did we do? Did we do anything? What are we doing today?

Shall we wait another 1000 years to finally realize that “the knife has reached the bone/դանակը ոսկորին է հասել”?

Are the buildings built today earthquake proof?

Are we taking precautions that “genocide”, be it natural or manmade/turk/asseri made does not happen again?

Edited December 7, 2007 by Arpa

[Anoushik]

Arpa, my mom told me that an acquaintance's husband was constantly in fear immediately after the earthquake and the years following of being prosecuted for the unstable buildings built in the '70's. But nothing happened and no one took responsibility.

 

It's tragic the way everything took place at the same time. The Artsakh movement, the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the earthquake.

[Yervant1]

Armenians individually reached great heights, but unfortunately failed miserably collectively.

Maybe each Armenian should have his/her own country.

[Anoushik]

Maybe each Armenian should have his/her own country.

Wow, you're so right!

 

[Yervant1]

Wow, you're so right!

Does this mean that we are very much selfish people who profess that we love our country, sing for it, write poetry for it, claim this, claim that but work for ourselves.

[Anoushik]

Does this mean that we are very much selfish people who profess that we love our country, sing for it, write poetry for it, claim this, claim that but work for ourselves.

That's what it means. It's best to be honest, realize our negative traits, and work up from there. But how many Armenians will admit that they are selfish?

 

Of course we're selfish. But we're not unique in that. Most of the human race is selfish. It's because of a small percentage of people, those unselfish people who are willing to sacrifice, be them Armenians or other nationals, that humanity goes forward.

[Anoushik]

Yervant, I don't know if you know, but I was there, in Gyumri, during the earthquake. I don't usually talk about it because life has changed so much and so many different ways for me. I don't understand why this world works the way it does and why some people lose so much in an instant and some don't. I don't know why my family was chosen to be one of those few lucky ones, and why we, out of so many people, didn't have any losses in our immediate family. How come I was able to go to school with both of my parents living and most of my classmates orphaned. I am truly fortunate.

 

I actually started this post with another idea in mind that I wanted to share. We were talking about selfish and unselfish people. I truly believe that if one is unselfish, life, karma, whatever, eventually rewards him. This is not to say that I think people who died had somehow been selfish. I don't mean that at all. It's just that today my mom and I were talking about the earthquake and our experiences and I came to remember again my life in Gyumri. After the earthquake, after first being evacuated to Batumi, Georgia, for nine months and then to Sevan for some three months, my mom and my brother moved back to Gyumri (my dad had always remained in Gyumri). At that time they were handing out the domiks/tnaks to families who had nowhere to stay. My father, being a truly unselfish person, decided that since we hadn't suffered any losses we were going to wait until all the other families had a chance to sign up to receive a "domik". Well, we never again had the chance to get it. So we ended up living in my dad's cousin's endangered building, on the second floor, for three years until we left Armenia.

[Yervant1]

Yervant, I don't know if you know, but I was there, in Gyumri, during the earthquake. I don't usually talk about it because life has changed so much and so many different ways for me. I don't understand why this world works the way it does and why some people lose so much in an instant and some don't. I don't know why my family was chosen to be one of those few lucky ones, and why we, out of so many people, didn't have any losses in our immediate family. How come I was able to go to school with both of my parents living and most of my classmates orphaned. I am truly fortunate.

 

I actually started this post with another idea in mind that I wanted to share. We were talking about selfish and unselfish people. I truly believe that if one is unselfish, life, karma, whatever, eventually rewards him. This is not to say that I think people who died had somehow been selfish. I don't mean that at all. It's just that today my mom and I were talking about the earthquake and our experiences and I came to remember again my life in Gyumri. After the earthquake, after first being evacuated to Batumi, Georgia, for nine months and then to Sevan for some three months, my mom and my brother moved back to Gyumri (my dad had always remained in Gyumri). At that time they were handing out the domiks/tnaks to families who had nowhere to stay. My father, being a truly unselfish person, decided that since we hadn't suffered any losses we were going to wait until all the other families had a chance to sign up to receive a "domik". Well, we never again had the chance to get it. So we ended up living in my dad's cousin's endangered building, on the second floor, for three years until we left Armenia.

