The Road to Ptghni

Really, its the road through Ptghni. Sorry.

Ptghni is a village on the road that goes north from Yerevan to Lake Sevan. It has nothing to do with anything except, come on... "Ptghni"? How can you not love that?

I was driving north with Jacob because I wanted to go hiking. We have a book of hiking trails, and it showed one in the village of Fantan -- right, I should make a list -- Fantan, about 30 km north of here. I have one of those baby-backpack carrier things, and Jacob still fits in it. So I thought, hey, Sunday hike.

Didn't quite work out... See, while Fantan is only 30 km away, it's about 700 meters or 2000 feet higher than Yerevan. So while the flowers are just about to start blooming down here, up in Fantan the snow hasn't finished melting yet. So we could drive to the trailhead -- through streets full of slush and mud, and gutters frothing with meltwater -- but the trail? Went straight up the side of a hill that was still covered with snow.

Beautiful view, though. I pulled over by the side of the road and let Jacob out. The sun was very warm, almost hot, despite the snow... well, we were almost 2000 meters up, so that can happen. Sheets of meltwater were running down the road, and Jacob happily stomped and splashed while I took in the view. We were there five or ten minutes and nobody passed us. It was quiet. Then we got back in the car and drove down through the village and back to Yerevan.

...the village. Fantan is a village of maybe a thousand people, and it's obviously seen better days. I've seen devastated inner cities, but never before a devastated inner village. But that's what this looked like. In the center of the village was a crossroads where several larger building stood. It looked like one had been a store, another a school, a third perhaps the town hall. All were empty and ruined, gaping windows and crumbling masonry. There were also a lot of empty houses, some boarded up, some just falling apart.

Rural Armenia has been hit by a double whammy: most of the able-bodied men and ambitious young people have either moved to Yerevan or gone out of the country to find work. Yerevan has nearly doubled in size since 1991, but almost all of the country's small towns and villages have lost population. The same is true in most post-Communist countries, but it's much worse here.

Also: lots of people standing around in the streets. Some were working -- shoveling snow so the meltwater could flow -- but most were just standing. When we drove through town in our big Ford, everyone turned and unabashedly stared. I could see them staring after me in the rear-view mirror until we were out of sight.

* * *

In other news, Armenia's Prime Minister died last night. I never met him. The official word is heart failure. The most interesting thing about this is, I heard it from a colleague this morning -- around, oh, 11 am -- by which time he'd been dead for a while. But the official news wasn't released until about 3 in the afternoon. In the West we're used to getting very immediate news, but things don't work that way here.

Comments

[Noel Maurer]

Apropro of nothing: Mexico is kicking Paraguayan ass in soccer right now. Yes, Carlos, I've gone over to the dark side. I've even at times caught myself thinking that basketball has too much scoring.

But apropro of Ptghni: do you have photos? I'm curious to see how Armenian villages stack up against rural areas in other parts of the world. I'm only now realizing that all the rural areas I've seen have been overrun by children: even a comparatively low TFR of 2.5 produces a lot of kids running around. What are villages devoid of children like? They sound depressing.

I like Mexico City, Copenhagen, and New York much more than Paris, London, or Toronto because they have lots of children running around in places where you wouldn't expect them. (This is not necessarily directly related to the metropolitan birthrate: frex, Hong Kong has kids everywhere and Buenos Aires does not.) Of course, I write this in a cafe in a yuppie part of Mexico City where I can see seven pre-adolescent children out of a total patronage of 24 people --- with all the expected annoyance --- so perhaps I am biased. But how do Torontonians or Washingtonians stand it? And what must a village devoid of rock-throwing nine-year-old boys be like?

[Doug M.]

Basketball /does/ have too much scoring. I don't like to watch the first three quarters of a basketball game for just that reason.

Claudia's the picture-taker (and has the camera). But I saw maybe fifteen people in the village, and just one kid -- a boy of ten or twelve, shoveling snow. