Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Villages in Armenia and Moldova

Ever since I started spending serious time in the former Soviet Union, I’ve been interested in visiting villages. Luckily, in the intervening years I’ve made several friends who have graciously invited me to visit their villages to check them out. Welcome to a virtual tour of the two villages I visited this summer, Congaz in Moldova and Arevik in Armenia (with a few pictures thrown in from past travels). Congaz is a large village in the south of Moldova with approximately 12,000 people. Arevik, a much smaller village, is just a short drive from Gyumri, the second-largest city in Armenia.

We’ll start our tour with a relatively simple question: What do villages look like?

As I explained in a post about the village of Beșalma on my previous blog, Adventures in Bessarabia, Americans often have a hard time wrapping their heads around villages simply because we don’t have many places where families have been farming for generation after generation anymore. Moreover, the archetypical rural American homestead was somewhat isolated from its neighbors. People built houses in the middle of their land. In the former Soviet Union, village houses tend to be grouped together, and people have to travel a bit to get to the farmland. 

The village of Beșalma

My suspicion is that this has to do with the lack of a true concept of private land in many parts of the Russian Empire. (In a traditional Russian peasant commune, the patriarchs redistributed the land every few years in order to give more to families that had increased in size, and thus in labor potential.) I’m not sure how this translates to places like Moldova that generally didn’t have serfdom, but at any rate, the organization of villages seems pretty similar. The closeness of the houses seems to make it possible for everyone to be involved in everyone else’s business (in good ways and bad ways).

Another thing that is surprising from the American perspective is the extreme gap between urban and village life. Most people who live in cities in the former Soviet Union live in a way that is recognizable to Americans. Sure, they might not have running water 24 hours a day, or they might have to permanently sleep on a couch in the living room because there’s not much space, but it’s still urban life. (At any rate, cramped quarters and high tenant-to-bathroom ratios are very familiar to grad students who live in Somerville!) 

A road in Arevik


Arevik
Village life is significantly different than anything I have ever experienced in America. The material conditions of life are quite striking. As I wrote in my Besalma post, a good heuristic for knowing whether or not you are in a village (and not just a rural town) is that the bathrooms are outdoors. People usually have running water, electricity, and gas, but they are rarely hooked up to sewers. The roads barely deserve the name as they are pitted with potholes and gullies. (I’ve been on unpaved roads east of Phoenix and they’re a piece of cake compared to what I’ve seen in the former Soviet Union.) There are certainly people who live in similar conditions in the U.S., but not on this scale. In 1989, after years of rapid urbanization, a third of the Soviet population still lived in rural areas. Today the infrastructural contradictions can be pretty confounding—people may have decent internet, but they still get their water from a well.

Houses in Congaz
Given these conditions, it would be easy to think that the villages are unchanged relics of the past, but in fact peasant life in the twentieth century was characterized by radical upheaval. Sovietization entailed collectivization (or, as I have seen it called, the largest theft of property in history). Peasants were required to give up all their land and animals to the collective farm, where they became state employees. Those who opposed collectivization or happened to be a bit richer than the others were deported to Siberia or Kazakhstan. 

The topic of collectivization brings us to the next stop on our virtual tour, the backyard garden. After collectivization, Soviet authorities eventually allowed peasants to have a private plot for their own use. It was a win-win: peasants could ensure their own food supply and the state could wash its hands of the responsibility of feeding them. Today, as in Soviet times, many people grow a significant part of their diet on the land in their backyard. The self-reliance that characterized the village continues in today’s post-Soviet villages, which are typically extremely cash-poor. (Your average school teacher in rural Armenia or Moldova makes about $200 a month.)

Backyard garden in Arevik
Potato field bordered by sunflowers

Potatoes recently dug out of said field

As a result, summer is one of the busiest times of the year in the village. With fruits and vegetables running riot this time of year, people take part in the time-honored tradition of figuring out what to do with them. It can be easy to forget that the very reason we turn fruits and vegetables into pickles, jam, and preserves is, well, to preserve them. While visiting the village of Arevik, my friend Marine’s mother was busy putting up a stock of kompot (a sort of juice beverage) for the next year. She filled jars full of currants from the backyard, poured hot sugar water into the jars, sealed them up, and put them in the pantry to wait until winter.

Future currant kompot

Affixing the lid

Fiery meat goodness. Note aforementioned potatoes!
Many village homes also have ovens for baking bread. In the case of Armenia, clay pit ovens called tondir are used to bake a flatbread called lavash. The factory-made lavash in the city can’t hold a candle to it. A tondir can also be used to roast meat, as in the case of these delicious khorovats kebabs.


It can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that village life is a rural idyll, but in reality it is a lot of plain hard work. Taking care of a vegetable patch is hard work, and in the village it is something you do on top of your regular job. (For more on the rural economy, check out my friend Derek’s post about his village in western Ukraine.) Many of the people I know who live in villages also work at the village school. The village school is often the heart of the community. After the Soviet Union instituted mass compulsory education (an innovation in place like Moldova and Armenia), the school was one institution that everyone was sure to pass through in the village.

My friend Oxana at her childhood school in Congaz

The Arevik village school, despite serving a rural community of about 2,000 people, manages to send students to study in capital city universities every year. This year, they even had a student qualify for the extremely competitive FLEX program, which sends high school students to study in the U.S. for a year on the American government’s dime.

Another institution that affected every level of Soviet society was the military. In times of relative peace, men were required to serve in the military for two to three years. When Axis forces invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, nearly 30 million men (and women) were sent to the front. Many of them never came home. Today, nearly every village has a war monument commemorating the Soviet victory and the many who died to ensure it.

War memorial in Congaz
Me and Hakop, my friend Marine's father, at the Arevik war monument.
Note that the names of the many soldiers from the village who died are
engraved on the monument.


In Moldova, Lenin sometimes makes an appearance as well.

A monument of Lenin in front of the boarding school for disabled children
where my friend Oxana's mother works.

The last stop on our tour will be one that was relatively marginalized in Soviet life: the village church. They were often used as storehouses or turned into museums of atheism. Today, many village churches like this one in Congaz have been restored.

One of three churches in Congaz


Well, it has been my pleasure taking you on a combined tour of Congaz and Arevik. If you ever have the chance, make sure to visit a village yourself!

Leaving Arevik

3 comments:

  1. YOUR BLOG REMINDS ME OFMY DEPRESSION CHILDHOOD WHEN MY FAMILY LIVED OFF THE BACKYARD EVENTHOUGH WE LIVED IN THE CITY.

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  2. A visit to a friend's farm in Minnesota had some similarities (hard work, a well and isolation), but the outhouse was definitely not part of the experience! Great tour, Erin!

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  3. Wow, interesting! People in towns often live off their kitchen gardens, too!

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