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Sochi's Armenian Diaspora Weeps

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  • Sochi's Armenian Diaspora Weeps

    SOCHI'S ARMENIAN DIASPORA WEEPS
    By Carl Schreck
    Staff Writer

    The Moscow Times, Russia
    May 4 2006

    Pavel Yeremyan, left, Vram Cholokyan, center, and an unidentified
    man lamenting the crash Thursday near Sochi.

    SOCHI -- Pavel Yeremyan had been drinking and smoking cheap Yava
    cigarettes for hours.

    "This is a terrible tragedy for us," Yeremyan, a subsistence farmer,
    said Thursday of the Armenian airliner that went down a day earlier
    off the coast of this Black Sea town.

    The crash killed all 113 people on board and has left the local
    Armenian community stunned. With 125,000 ethnic Armenians in Sochi,
    out of a total of 400,000 people, the community is one of the largest
    in the country.

    In Yeremyan's village of Baranovka, like many of the 20 mostly
    Armenian villages in the hills above Sochi, you don't have to look
    far to find people who knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone,
    on the late-night flight from Yerevan.

    "The young woman who lived in that house was on the plane," said
    Yeremyan's friend, 69-year-old Vram Cholokyan, who wheezed as he
    pointed to a two-story, white concrete house. "She was about 22 and
    had a young child. I saw them walking around here just before Easter."

    Both Yeremyan and Cholokyan have lived in the village their entire
    lives. Their families came here in the early part of the last century
    to flee the Turks. Today, they live off the fruits and vegetables
    they grow on small plots of land. Whatever they don't eat is sold at
    market, Cholokyan explained in a raspy, almost inaudible voice.

    Grach Makeyan, deputy head of the Sochi branch of the Union of
    Armenians in Russia, said only 26 of those who died in the plane
    crash were permanent Sochi Armenians. Most of the victims, he said,
    were among the seasonal workers who come to Sochi from Armenia for
    the vacation season, which lasts until November.

    "But we're all Armenians, even if we're not relatives," Makeyan said
    in his office at the Kamelia Hotel. "There aren't that many of us, so
    almost everybody knows somebody who died, even if indirectly through
    friends or neighbors. We are all in mourning. This will be a very,
    very difficult time."

    A priest from Sochi's Holy Cross Armenian Church, known to all
    simply as Father Komitas, said all the Armenians in the community
    felt personally affected by the crash.

    "Around 70 of the victims were citizens of Armenia and didn't have
    relatives here," Father Komitas, 38, said Thursday in his cramped
    office decorated with his own sculptures and drawings. "But this
    terrible tragedy is all of ours."

    Makeyan noted that a close friend of his had invited several of the
    people on Wednesday's flight for a birthday celebration.

    "Genocide, the war in Karabakh, the earthquake, and now this,"
    Makeyan said. "Every time we get our heads just above the water,
    something like this happens. But we will stick together. Armenians
    are the people most capable of enduring tragedy after tragedy."

    Because of their heavy smoking and poor diet, Armenian men tend to
    age rapidly. Many in their thirties look twenty years older.

    Lev Dashchyan, 28, a cab driver from Sochi's Adler district, home to
    about 80,000 ethnic Armenians, said war, natural disaster -- and now
    the plane crash -- had exacerbated local Armenians' plight.

    "My father-in-law's friend lost his wife and children in the
    earthquake," Dashchyan said, referring to the 1998 Spitak disaster.

    "They never even found the bodies. Then he remarried, and his new wife
    and child died in the plane crash. He has suffered a lot. He's 55,
    but looks like he's 70."

    Dashchyan belongs to the Hamshen Armenian community. His ancestors,
    Makeyan said, fled across the Black Sea from Turkey to settle in
    the Krasnodar region and Abkhazia in the early 19th century. Hamshen
    Armenians comprise most of Sochi's Armenian population; while they
    speak an old dialect featuring many Turkish words, they are close to
    other Armenians.

    Komitas looking at a photo album.

    "Sometimes we have a difficult time understanding each other because of
    our different dialects," Karina Mardvitskaya, 37, a Hamshen Armenian
    and a florist, said of her friend, non-Hamshen Armenian Violeta
    Muratyan, who tends the bar at an outdoor cafe on Kurortny Prospekt,
    Sochi's main drag.

    Mardvitskaya, a Sochi native, and Muratyan, who came to Sochi from
    Stavropol three years ago to find work, said Wednesday evening that
    they had been frantically calling friends to find out if anyone they
    knew had been killed in the plane crash.

    "I was on the phone all day," Muratyan said. "Everyone was calling
    trying to figure out who had heard what. Luckily, no one close to me
    was on the plane."

    But Muratyan said a young Armenian woman who frequented the cafe had
    apparently died in the crash.

    "Some customers came in today and told me she was on the plane,"
    Muratyan said. "I remember her face clearly. She must have been
    around 21."

    Other Armenians spent the better part of Thursday finding out that
    people who had been a part of their lives for years were now gone.

    Flipping through a photo album, Father Komitas turned to a group
    picture of several of his congregants, pointing to a middle-aged
    blonde woman.

    "She came to church regularly," he said of the woman, who had been
    on the flight. "It's important now that we find the bodies so they
    can be put to rest, hopefully in Armenia, in their homeland."
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