Fifteen things I wish I knew before my last trip to Yerevan

I’m licking the salt off my stubbled seventeen-year-old mustache in a crowded van. Yerevan passes. Concrete and dust. A flash of Sevan (so blue it looks fake). The Genocide Memorial. Dalma Mall. I get off, fan the sweat off my armpits, and walk into Zara. 

ONE: Yerevan gets really hot.

Huddling in a van in 101 degrees Fahrenheit (or, if you’d like, 38.3 degrees Celsius) summer is one thing. Living on Leningradyan Street is another. There is something uniquely suffocating about being seventeen and stuck in a concrete Soviet apartment complex without air conditioning.

TWO: KFC is the closest you can really get to America—

And I hated this. Still, I’d kill time (outside the van, outside Dalma) at the KFC by the Opera House, the one by that statue—I think Arno Babajanyan? Though I only really remember KFC being there.

THREE: Malatia-Sebastia is not the place to live.

This was not the Armenia (the otherwise deep-cut tourist spot for its “vibrant cuisine,” “absurd affordability,” and “stunning landscapes”) I was promised. 

My uncle’s apartment is not the place to live. Everything here is dull and dusty. Even house cats.

FOUR: It’s odd to live on a street named after Lenin in the Republic of Armenia—

But so is eating KFC across from Arno.

Yerevan, sometimes, in all its capital-ness, didn’t feel Armenian. I didn’t know how to really say it, though I’d been eating a lot of  “BOXMASTER CHEESE”s.

FIVE: No one here assumes you are Russian from your name.

I thought that this was odder. That I was never asked if I was Russian after saying my name was Vladimir. That, somehow, the Armenian I had pieced together was enough to prove I wasn’t.

Maybe it’s normal for Armenian things to be named in Russian here. Or, maybe, my hair was impossibly dark for a Russian.

SIX: Armenians love the internet—

When the most fun thing to do is take the 100-dram “bus” (really, a van), back and forth to Dalma Mall for the sake of going to a mall, I can understand this.

There is a Telegram channel called Xaytarak—literally, disgrace—that shames Armenia’s biggest disgraces: a woman in athleisure. A singer of rabiz music (of course). The metal band System of a Down. In the name of “preserving Armenian traditions and values,” a phrase featured in its channel description (in Russian).

SEVEN: Bad news travels slowly here.

I found out, a few days before I would leave, that a seventeen-year-old boy had killed himself two miles away from Leningradyan. And I hate how I found out through an article with a headline that said “Every month, press freedom in the Caucasus shrinks a little more.”

EIGHT: The KFC menus are hard to read in Russian—

Pretty hard to parse “CHEFBURGER DE LUXE” in Cyrillic. 

NINE: Xaytarak is even harder to read in Russian.

The words “preserving Armenian traditions and values” look ugly in Cyrillic. That kept bothering me. The way the letters don’t curve. A channel policing who gets to be Armenian in the language of the empire that named my street. The language that took the life of a boy my age.

TEN: The KFC was not as good as I expected—

Or, really, anywhere near what it’s like in America. Staring at Arno for too long, I wonder what I am doing here, eating a “CHEESEBURGER DE LUXE.”

ELEVEN: 2023 was just a bad year to be in Armenia.

I do not blame that boy (or anyone who left). Months after I left, a hundred thousand Armenians were thrust out of Nagorno-Karabakh in three days.

TWELVE: Armenia is not Armeniya—

Neither is Hayastan. We lost it (what Armenians call their nation) along the way. I’m spending my entire summer in Armeniya on Leningradyan looking for something that has been renamed.

THIRTEEN: It’s awkward to spend your time in Armenia with family.

I can never eat the overcooked noodles my uncle’s family makes. Fried potatoes on the side, a plate of cheese, bread. Beige and white and beige again. My uncle’s family has lived on Leningradyan their whole lives and can’t eat garlic.

FOURTEEN: I never learned that boy’s name—

But I do know that he was seventeen, that he was outed as gay on Xaytarak. That following that, he lost his job, his family kicked him out of their house, and that he killed himself. 

There is something fitting (in the same way eating away at yourself is fitting) about an Armenian boy killing himself in the name of Armenian values. Something fitting about eating KFC and overcooked noodles in a country with vibrant cuisine. Something fitting about the Genocide Memorial being a stop on the way to the mall. 

Xaytarak, KFC—all of it—is just the latest version of a very old project: convincing Armenians to do the empire’s work for it. Occupation outlives empire when its logic becomes cultural instinct.

FIFTEEN: Armenia has survived everything but itself.