From yesterday to tomorrow…

With its impressive cache of brutalist architecture and repurposed USSR-style public spaces, Armenia’s ‘Pink City’ and capital Yerevan artfully melds its Soviet past with a proud, new post-socialist national identity

By Raul Dias

While I had heard a lot about the Armenian nationalistic pride—often with the words “bordering on jingoism” loosely bandied about—I couldn’t have been more ill-prepared for what I was about to witness. And I had not even landed on Armenian soil! All it took was the sight of the double-peaked Mount Ararat in all its snow-capped glory, emerging from a cloudy veil on the port side of the aircraft, for pandemonium to ensue in the narrow cabin around me.
And the row that I was seated in certainly wasn’t immune to this pre-landing frenzy. While the man to my left quickly whipped out his phone for a series of selfies with the mountain in the background, the stylish septuagenarian lady to my right kept muttering something in Armenian, making the sign of the cross every 10 seconds or so. All this, while reverently looking at the mountain where Noah’s Ark is said to have come to a rest after the great flood mentioned in the Book of Genesis.

Celebrating the past
It was only a few hours after landing at my destination, Armenia’s capital city of Yerevan, does the irony of it all strike me. Mount Ararat, one the greatest symbols of Armenia—the similitude of which can be found emblazoned on everything, from bottles of brandy and beer to Toblerone doppelgänger chocolate bars—isn’t even located in Armenian territory anymore. In fact, it can be found just over the border, in present day Turkey.
As I stroll through leafy Yerevan, with its Parisian-style wide boulevards and drinking water fountains called pul pulaks at every corner, I soon realise that for the former USSR country, symbolism is everything. How else can one explain the continued presence of a five-point Soviet star atop the main spire of the city’s Central Railway Station? It is the likeness of Mount Ararat below said star that makes the station one of the few places in Armenia that continue to use this coat of arms, never mind its Soviet underpinning.

Reclaiming glory
Speaking of which, Yerevan’s grand Republic Square was once known as Lenin Square housing a giant, mid-stride statue of Vladimir Lenin that was taken down post Armenia’s independence in the Autumn of 1991. Today, the square is surrounded on all four sides by grand architectural examples of Soviet Modernism, with their brutalist façades clad in the indigenous pink volcanic stone called tuff that gives Yerevan its ‘Pink City’ moniker.
At another popular attraction—the hill-topped Victory Park overlooking Yerevan—another former Soviet leader, General Secretary Joseph Stalin has been dethroned. Quite literally! Replacing his monumental statue and sitting on the same pedestal is the sword-brandishing, 22-meters tall, neo-art deco statue of ‘Mother Armenia’ made from hammered copper. Here too there is ample symbolism on display. The statue is said to not only show peace through strength, but also mirrors the role of prominent female figures in Armenian history who joined the men in fending off Turkish troops during the 1915 Armenian genocide.
Joining a group of the Yerevan Couchsurfing chapter on a post-beer walkabout the city, I learn about how in 2010 a Facebook group called “SAVE Cinema Moscow Open-Air Hall,” successfully petitioned the Armenian Government to stall the demolition of the open-air hall of the Moscow Cinema on the city’s arterial Abovyan Street. Built in 1936 in the constructivist-style—a form of modern Soviet architecture, with a facade adorned with scenes from famous Soviet-Armenian movies—the cinema itself replaced the 5th century St. Peter and Paul Church. Presently, it remains one of the city’s premier recreational spots with its life-size chess board set shadowed by a giant spider sculpture by Armenian artist Ara Alekyan. 

Parting shots
We walk towards the Republic Square Metro Station, where I notice how well the Soviet style of almost harsh, geometric ornamentation is merged with the more oriental features of the station. The entrance houses a decorative fountain of an eight-petal concrete flower in bloom, with a huge vaulted ceiling held up by plain columns featuring sculpted eaves in the shape of bird heads.
From Republic Square we take a dirt-cheap metro train ride (100 dram or Rs 15) to Charbak a few kilometers away to get the real feel of Soviet suburban Yerevan with its many ‘Khrushchyovkas’. Developed all over the Soviet Union during the early 1960s, these concrete-panelled apartment buildings were named after Soviet statesman Nikita Khrushchev to provide low-cost housing in a gargantuan communal setting.
It is from the terrace of one of these 15-storied (and yes, elevator-bereft!) grim-looking buildings do I spy the ultimate remnant of the Soviet past a few yards away, eerily backlit by the setting sun. Constructed in such a way that they spell out the alphabets CCCP (which is ‘USSR’ in the Cyrillic script) when seen from above, I’m told that they were built so that the Soviets could feel patriotic as they flew in from Moscow.
Truly, one man’s Mount Ararat is another’s alphabetised Khrushchyovka!


