Epress.am News from Armenia
Araks is a village in the Armavir region, on the border with Turkey. From almost any point in the village, you can not only see Ararat and the border, but also hear the azan — the Muslim call to prayer. Though not five times a day, as prescribed in Islam. Locals say that in the past (and in our case, “the past” almost always means Soviet times) the Turks were louder, so they used the morning call of the muezzin as an alarm clock, but now the loudspeaker doesn’t work well.
People say the border guards used to do their job better too — after all, they were protecting their own border, the border of the Soviet Union. Each outpost had dozens more soldiers back then; now there are just six. “Why should he care about guarding it now? It’s not his homeland, not his border,” one villager says. “Back then things were different — not like this one of yours…”
This “ours,” as the locals call him, is one of the Russian FSB border guards stationed on the Armenian-Turkish frontier. His duty is to check every visitor and explain the local border regulations. That’s how we met. As a Russian citizen, I’m easy to look up in their database. He asks whether I’ve ever been to the Donetsk People’s Republic — apparently someone with a similar surname had. Caught off guard, I say no, and later regret not asking him back: “And you?” After all, we’re standing on the border between Armenia and Turkey — what does that have to do with anything? I found out later that he was — “got some combat experience.”
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In rural Armenia, late June is cucumber season. “Yerekhek, inch ek duk uzum?” — our neighbor, Rimma Akopovna, came out to meet us. “Cucumbers,” we said. “Maybe five pieces.” “A kilo?” she asked, then brought out five as a gift. She used to work as a midwife in Vagharshapat before retiring — maybe that’s why she introduces herself so formally, using her patronymic. “My grandson is my life. He’s thirty-five.” After his parents died, he stayed with her and now sells vegetables in Vagharshapat.
Another family delivers their vegetables to a warehouse in Yerevan City. Only perfect produce is accepted there — one out of ten from the garden. The vegetables that don’t meet the standards of the capital’s supermarket are taken to the market, either in their own car or in a rented Ford for 10,000 drams. There are also agent services — they take 10% of the price per kilogram of cucumbers, which is now 20 drams. A neighbor says that most of the money they earn goes to transportation to and from the market.
Almost everyone in the village works in greenhouses. Kids help their parents full time. One teenager told me he’d spent yesterday planting seedlings from six in the morning until two in the afternoon. His grandmother spends up to fifteen hours a day in the greenhouse. “I love her very much,” he says. “When it was her birthday, we just left home so she could have some time alone and rest. That was the best gift.”
The next day, Rima Akopovna appeared at our door with a large bag of cucumbers. When she learned that the “nachalnik” — the village’s term for the commander of the local border unit — had been visiting, she agreed to join us for coffee, first asking whether her dress was proper enough for such a meeting.
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Around the area, posters read “Don’t let the enemy enter your home!”, calling on locals to stay alert and, if needed, call the number of the outpost representative. The initiative came from the nachalnik. He was almost fired for it — the media spread a photo with comments about Russia’s influence on Armenia’s internal politics. It seems the message works. My colleague was stopped in the street by Uncle Zaven, who said, “Talk to the nachalnik first, then take a walk,” and immediately dialed his number. They say that during a training alarm, he once detained a “criminal” with a shovel.
“The chance to speak Russian without an accent” — that’s how the chief explained his curiosity about our company. We, for our part, admitted that we’d never before shared a table with an officer of the Russian FSB.
From what nachalnik and the villagers told us, things at the border post have changed over the years. There used to be many Russian soldiers stationed here, but now most of the personnel are Armenian conscripts and contract servicemen, selected by a commission at the Charbakh recruitment center, with Russian officers taking part. Officially, the selection isn’t about connections but about skills and knowledge of Russian. Service here is considered comfortable: there’s no gunfire, the unit is small, and everyone knows each other personally. “It’s harder for local officers,” nachalnik said. “They get calls from the soldiers’ relatives all the time. I’m a Russian officer — it’s easier for me to stick to the rules.” At the same time, Armenian soldiers wear Russian military uniforms but serve not one year, as in Russia, but two — according to Armenian law. Contract soldiers from Armenia are paid in Russian rubles.
One of the servicemen says that people crossing from the Turkish side are mostly members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. He clarifies that it is a terrorist organization: “When special operations and persecutions begin in Turkey, they run here. And in Turkish prisons, there’s even something called a ‘day off’ — once a month, inmates with good behavior can get short leave. There is no agreement between Armenia and Turkey, so they cannot be sent back. Here they receive a shorter sentence for violating the state border, and afterward, they go to Syria. The last Turk I detained… he had a fifteen-year prison term, of which he had served four. For crossing the border here, he got a year and a half.”
People from India try to cross the border too. The Russian officer compares them to the migrant workers from the comedy show Nasha Rasha: “They earn next to nothing here — literally pennies. For a day’s work, from six to nine, they get four or five thousand drams. They send that home, just like Ravshan and Jamshut.”
