Oral History

          Maroosia Gazaryan was born on December 23, 1912 and she was a smart girl in her young age even though there wasn’t any excellent education. She was one athletic person in her young age because she was able to do anything she wanted from running to playing soccer because in Armenia soccer was the national sport, if you went to the park then you would see what I mean by soccer being the national sport of Armenia. At winters there would be a lot of snowfall during that time. During the snowfall they she would go outside and have a snowball fight and she would always win because she showed no mercy to anyone. Her favorite thing she liked to do she said “was she loved drinking hot chocolate during the cold winter.” She worked as a tailor when she was young.

 

 

Thanks to Aso Peterosyan we were able to win our town’s independence back from the those hideous Guks which had taken our towns independence in 1949 so after our general Aso Peterosyan came to battle the Guks just retreated from the war giving Spitak its independence back. Yes we were proud of our hero and later I went up to him and I was able to be the first one to get his autograph. The life style in Spitak was very good back then because Easter Sunday people will get out of their houses and start going from door to door and have egg fights that were a tradition of most Spitakians and I always won all the other girls and they were all jealous of me, I felt so great. Yes I did a lot of stuff when it snowed I had snowball fights with friends and family. 

 

Furthermore what I did was that I made a snow angel and also my friends sometimes wanted to have a snow angel challenge like who ever can make the snow angel won five dollars. In Spitak, only for my family that this. What we did as a family is play charades and have hot chocolate and toasted marshmallows. It was the best time in all the day when it snowed that is. There were about six religions there and major one was the Christians. I was a Christian back then and still I am Christian; I will stay Christian for the rest of my life. The most important day for my town was April 24 because that was the year day that the Armenian genocide took place. Hey don’t get me wrong there were other important dates, but this is the most important date because of what had happened in that day and this was the most important day for all of Armenia I was alive during the Armenian Genocide was and I was only about three years old, but I was one of the lucky ones to survive the genocide because I wasn’t in Armenia when the genocide happened I was in Russia back then; later on is when I moved back to Spitak and lived there for more the fifty-five years and then I moved here to America with my husband. In the 1920s there wasn’t any way of travel but later in the 1940s, there came the transportation era. 

 

We had airplane travel for which it let us go anywhere that we want it to go, but we had to by a ticket, just like we do today in America and in Armenia, but the tickets are expensive. In addition, we had train travel, which was the funniest way for my family and I to travel because we got to sit next each other and eat and relax. Also in train you get to see the surroundings and see Mother Nature in its true form. My favorite way of traveling was the train because as I said it was family time and also I was able to relax and enjoy Mother Nature in its true form. My family’s favorite way of traveling was also by train because of the same reasons as me like, relax, sleep and be comfortable with Mother Nature. We did have automobiles but the automobiles weren’t as fast as the cars here because here there is more technology than Spitak. I got married at the age twenty-seven in 1929 I think it was, but my husband now has a stroke and he is in the hospital for about three months; he was a very good husband and now I miss so much. We also had a governor, his name was Artac Saroyan. Now that Armenia has a new president named Serge Sarkisyan; people in Armenia had a revolt because they hate Serge Sarkisyan. Also when I was young my mom told me to keep my strength inside and always protect the family when she died so when my mom died in 1967 I had to take care of my dad who was sick and dying because he had heart attack, but I tried to do everything I can but I couldn’t because seven months later my dad died in 1968 at the age of seventy-five. Thank you for coming to interview me because of you I had so many memories to tell you and now that I have said everything I could remember it is time for you to go. Your welcome please fell free to come back and ask me more questions and I would try to be an assistant for you if not I’m sorry. Come again.