Notes From Hairenik: A Blog About Life in Armenia

January 27, 2006

Freenet.am in danger of shutting down

The premier Internet service provider in Armenia, Freenet.am, may be shut down permanently in a matter of a couple of weeks. Freenet.am provides free Internet access and email accounts to users throughout Armenia. It was founded by two of my present coworkers in the late 1990s.

Here’s a brief history taken from the Freenet.am FAQ page:

The Armenian Freenet (ArmFN) was created in the framework of UNDP Armenia Internet Project in 1997. The Internet Project aims to support the development of Internet and information technologies in Armenia. Following the best traditions of the Internet, the ArmFN provides free services to individuals, as well as non-profit, education and research organizations, government and other institutions.

Over the last nine years of service Freenet has acquired 21,832 user accounts and hosts 4,286 Web sites at no cost. As long as you or someone you know has a computer with a dial-up modem and a telephone connection, you are basically ready to use all Internet services provided by the service, including communicating via a free email account. There is one catch however: users can only view Web sites based in Armenia. Thus all Web sites with a .am extension can be viewed, as well as certain .com or .org sites. However, email messages can be sent to anyone in the world.

Apparently the UN no longer wants to host or finance Freenet.am. The office including all its servers, switches, routers and so forth is housed in a small room on the fourth floor of the UN building in Yerevan located near Republic Square. From what I’ve been told the UN administrators have other plans for the Freenet.am office, so basically the project will come to an end unless it gets thousands of dollars in funding very soon to keep it going as well as maintain a new home.

Freenet.am is an excellent, well-maintained, invaluable service and needs to keep going, as most of its users probably cannot afford the cost of connecting to the Internet via an ISP provider. It will truly be a crime if this project shuts down.

If anyone has suggestions or is interested in funding Freenet.am, please send an email to Freenet-Daemon@freenet.am or leave a comment for this post.

Posted by Christian Garbis at 12:11 PM.

3 comments Links to this post

Another part of Old Yerevan is slated for demolition (revised)

On the way to work I stopped by the tiny convenience store at 5 Abovyan Street that sells "khachabouri" and other pastries as well as cigarettes, soft drinks, and other things. The store resides by the city's standards in an ancient building dating back to the late 1800s, making it probably the oldest standing intact building in central Yerevan.

As explained to me by one of the store's managers, much if not all of smaller central Yerevan, in other words former Old Yerevan including the area stretching from Mashdots Street east towards Khanjian Street, was occupied by Turks. In fact, this building she works and resides in was built on top of a Turkish cemetery. When they were demolishing the building just next door to make way for the monstrous "Star Time" disco complex they discovered underneath the foundation that people were buried sitting down, as apparently was the Turkish custom (although I cannot verify this).

It may not be the most aesthetically pleasing or safe building in Yerevan it seems solid enough nevertheless. Sturdy enough to support a store which occupies a small, narrow portion of the two-floor building's ground level. It is situated in between two ugly six story buildings both housing discos and expensive boutiques as well as offering hotel rooms. But the ancient building that remains, until the beginning of March, is a testament to Yerevan's history, its development from basically village status to a city of about 1,000,000 residents. It is of course another piece of the past that needs to be preserved at all costs and also is part of the city's disappearing charm, yet greedy developers fail to understand this. Basically this structure must be given landmark status, and should be preserved and repaired. All international cities keep and restore very old buildings, especially structures with an over 100 year-old history. Furthermore, ancient landmarks, especially in city centers, attract tourism.

The store's owners and building occupants are taking their case to Strasbourg, as no court in Armenia will defend anyone's right to live where they wish to remain. The woman said that they will end up in the middle of a field somewhere outside the city, as they won't be able to afford anything else with the measly compensation the government supposedly will provide.

There is no justification for raising historical buildings--it doesn't matter what state they may be in. They can be repaired and restored, especially those made from simple brick and mortar like this one.

More details about the building occupants' plight can be read on Hetq Online.

Labels: Personal Experiences, Social and Cultural

Posted by Christian Garbis at 11:13 AM.

4 comments Links to this post

January 25, 2006

Video coverage of historic central Yerevan destruction

This is my first video blog posting and supposedly may be the first from Armenia. It shows the demolishion going on behind my apartment building as discussed in my Back in Yerevan post. I also wrote a short article for Hetq Online, which basically is the description of this video.

You may need the QuickTime browser plug-in to view this video. Try to view it first as it should appear, but if it doesn't work go to the home page of your browser and download the plug-in, or else visit the Apple site.

