Three Nights in Gyumri: Fountains, a Street Concert, and a Song Through a Window

Gyumri does not perform for visitors. It is Armenia’s second city, up on the Shirak
plateau, and most people see it in an afternoon between Yerevan and somewhere else —
the black tuff architecture, lunch, the drive back. Stay three nights and the city stops
being a stop.

What follows is what three ordinary August evenings looked like: a fountain running
behind a church, a street with several thousand people in it, and a man in a courtyard
asking who sings a song he last heard when he was thirteen.

The church, from behind

Holy Saviour’s Church — Surb Amenaprkich — was built between 1858 and 1872 and
consecrated in 1873. Its mason, Tadevos Andikyan, modelled it on the cathedral at Ani,
the ruined medieval Armenian capital that sits just across the closed border with Turkey,
close enough to see from the hills outside Gyumri.

The church has had a hard century. It survived the earthquake of 1926, was taken by the
Soviet state in the 1930s, lost its belfry in 1932 and got it back in 1964. The 1988
earthquake broke it badly, and it has been under restoration since 2002.

It occupies the southern side of Vardanants Square, which means most photographs of it
are taken from the front. Go round the back and there are fountains — the kind that run
a colour programme after dark, cycling through green and magenta and a cold blue, with
the tuff wall of the church standing behind them absorbing all of it.

People sit on the steps. Nobody is filming it. It runs every night.

The night the street filled up

The following evening the pedestrian zone in the old town was closed off and several
thousand people came to stand in it.

The occasion was International Youth Day, and the concert was put on by the
Youth Initiative Centre NGO together with Gyumri Municipality, UNFPA Armenia,
the SALTO Eastern Europe and Caucasus Resource Centre and the Erasmus+ Info Centre
in Armenia. That is a longer list of institutions than most street parties can claim,
and none of it was visible from inside the crowd.

DJ Sianna opened, playing against a full-height curtain of fairy lights strung
between the buildings. Then Erik Karapetyan came on, and the street did what streets
do when a singer people actually know starts a song they actually know.

The thing worth noticing is where it was. Not a stadium, not a festival field — the
ordinary shopping street, the one people walk down every day, with lasers going over the
nineteenth-century facades.

And then, a Greek song

The next morning was quiet. A courtyard behind a tuff house, a satellite dish on the
roof next door, laundry, blue sky.

Somewhere nearby, someone was playing Greek music, loudly enough to carry through an
open window.

There is a particular thing that happens to people from the diaspora. You go to the
homeland to be in the homeland, and then something arrives from the other half of your
life and catches you sideways. This is a Cyprus-Armenian, standing in a courtyard in
Gyumri, listening to a song he last danced to at thirteen — the kind with a glass set
down on the floor, everyone circling it, and the glass broken at the end.

He does not know who the singer is. He is asking.

If you recognise it, tell him.

Practical notes