Notes from the Pink City
Scuffles Over the Opera Café Dismantling: A Sign of the Pains to Come
Last week, the Yerevan Municipality began dismantling several illegal outdoor cafés around the city’s landmark Opera House as part of a bid to return the city’s shrinking green spaces to its residents. This move was not taken lying down by the owners. Hundreds of waiters, line cooks, accountants and busboys assembled on Freedom Square to defy the bulldozers. Livestreams of the scuffles with police over the following days have been watched by tens of thousands of people. Some opined whether the new authorities were finally taking their anti-corruption crusade too far this time. Either way, this latest episode in Armenia’s struggle to implement rule of law offers a glimpse of difficulties to come.
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Well Said Rafi.
–Todd Fabacher
Hi Mr. Raffi Elliott,
I am subscribed to The Armenian Weekly. When was the Opera Cafe built? How old is it?
I am an author, and a lot of information for the second book of my series is based in Armenia. Why? Because it links events that happened in connection with Mount Ararat and the town of Masis.
I am a former Research Analyst, and so I like to keep my information accurate even though my book is fiction.
I have tried to find sources, people, here in California, that I can discuss Armenian culture from 1841 to 1960. Trying to keep my information as real as possible to the history of Armenia.
I would appreciate any help I can get, including passing the chapters of my book on Armenia to someone to look at before publication. Would you be interested int hat? If not, do you know who might?
I live in California, my maiden last name is Masis and even though I don’t have a lot of information on my ancestry, my dad, Hector Luis Masis, passed away long ago and only saw him a couple of times since I was a child; my parents were divorced since I was about three years old.
Hi Marta.
The Opera itself was designed and built by Aleksander Tamanyan, the architect who built Yerevan’s Master plan.
However, the green space around the Opera house has been built over by a number of open-air cafes since the early 2000s. The Municipality has dismantled them last week.