To view a higher resolution of the video, click here.
To view a lower resolution if you have a dial-up connection, click here.

Labels: Personal Experiences, Social and Cultural

Posted by Christian Garbis at 12:49 PM.

1 comments Links to this post

January 24, 2006

A few things...

I wrote a blurb about what's happening behind my apartment building, relating to the raising of the tiny neighborhood, which can be read at Hetq Online. Photos are by Onnik Krikorian, who is the photo editor at Hetq. I will be writing a more detailed article about this development in the coming weeks.

It is snowing pretty heavily outside, with over 8 inches on the ground and more to fall. It's my third winter spent in Yerevan, and I've never seen so much snow. The streets in center Yerevan are messy, and there are few cars on the road. The sidewalks are a mess as well, as businesses are responsible for shoveling the areas in front of their own establishments.

There is a natural gas crisis facing Armenia at the moment, due to those pesky Chechens who blew up the pipeline running from Russia to Armenia in North Ossetia. Supposedly the pipeline will be fixed by Wednesday at the latest. You can read about it more here.

Labels: Personal Experiences, Thoughts and Musings

Posted by Christian Garbis at 1:39 PM.

2 comments Links to this post

January 17, 2006

Back in Yerevan

I finally made it back on Sunday night and spent the entire day Monday with my wife at home. It's cold here--about 32 degrees F or 0 degrees C. My apartment is colder than it has been in the past since my mother-in-law washed the windows in late fall and peeled away the strip insulation that lines the frame of each window to keep the wind out. Today I will spend trying to reinsulate the windows and then return to work as soon as the guys exhausted from the trip back from California open the office.

Just a few observances of what's going on here. People have just wrapped up the holiday season, a time which is always enjoyable as people roam from house to house to visit, drink, and eat some snacks. I missed a steady stream of festivity lasting from about December 25 through January 7 or so, especially in Republic Square where about 10 Santa Clauses pace the stretch of tiled sidewalk in front of the hibernating fountains looking for kids to tease. There’s a huge tree in the middle of the square which is now being dismantled.

Traffic in central Yerevan seems to be cut in half. This may be due to the fact that the costs of fuel have risen dramatically--propane gas which is the preferred, cheap choice of fuel for cars has doubled due to an increase in Russian fuel exports, primarily to former Soviet satellites. Gasoline also remains pricey--just before I left Armenia two months ago the cost per liter for regular gasoline fluctuated between 380-400 drams per liter, or about 80-90 cents. I imagine the costs are about the same, as I have yet to start up my car and refuel it. So there is a lot less noise downtown, and it is safer for pedestrians to cross the streets.

A heartbreaking unwelcome awaited me when I saw to my dismay Monday morning that 75 percent of the secret small neighborhood which lies just behind my apartment building has been totally destroyed. Yerevan authorities have been promising to demolish the ramshackle shacks for over three years now, and they finally got around to doing it in the middle of winter, during the holidays nonetheless. Really, this is something that was to be expected although I started to think it would not happen, since the neighborhood really poses no threat to anyone except developers snapping up every square meter available or that can be made available for construction.

Thousands of people were either displaced or relocated from the half-mile or so stretch of land from Tumanyan Street near the Opera House to the end of Abovyan Street, just right of the half-renovated business building housing popular restaurants Marco Polo and Square One to make way for the Northern Boulevard, which is still being constructed and will go on for at least another year at least. Thousands more were evicted from their homes on Puzant and Arami Streets that run perpendicular to Abovyan Street and stretch to as far as Mesrob Mashdots Street, or “Prospect.” Other historic buildings, some dating to the first republic, have also been totally destroyed to make room for new, unaesthetically pleasing high-rise buildings, which will contain apartments fetching over $100,000 each. This sweeping away of Yerevan’s history is extremely careless and stupid, as tourists will wonder what has happened to the historic quarters of the city, and the city’s charm will virtually disappear. The Yerevan that exists today has less than an 80-year history, and any structures that managed to last that stretch of time --structures that are for the most part extremely solid and have few if not any cracks in the stone walls, foundations, or floors--are now being taken down. It is sloppy city planning and I believe is a total rejection of the envisioned design created by famous architect and Yerevan’s father Alexander Tamanyan.

In any case, I will write more about this in the coming weeks.

Labels: Personal Experiences, Thoughts and Musings

Posted by Christian Garbis at 11:37 AM.

12 comments Links to this post

January 6, 2006

Happy New Year and Merry Christmas!