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Today, on our way back from a nearby village, we heard a police siren — turns out, it was for us. The chief jumped out of his car, smiling: “I knew it was you! People keep calling me, saying someone’s riding bikes around and studying the system.” Among border guards, the “system” is what they call the barbed-wire fences marking the border.
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These days, Turkey’s proximity unsettles few — mostly just the teenagers. Rumors among them say that if the border ever opens, the Turks will surely attack. Adults have a different concern — that once Turkish fruits and vegetables start coming in, locals will lose their jobs.
There is only one school in the village; in my new friend’s class, nine students remain. Recently, Turkish has been added to the curriculum as an elective. Each year, the students visit the border post and, during the excursion, eat soldier-style — buckwheat with canned meat. On the first floor of the school, drawings are displayed. Near Ararat, the Araks River is always drawn — you won’t find such a motif in Yerevan. Among all the drawings, the one that Aren made on our balcony stands out — it shows a road leading to Ararat.
My friend observes, “It feels like we’re stuck in the nineties here. Yesterday someone stole a car, and today I’m heading to the funeral of a friend who committed suicide, but no one talks about it. If you don’t live by the rules, people will bully you, and it’s even worse for girls. You have to fit into a society where everyone wants to become a thief.”
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Here, wanting to become a thief almost feels natural. Offline role models are few: you can either serve as a soldier or work the fields under the watch of Russian FSB officers.
We quickly found common ground with David, a former gangster. He respects those who refused to fight in Ukraine and has no love for Putin — “a thief who betrayed the thieves’ code,” as he puts it. That evening’s liveliest discussion centered on the deportation of Azerbaijanis from Russia: “Putin’s the only one who respects no one, among thieves, there’s no such thing as nationality”.
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A neighbor recalls the years after the Soviet collapse: “There was no state — we handled everything ourselves. But the KGB stayed the KGB: the border was always in order.” During the country’s lean years, life in the village was comparatively easier. Locals organized, gathered vegetables, drove them to Yerevan, and gave them away. They also sheltered refugees from Azerbaijan — though now they joke that many left after hearing the azan at dawn.
“From 1991, for five years we had no electricity,” so the whole street pooled money for diesel fuel. They watched Slave Isaura on a battery-powered television. The building that today houses the kindergarten was abandoned back then; older kids used it as a hangout in the nineties.
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In the 1948 Soviet atlas, the village of Araks appeared under the name Nerkin Karkhun. The Collected Data on the Caucasus (1880) recorded 132 households here, listing the residents as “Tatars” by ethnicity and “Shia” by faith. It made no mention of churches or mosques, but did note gravestones shaped like rams — the same kind seen in Goris, many now with their heads broken off.
Neighbors whose families settled here after the genocide recall that “Turks” lived in the village in the 1930s. By 1945, everyone had left: Kurds moved to Central Asia, Yezidis to Russia, and the remaining “Caucasian Tatars” departed in 1948. Locals say their cemetery was later found where the village school now stands.
“It’s a pity you never lived in the Soviet Union,” our neighbor remarks. In the 1960s, he recalls, “the border post was our home.” Major Sovenko knew everyone, spending more time in the village than at the post itself. His wife, Raisa Ivanovna, taught Russian in the village school, where the children of border guards studied alongside everyone else. “Nowadays it’s nothing like that — it’s all market relations.”
Villagers also endured the pitfalls of centralization. “Under Andropov, the village had a cattle-breeding kolkhoz. Who in their right mind brought cows from the Baltics? Summers here hit 50 degrees, winters drop to minus 20 with one and a half meters of snow.” “Planned economy made people suffer, forcing them to grow cotton.” One winter, a soldier in a Russian sheepskin coat nearly fell prey to jackals. They recall that in the 1970s and 1980s there was a fair in Zvartnots, during which all village stores were closed because goods nobody needed in the village, distributed by allocation — galoshes, canned sprats, and other preserves — were brought to sell. They say people from Baku would queue for them.
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Today, many villagers have fields in the border zone, and you can access your own plot only with a permit.
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After the USSR fell, some people moved to Russia, others to Europe; a few came back. One man spent sixteen years in Kharkiv and now keeps in touch with friends and relatives by phone. Someone recently arrived from Karabakh. Even families who have always stayed in the village have relatives working abroad. The neighboring house once had a tandoor, but today the woman’s sons, pictured here, are baking lavash in Samara.
Our neighbor David ran a successful construction business in Russia, though in the Belgorod region, where nothing is being built now and selling an apartment is impossible. “Russia swallowed everyone. Now we’re returning empty-handed,” he says. The Yezidi Hussein’s family all left for Europe during perestroika, but he fount life there dull — here he has a large house, a greenhouse, pigeons, and regular trips to the market.
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During my work on this piece, I discovered the blog of David Gasparyan from Araks. He documents the orchards throughout the year, showing how he cultivates and cares for the trees. Blog link: https://www.youtube.com/@davitgasparyan2800
anastasia karkot*ska