Suren Stepanyan graduated from Yerevan State University. He worked as a radio reporter and broadcast journalist for several media outlets and TV channels. Currently he works at the Public Television of Armenia at the department of special projects as a journalist and a researcher. He is interested in covering social topic.
This small farm-a family business-was founded with little financial resources by Arman Mikayelyan. Arman, an economist, decided to use his theoretical skills in practice four years ago. Due to experiments and courageous decisions, his production now includes a rich variety of European and Armenian cheeses.
The Ukrainian crisis forced Hovasapyans to return to his homeland, which he left 20 years ago. Within a few months, their city, Mariupol, transformed into a military zone with written and unwritten rules of war. In Armenia, their refugee status is full of difficulties, but on the flip side, his family can now live with security, which they would otherwise lack.
It’s been 25 years since Alina Arakelyan has been on daily duty, without any free weekends, holidays or vacations. She provides medical services to 3,200 inhabitants of the villages of Paravakar, Varagavan, and Тsaghkavan (In the Tavush region, on the borderline with Azerbaijan). The nurse of this small rural clinic is ready to help patients every moment and is irreplaceable.
For these young people the day starts in different places, but, as a rule, ends at the studio. It is where they compose their music of freedom and independence; rap and hip-hop are inseparable parts of their life.
It’s always difficult to establish a small or medium-sized enterprise or develop new business production in the rural areas, especially in the villages next to the border. The lack of communications, logistics, roads and resources often turns entrepreneurs away. However, a businessman from the Tavush region managed to open a huge glove factory in Choratan, a village near the Armenia and Azerbaijan border. Now, there are 150 employees working there. Every day, they produce thousands of pairs of gloves to export to Russia.
Sixteen years after the creation of the presidium of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin signed the decree establishing the award of “Hero of the Socialist Labour” on December 27, 1938. The honorary title, which was awarded for the first time a year later to Stalin himself, became the highest award of distinction for exceptional achievements, specifically “for selfless work and displayed valor” in the spheres of agriculture, industry, sports, culture, science and commitment to the party. Awarded for the first time in December 1939 to Stalin himself, the hammer and the shackle gold medal was last handed out on December 24, 1991, the day before then-Soviet Union president Mikheil Gorbachev announced that the USSR ceased to exist. In those 52 years, a total of 20,812 people received the prestigious medal - of them about 200 were Armenians. Today just a handful of recipients are still alive, living in oblivion and forgotten by the current Armenian state.
Taxi drivers are a common sight in the South Caucasus - shiny European cars flutter alongside aged vehicles of Soviet memory. At the steering wheel, men, and rarely, women provide a ride and more often than not, a chat that matters. Chai Khana explores the life on the road of three taxi drivers in Tbilisi, Yerevan, and Sukhum. For the subtitles, please click CC in the youtube window.
Armenian-Azerbaijani Felix Aliyev never stopped coaching. When the war between the two former Soviet republics broke out over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, mutual hatred peaked, yet the now 78-year-old weightlifting trainer did not flee his native land, then Soviet Armenia. Neither did his Azerbaijani father, who died in 1998 and was buried in Armenia. The softly-spoken, now grey-haired coach from Echmiadzin has been walking through the emblazoned iron door of the weightlifting school of Geghakert, about 25 kilometres from the capital Yerevan, everyday for the last 47 years, training hundreds of sportsmen - some of them going on to become national, European, World, and Olympic medalists.
On the eve of Armenia’s parliamentary elections this April, journalist Gegham Vardanyan found himself in what would be a crisis for any reporter -- his Twitter account had been suspended. But he was not alone. Aside from Vardanyan, the editor-in-chief of media-industry monitor Media.am, the accounts of non-profit media outlet Civilnet.am, investigative-news site Hetq.am and political analyst Stepan Grigoryan were suspended, too. All had been providing active coverage of the elections.
One month ago, a 26-year-old unemployed former film directorin Yerevan had a dilemma – how to bury his grandfather when there’s no space left in the local cemetery. In some countries, cremation might be an answer. But in Armenia, a country with no crematoria, it’s not. Armenia legalized cremation in 2006, but, 11 years on, tradition -- a powerful force in this ancient country, as elsewhere in the region – still gets in the way. Even when gaining a desirable plot in a cemetery means paying a bribe.
Seda Khachatryan, Rima Avagyan and Alvine Chobanyan are three Armenian septuagenarians whose lives are strung between memories of the past and challenges of the present. Gunfire occurs regularly in their village of Nerkin Karmiraghbyur, a stone's throw away from Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan, but there is no one to help these elderly women face it. They live all alone.
Armenia’s First Republic, formed on May 28, 1918, marked a return to Armenian statehood after 543 years. It provided not only independence, but a country in which thousands of ethnic Armenians, fleeing genocide in neighboring Ottoman Turkey, could take shelter. Yet today, most Armenians pay little or no attention to this period. Some fear that two of the founding fathers of the First Republic -- Interior Minister Aram Manukyan and Prime Minister Hovhannes Kajaznuni -- have simply been forgotten.
Growing up in the Turkish capital, Ankara, 33-year-old Okan Doğan heard the word “Armenian” used as a an insult, just like his peers in Armenia heard the word “Turk” uttered with contempt.
Every day, Rabbi Gershon Burstein, 56, opens the door of Armenia’s only synagogue and waits for the faithful to enter. They very rarely do so.
Coursemates Gevorg Avagyan, 31 and Kristina Gasparyan, 33, got married in 2012. Kristina, who used to live in capital Yerevan, was happy to leave the city and move to the village of Khoronk to live with her husband and his parents.