Travel log
Getting There 
As there are no direct flights from India to Armenia, one can reach Yerevan by connecting flights from Dubai on airlines such as Emirates and the low-cost carrier FlyDubai. Given its compact size, most of Yerevan can easily be accessed on foot or by its super cheap metro train system which comprises of 10 stations. Costing a very affordable US$ 6 for a 21-day or less stay, the easy-to-procure Armenian visa can be availed of either online (evisa.mfa.am) or on arrival at Yerevan’s Zvartnots International Airport by most nationalities, including Indians.

Stay
Offering a range of hotels to choose from, Yerevan has accommodation options to suit all budgets. One such recommended accommodation option is the conveniently located, city-centered Double Tree by Hilton (Rs 6,600 for two with breakfast, doubletree3.hilton.com). The Ibis Yerevan Center Hotel (Rs 3,200 for two with breakfast, accorhotels.com) along the city’s pedestrian-only Northern Avenue is another good, value-for-money accommodation option.

Tip
* Every night from 9pm to 11pm, Tuesday to Sunday, the grand fountains outside the History Museum and the National Gallery in Yerevan’s Republic Square put on a very informative free sound and light show with plenty of local folk music and snippets of Armenian history narrated in both Armenian and English.

(An edited version of this article first appeared in the 19th October 2019 issue of The Hindu Business Line newspaper's BLink section on page 20 https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/takeaway/yerevan-armenias-pink-city/article29732640.ece)

Notes from Tashkent

By Raul Dias

I’m technically still on Indian soil, sitting ensconced in a giant metal tube that’s taking the form of an Uzbekistan Airways’ airplane, en route from Mumbai to Tashkent. But I’m also instantaneously being made aware of the fact that remnants of the former USSR are very much alive and kicking in the country I’m to be deposited in, four hours later. The cabin crew greet me with a hearty “dobro pozhalovot!” in Russian. The safety briefing is a trilingual English-Uzbek-Russian one, the rather robust wordage and flat intonations of the last language not lost on me. But that’s just the tip of the proverbial ‘Soviet-influence iceberg’, constant montages of which reveal themselves to me at almost every turn I take over my next two days in Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent.

Past Perfect
An hour after I land, I find myself on the brink of a mini meltdown as I try to navigate my way through block after block of bleak, Khrushchyovka-style residential buildings in the Tashkent suburb of Chilanzar. Bereft of a charged cell phone, I’m trying desperately to locate the elusive building number 26 where Yura Vedenin, my friend of Russian descent has promised to let me spend the night in his tiny, two-room apartment. Named after Soviet statesman Nikita Khrushchev—in whose era these low-cost, concrete-panelled apartment buildings were developed all over the former Soviet Union during the early 1960s—the ‘Khrushchyovka’ is a suburban Tashkent mainstay.
The next day, at the city’s glitzy Tashkent Janubiy Vokzal southern train station, I try to make sense of the indecipherable Cyrillic alphabets that form alien words printed onto my bullet train ticket to my next destination, the ‘Silk Road’ city of Bukhara. God bless the kind-hearted ticket counter lady who takes the effort to pen down all the vital details on the back of my ticket in Roman numerals and alphabets. Without her intervention, I’d surely be in Cyrillic blunderland!
On my way back to Chilanzar from the train station, I burrow my way underground to experience for myself the brilliance of the Tashkent Metro I had heard a lot about. Opened in 1977, the metro today has 29 stations, each a shining (pun intended!) beacon of the former USSR’s legendary hubris. ‘Opulent’ as an adjective doesn’t really do justice to the grandeur and scale with which each of them has been built and decorated, with everything from pink marbled walls to be-chandeliered ceilings. One of the most beautiful of these is the Kosmonavtlar station where Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova—and the first woman in space—is immortalised with a mural, wherein the ceramic wall panels surrounding her portrait fade from blue to black in imitation of Earth’s atmosphere.

Spaces like no other
And speaking of space, just like this station that was influenced by the ambitious USSR space program, Soviet architecture in Tashkent too greatly references the cosmos and science fiction. One such building in Tashkent is the turquoise-domed Tashkent Circus built in 1976, that pays homage to Yuri Gagarin’s epic journey into outer space with its flying saucer like appearance and alien limb-like pillars.
But it is the typical soviet, brutalist style of architecture that augments the USSR’s overarching influence over Tashkent, 27 years after Uzbekistan declared its independence as a brand-new nation in 1991 post the historic breakup of the Soviet Union. It was the devastating Tashkent earthquake of 1966, that gave rise to this style of utilitarian architecture where form and function trump ostentation and ornamentation of any kind.
Seemingly caught up in a time warp when bell bottoms and acid rock ruled, the gargantuan Hotel Uzbekistan, centrally located at Tashkent’s Ground Zero—Amir Timur square—is the perfect specimen of 70s Soviet modernist architectural style that’s associated with social, utopian ideology and influenced by the works of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Though a tad tired and scruffy looking today, this icon of Tashkent’s Soviet past draws in nostalgists by the busloads eager for a morsel of melancholy…however brutal. 

(An edited version of this article first appeared in the 20th January 2019 issue of The Hindu newspaper's Sunday Magazine section on page 7  https://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/travel/notes-from-tashkent/article26035588.ece)