Spitak
The scenery here is soaked with
resignation. All you can do is look at the mountains and imagine you are in
Scandinavia – Norway, or even Iceland. Rocky peaks and mild slopes overgrown
with fine grass. Landscape green from the ground and blue from the sky. An
unambiguous and stark scenery. The decisions about the scenery were taken years
back and are irrevocable. Just starkness and scorching sun. Then your eyes
slide down from the hills to the valleys, falling on man-made features, signs
of human presence. That's Spitak. There can be no doubt. All over the place,
your eyes are stung by evidence that something began here, but was soon
abandoned in resignation. Unfinished
roads, bridges, houses, plants, barns, petrol stations. As if the people here lost
their faith halfway through and simply left, perhaps to seek luck elsewhere.
The road winds its way across an area full of failed hopes. We enter the city,
parking on the central square. The place is buzzing. Here and there things are
transported by car or carried, pulled or towed. A rug, couch, an old closet, a
coil of wire or plastic tubes, several gypsum boards, a pile of bricks. The
people keep building something. Or possibly, they have just ended building or
are about to build. And then they will abandon all this? Perhaps they have
simply run out of patience, perhaps they can still remember the earthquake, the
horizon full of debris? Or maybe they simply realise that there is no point in
all this only after they start, once they bring in the bricks, set up the
formwork, mix the cement? That is why they stop. Yet, soon they forget about
their resignation, with a new flame lighting up in them, a new impulse of
change. So they start anew. And so it goes on over and over again. As long as
it takes.
Filip Springer
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