Anoushik Jan,

I didn't know that you were there, sure being in a major event like that gives you a different look at life and appreciate what you have even more. But I don't read too much as to why one survives and the other dies it's just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Human beings are always looking for explanations in everything that happens in their life in order to make it meaningful but the reality is that we are too small to be important in this universe.

[Armenak]

December 7: Gyumri children of earthquake turn 19 today

 

By Ani Hakobyan

ArmeniaNow regional reporter

 

It was a cold December evening of 1988.

 

In the northern Armenian town of Gyumri 19-year-old Narine Mirzoyan was voiceless suffering labour pains in a room barely lit by candles.

 

In one corner of the room, relatives mourned over the dead body of Narine’s young cousin.

 

The city was without electricity and heat, no doctors were available to help a woman in childbirth and streets were flooded with people whose screams of woe and despair shook the city and deadened Narine’s birthing pains.

 

Narine’s child came into the world on December 7, a day more marked by death than by birth in Gyumri.

 

The 7.5 magnitude earthquake killed 25,000 people, according to published figures (unofficial figures say that the number of victims were twice more) left 150,000 injured and 500,000 without shelter. The calamity covered 17 percent of the republic and partly or totally destroyed 21 towns and 340 villages levelling the epicentre Spitak town. (Experts say that the energy outburst in the epicentre was equivalent to WWII atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

 

Nineteen years since the day that brought death and new life to Mirzoyan’s family, Narine could not help crying when she recalls her daughter’s birth.

 

“The truth is that I never heartily rejoiced for my first child, (daughter) Khanum,” says Narine. “From day to day more and more victims were found. Gyumri was like a sorrow-mad mother.”

 

Narine recalls the moment when the earthquake happened she even did not realize the danger. She stared at the walls moving until her mother-in-law took her out of house.

 

Her daughter Khanum, born in the evening of Gyumri’s awful fame has nothing to remember of the earthquake, but all her life turned to be affected by it.

 

Khanum’s parents’ home was destroyed during the earthquake and like many in Gyumri her family spent many years in “domiks”, the tiny shelters that were mean to be temporary.

 

“We had no gas, no electricity, no normal living conditions in our home, but I never realized that there could be better homes and thought we had normal living conditions. Later when everything started to get better I realized what was normal”, says 19 year old Khanum Mirzoyan.

 

Today Khanum’s family lives in a newly constructed building, in the town quarter built by Russians. Khanum is a student at a medical college in Gyumri and she has a comfortable separate room with computer, piano, tape recorder. She has a brother who is 17 year old and study at the military academy.

 

“When I was a kid, I could not understand what earthquake is and I was happy to be born on such a memorable day. As I grew up, I started to realize the horror of the earthquake. I heard so much about those terrible days from my parents and TV that now I easily imagine every minute of those days,” says Khanum with pity on her face.

 

“Of course I would never wish to be born on such a day. And I am sure even in many years when all the earthquake consequences will be overcome I would never celebrate December 7 as my birthday.”

 

On December 7, 1988 in Gyumri were born another 6 children. When Khanum turned 16 she met with them at an event organized by the Gyumri municipality. They became friends and often communicate and even celebrated their birthday together. But on the next day. Their birthday is still a day of mourning, and they join others – not around a party table, but going to cemeteries.

 

http://www.armenianow.com/

[Armenak]

New Documentary Portrays Grief of 1988 Earthquake as Never Before

 

By Andy Turpin

 

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (A.W.) — On Oct. 3, at Harvard’s Carpenter Center within the Harvard Film Archive, Czech filmmaker Jana Ševèíková previewed a rough cut of her newly finished documentary, “Gyumri.”

