I Grew Up and Grew Old

The fact that the people on the show can’t hear her is completely irrelevant to Nelli Karapetyan. She does not find the political discussions on television to be in any way accurate or worthy of peoples time, claiming that all politicians are just out to seek power. After a great bit of yelling at a colorful screen she sighs and says, "I never saw this kind of corruption at home." Life in her small town of Khndzoresk, Armenia was a much simpler way of living. Woke up, went to school, came and played with other kids. While Soviet rule caused some complication, life in her town was still rich. Days filled with watching painters and poets draw inspiration form the beautiful country side still occupies her memory. In her early seventies she finds that the time she spent in her small town was one of the best times of her life, and while she enjoys the city, she says she will always be a country girl.

I lived in Khendoresk until I was 15, until the 8th grade; from there I went to Yerevan. Khendoresk is a large village that is in the mountains. In the village we would say how much smoke there was. There, every family had a fireplace and every family had 8 to 10 kids, plus a grandmother, and grandfather, mother, father so every one family would have 10 to 12 people and sometimes more. We would count by how many chimneys there were. With us there were 350 smokes. In my home, my grandmother had 11 kids of which 8 lived until the deep end (long life). My father lived until 94, his sister until 95 and like this so did everyone else. In our village it would happen that ones roof was the others backyard, like that. Our mountains had holes in them. They just formed like that; they don’t have mountains like that anywhere else. 200 years ago people lived there, and then people would go out of the holes and make houses for themselves. Painters and tourists would come from everywhere to see it. We liked them, we happily showed them around, it was interesting for us to meet them, they would tell us of news and we would learn things from them and they would from us.

We got our news in information from the radio, we had radios in every house, we didn’t have TVs back then, and every house had a radio and we got a newspaper. We had the county paper and the Yerevan paper. The county paper was small and local, but the Yerevan paper talked about world events. But the most important papers for the USSR were the Provda Y Ezvestia. In Khendoresk everyone was close with everyone and we helped each other. Everyone knew everything about one another in the way that if one needed help, the other knew how to help; who ever had the means helped. We were all close. We always forgave each other and had no grudges. There was a lot of visiting one another; you go in and ask "how are you." When there was a wedding everyone went; when there was sadness every one was sad. Gossip didn’t happen because everyone liked each other.

I grew up and grew old under the USSR. Under Stalin we lived very well. We liked him very much, we didn’t know what happened under his rule, we didn’t know. Our life, we loved it because we learned for free in school and university, medicine and health care were free and who ever worked received a free house from the government. Everyone went to school, in the USSR it was law to go to at least 10 years of school, they would check the houses to see if there was any child that was not a learner, if they found one that didn’t go to school they took him and forced him to go to school, people HAD to go to at least 10 years.
Young kids went to pre school, they all went to pre school it was free, they went, they ate, drank, and their parent came to pick them. For fun we all got together, the neighbors, we would just play in the yards, soccer, hide and go seek, esh miltia (leap frog). We would play Lapta…its like tennis, like tennis part two; exactly like badminton we just called it Lapta, and Seven Rock. You stack seven rocks and with one big rock you hit it and you had to run and put your foot on one of the small rock and someone else would chase you.

The Village had one big school. After 10 years who ever learned well went to learn in a university. Many became lawyers and doctors and came back to the village to work. Get it? The village had its own mechanic, economist, vet, and botanists, they looked at trees and give them shots, and we had our own clinic. And like that the village advanced. From the villages very very very smart people came out to become writers. Uhh Goront who wrote a book caller Tehran, it’s the capital of Iran you know? He told a story about the conference in Tehran in World War 2, in 1943 where Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin- the three leaders of three countries thought about how to open the second front and draw and end to fascism. We also had painters, and singers, and composers. There was a painter named Parnoian and a singer…uh she was a pre Madonna of the opera…Tatevik Sazandarian. Every village had their wise one too; there was a person in every village who would be the one to go to ask for advice. Our wise one was Ohanjian, it was like God gave him a mind so he could give us advice.
The villagers worked hard, all villagers worked on the farm, they made yogurt, cheese, sour cream, milk we made everything on the farm and we took it to the city and sold it. Cows were only in the villages, there was no grass in the cities for them to eat or for anything to grow. And when sheep we had we took the wool and we send that to factories to make string and made clothing from it. They made suits, god knows what else, and its all wool you know.

Our village is also known for its Vodka. The tree that on it they have they beginnings of silk, they liked that tree a lot, the tree gave a fruit called tutee and they would use that to make vodka. It is very healthy; everyone in the village who was sick, the sick ones would get cured by drinking a shot of it in the morning, 50 g. (3 oz). Especially for the diabetics. It was sweet.

As for tradition, every April 24 we would all go to church and we would have service there. There was a small area near the church we would bring flowers, talked about it, remember old family, we would eat and come home. When Lenin took down the church, they closed, like, they didn’t break it down, just closed it. They took out all the popes, they killed half, sent half to Siberia, and used the churches for storage for grain, wheat, potato, onion, beans and that stuff.
In our village it was relaxed and closer and united in the village the air was clean the food was healthy, but in the city you fall into rhythm, fast, more stress, yes, and every year, we went back in the summer to the village to relax. I would like for my children to have some connection to a village so they could be closer to nature, breathe in fresh air, and eat healthy.

Interview by Nelly Barsegian