Yerevan With Nowhere to Sleep: The Four Hours I Didn't Film

There is a hole in this film.

I arrived in Yerevan at half past twelve. The next thing I filmed was at twenty-five past four. Between those two timestamps there is nothing at all — no clips, no photographs, not a single frame — because I spent that afternoon walking into hotels and being told no.

I had booked nothing. I had planned nothing. I had come down from a village outside Ijevan that morning in a shared taxi with seven other people and a vague intention to be in Yerevan, and it turns out that in the middle of August that is not a plan, it is a wish.

So the best four hours of daylight went on the one part of the day I was trying to organise. And everything worth putting in this film happened afterwards, when I had given up.

The road down

The road out of Ijevan climbs into the trees and then drops into a long green valley, and for a while there is nothing to do but watch the guardrail go past.

Then, at a bend where the mountains open out, there is a row of roadside stalls selling fish — hand-painted signs, a phone number in enormous digits, a photograph of a sazan the size of a child. And standing among them, for no reason I could establish, a shop mannequin in a grey dress.

I have no explanation. I took a photograph with her. It felt rude not to.

12:28, and then nothing

We came into the city in the early afternoon. I got out with a bag and a phone battery at forty percent and started walking.

I will spare you the four hours. Every place was full, or was not full but wanted a price that made me laugh out loud in the lobby, or had a room but not tonight. This is what last-minute looks like in Yerevan in August, and it is entirely my own fault.

At 16:35 I turned the camera on again, standing in Republic Square, and said: I've reached Republic Square, as you can see, I'm in Yerevan. Which is a sentence that gives away nothing at all about the preceding four hours, and I like it for that.

Vernissage

By five I had walked to the Vernissage, which is the open-air market that runs along Aram Street, and which anyone who has been to Armenia already knows.

It is enormous and it is not curated. Painted plates, a hundred of them, propped in rows. Wooden crosses. Silver. Carpets hung like walls. Rank after rank of little cloth dolls in traditional dress, all of them staring slightly to the left. Ornamental pomegranates by the hundredweight — on trees, on plates, on bottles, as jewellery, as fridge magnets. If a thing can be made pomegranate-shaped in Armenia, it has been.

Two men made the afternoon.

The first was sitting behind a stall of icon paintings with a duduk in his hands, playing to nobody in particular, the way you would hum.

The second had a dhol — a drum — and when he saw the camera he grinned and played a few bars for it and went back to what he was doing. Neither was performing for money. They were passing the time in the way people who make instruments pass the time.

And then there was the backgammon board.

It was taller than me. A nardi set the size of a wardrobe, standing upright and open, the points inlaid, the pieces the size of dinner plates. I filmed it and said into the camera: don't think I zoomed in — it really is this huge. I still do not know whether it was for sale or whether anyone has ever played on it.

The woman with the needles

Later, on a bench under the plane trees, an older woman was crocheting.

Lined up along the stone ledge beside her were the things she had made: a yellow duck, a blue creature I could not identify, a small pink pig, a grey mouse. A ball of orange yarn in her lap. She worked without looking up, hands going steadily, while the city walked past her in both directions.

I never spoke to her. I did not ask her name, or what the toys cost, or how long one takes. I filmed her from a few metres away for about two minutes and then I walked on, and I have thought about that more than I expected to.

She is in this film, at some length, and she does not know it. I have shown her hands and her work and her face and I cannot tell you one true thing about her, because I did not ask. That is the honest position and I would rather state it than dress it up.

Northern Avenue, and a man in a dinner jacket

By seven the light had gone gold and Northern Avenue was full — the whole pedestrian stretch from Abovyan down to the Opera, families out, shops still open, a mural of a girl three storeys high on the side of a building.

Two buskers on a low wall, one on accordion, one on a snare drum.

And then, in front of the Opera House itself, alone on the paving with a music stand and a small speaker, a man in full black tie was singing Sinatra.

Behind him, on a board by the doors, was a poster for a tenor gala on 12 September — eleven faces in dinner jackets, the whole apparatus of a proper concert, tickets and a website.

Inside that building, in September, tenors. Outside it, on a Friday in August, one man in the same clothes singing to a square that was mostly not listening.

I stood and watched for a while. Nobody stopped. He finished the song and started another one.

Down

The evening finished at Swan Lake, where the pedal boats were still out and the fountains had come on, and then in the metro — which is clean, and nearly empty, and where you can now tap a credit card straight onto the reader instead of buying a token. A small thing. It made me absurdly pleased.

The last picture I took that day was at five past eight, in an underground passage full of stalls — sunglasses, watches, shirts on racks — with people moving through it on their way somewhere else.

What the hole is for

I did eventually find somewhere to sleep. That part is mine and it stays out of this.

The point is the shape of the day. The four hours I planned produced no footage at all. The four hours I didn't plan produced everything above. I am not going to draw a moral out of that — arriving in a city with nowhere booked in August is not a strategy, it is a mistake — but the mistake is what put me in front of a giant backgammon board and a man in a dinner jacket singing to nobody, and I would not trade those for a confirmed reservation.

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Next: south to Kapan, and a concert.