 

The film concerns the 1988 earthquake and children who were born afterwards to parents, specifically, who had lost a child in the event.

 

Ševcíková has distinguished herself as a proponent of the “poetic documentary.” A graduate of the Prague Film Academy, her thesis film, “Piemule” (1984), offers a frank examination of Czech émigrés in Romania during the final years of Ceausescu’s totalitarian regime. She has produced films independently, such as “Jakub” (1992), and received state funding from the Czech Ministry of Culture. Her films have been shown at festivals in Berlin, Strasbourg, Karlovy Vary and Krakow. Praised throughout Europe, Ševèíková’s works often seek to challenge the distance conventions of ethnographic filmmaking.

 

“Gyumri” is about grief, loss, remembrance, parenting—and a caustic national event in Armenia that many Armenian-Americans are aware of, though they’ve rarely been viscerally exposed.

 

Ševcíková pulls no punches in depicting how the pain from the quake still resonates in the daily lives of the people in Gyumri. At one point, a haggard father, who was prevented from identifying the remains of his child because of Soviet-era bureaucracy, holds a signet ring to Ševcíková’s camera, and speaking to his lost son, says, “My child, you are my saint, my most precious of things. I have your name engraved on my ring.”

 

Other moments in the film may not make total sense to the average viewer, but will hit home hard to fellow Armenians. Those moments show Armenian mothers coping with child loss while regaining a lost bond with their Armenian Christianity (disrupted due to Soviet-domination).

 

One mother stands with her child beside the grave of his dead brother. The child was conceived as a replacement of him. The mother says, “Do you know how much responsibility you have to bear? You must make your dreams come true and his. You are his continuity.”

 

Confronted with such strong yet bleak emotions for the roughly three years it took to complete the documentary, Ševcíková said of the filmmaking experience, “It is still very fresh in my mind and difficult to talk about after the screenings.”

 

She explained, “When I first came to Armenia, I had no idea I’d be making this film. I only knew there had been an earthquake. My original idea was to make a movie about artists in Gyumri, people who do incredible work with no money.”

 

“I took my backpack and by myself, as I always do, went for a couple of months to collect materials,” she said. While traveling, she encountered child after child who had lost a sibling or had been named after a sibling lost in the quake. “For me, this was the moment when things changed. I won’t use big words, but it was very profound.”

 

“After that I went back to Prague. In the spring, I went back to Armenia to work on this version of the film. It was very hard. I wanted to run away and go back home.”

 

During her countless emotionally despondent hours working on the film, Ševcíková recounted that “Many of the mothers would comfort me and say, ‘You were chosen by the souls of the children to make this film.’”

 

In later segments of the film, she interviews subjects who put forth the adamantly adhered to local belief in Gyumri—that the quake may have been the result of Soviet seismic weapons testing or storage in the region.

 

One subject states, “It was all staged. It wasn’t a natural quake. There were weapons under the ground.”

 

Ševcíková addressed this view, stating, “Nobody knows what really happened. It’s not something the people will talk about openly, but [that belief] is very present. It’s part of their grief.”

 

She explained, “I didn’t want to make a conspiracy film.” Twenty years from the event, the archives will be open for scholarly and journalistic perusal, but she stated, “I have no priority to see these materials. When they open, maybe we’ll know I have no proof or facts. But I wanted to put in the question so that people like you may want to find an answer.”

 

“Gyumri” is set for limited theatrical release in the U.S. following completed editing in 2008.

 

From the Armenian Weekly

 

Note: Armenak I merged your topic with an existing one running in parallel.

Edited December 7, 2007 by Yervant1

[Armenak]

Today, for the first time in so many years, I watched the entire Gyumri/Earthquake report on Hyelur. I was glad to know that there is no single school left that's in domik/tnak and all the schools have been reconstructed. Similarly, I was happy to see that Gyumri resembles a city with all facilities for entertainment and sports. It's progress.

 

On the other hand, there are still 6,000 families in need of housing. That's a huge number.

