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The Present Passes Unnoticed [October 16, 2006] There is a restaurant a short distance below City Hall in Hadrut. People call it “Emil's Restaurant” but the sign tells you that you have come to “Mher's”. In contrast to other such institutions there, Emil's is clean and well designed, and the food is not your regular barbecue and kebab fare. There is no menu; you can order whatever you wish as long as it does not include ingredients which are not available in the city's shops and markets. Some items are bought directly at the shop next door. Storing these ingredients would require guarantees that they would be ordered – but who is to know when, say Russian vodka, will be ordered next. The waitress said that only soldiers frequent the restaurant. She thought that it was natural because only the army assured you of a stable income. “The others don't have money, but they're also not used to the idea of going to a restaurant.” Soldiers of all ranks are everywhere in Hadrut – in Emil's restaurant, Karen's café or the teahouse on the city square. Besides them, one can see the elderly drinking tea, playing cards and talking of the past or the future, as the present passes unnoticed.
The teahouse is an open-air establishment. The chairs and tables are at least forty years old. The residents of Hadrut call this leisure spot Khor Aghbyur or Chinari . It's called Khor Aghbyur (deep spring) because it lies near a spring of the same name, and Chinari (plane tree) because it is located in the shade of two 400-year old plane trees. One of the customers told me that during the first months of the Karabakh movement a resident of Hadrut who remains unknown to this day climbed atop one of the trees and flew an Armenian flag from it. Azerbaijani soldiers surrounded the tree, but then had to get a helicopter from Baku to remove the flag. After a lot of effort they finally succeeded; then they disarmed the Armenian policemen here and left. Nothing has changed at the teahouse from that moment in history to today. Nothing has changed in Hadrut either. “I want there to be a factory so that the villages get some support, but there is no basis for production,” said grandfather Shahen, a customer at the teahouse. “Nothing will change here,” Boris Sevyan echoed grandfather Shahen's sentiments. Sevyan said that he had four children but none of them were employed. He owned some land in the village of Jraberd in the Hadrut region, and they lived off what it produced. When discussing the reasons behind the current situation, the elderly at the teashop considered the Karabakh movement and the war following it historically inevitable. They said that conflict with the Azerbaijanis was going to happen sooner or later, because they treated the Karabakh Armenians as guests on their own land and were trying to do everything to drive them out. The elderly considered that good relations with Azerbaijan would never be possible. “We have massacred each other,” said Boris Sevyan. The hard life, according to them, was a result of democracy. “The reason is that they have released the people and given them freedom,” said grandfather Shahen. Forty-year old Serjik Sardaryan was of the same opinion, but, in contrast to the others, was more optimistic about the future and saw progress. “We only had one or two mobile phones in the past, and now there are ten or twenty,” said Serjik. He also cited the illumination of Hadrut at night as a sign of progress. The elderly at the teahouse were unwilling to link the need for factories with the issues of mobile phones or streetlights. They were not sure what they meant by development either. However, they definitely wanted the country's decision makers to have a clear picture of the future, and to not remain aloof from the people who did not get to make the decisions. Mher Arshakyan |
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