 

(Does anyone know where I could find maps of Gyumri online? How come Google maps has maps of Turkey but none of Armenia? I'd like to have a mental image of Gyumri, to remember major streets, etc..)

A map: http://www.gyumri.eu/Gyumri_Map_big.jpg

 

anoushik, I think these might interest you: Gyumri: Armenia's Belle Epoque, Proud past, Old Gyumri Walking Tour

[Anoushik]

Anoushik Jan,

I didn't know that you were there, sure being in a major event like that gives you a different look at life and appreciate what you have even more. But I don't read too much as to why one survives and the other dies it's just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Human beings are always looking for explanations in everything that happens in their life in order to make it meaningful but the reality is that we are too small to be important in this universe.

Yervant, it's just so unfair, how some people get lucky and some don't. When I think of the earthquake, I don't think of those who died. I think about those they left behind. One of my classmates had lost everyone she knew in her life. The only person left for her was her sole grandfather. They even wrote about her in the newspaper yet no one really knew how to help, because there was so much chaos all around. I always think of her and wish that I somehow found out how she is doing.

 

And about a different look at life, yes, you're right. As I get older I cherish more the experiences I've had. It's always there to compare my life with that I'm living now. All those small things that people here take for granted, like hot morning showers and falling asleep in a warm bed, are such wonderful privileges that we should all be thankful for and enjoy every moment.

[Anoushik]

A map: http://www.gyumri.eu/Gyumri_Map_big.jpg

 

anoushik, I think these might interest you: Gyumri: Armenia's Belle Epoque, Proud past, Old Gyumri Walking Tour

Thank you so much!

[MosJan]

CHIEF SEISMOLOGIST CONCERNED ABOUT YEREVAN CONSTRUCTION

 

*

 

article's photo

Armenia’s chief seismologist expressed concern on Friday about the ongoing construction boom in Yerevan, saying that new residential and office buildings springing up there may not as resistant to earthquakes as their owners claim. Alvaro Antonian, head of the National Seismic Defense Service (NSDS), issued the warning as Armenia commemorated the 19th anniversary of the 1988 earthquake that killed some 25,000 people and made hundreds of thousands of others homeless. Thousands of them still live in makeshift homes. As always, President Robert Kocharian led official remembrance ceremonies, laying a wreath at a memorial to earthquake victims in Gyumri, Armenia’s second largest city that accounted for much of the immense death toll. Kocharian formed last month an ad hoc government commission that will coordinate official events to mark the earthquake’s 20th anniversary next year. The huge scale of the devastation has been widely blamed on the poor safety of the Soviet-era buildings and houses. They were not designed to resist calamities of lower magnitude and were often built in contravention of basic safety norms. Antonian warned that a similarly powerful quake could wreak havoc on Yerevan even if its likelihood is considered low by his agency. He was particularly worried about the increasingly common remodeling of Soviet-era apartments blocks in the city center. Wealthy citizens owning apartments on their last floors routinely double their living space by adding entire stories to the buildings. Antonian also pointedly declined to vouch for the safety of new expensive high-rise buildings emerging in downtown Yerevan, saying that they are often disproportionately high for an earthquake-prone country like Armenia and located too close to older structures. “Today the construction industry prefers quick profits,” he complained. “They think about investing money, making as much profits as possible and then disappearing.” The new buildings are being advertised by the builders as very reliable and earthquake-resistant. Antonian said this is not necessarily the case, arguing that few of them undergo a seismic examination by the NSDS. “Those are just advertisements,” he told a news conference. “Only the National Seismic Defense Service can professionally evaluate a building’s seismic strength. Unfortunately, there are statements that leave you startled.” According to local estate agents, only those people who lived in Gyumri and other towns in northwestern Armenia in 1988 seem to take seismic concerns seriously when buying an apartment these days. “Buyers who lived in Gyumri or Spitak want stone buildings and lower floors,” said one of them. (Photolur photo)

* By Anna Saghabalian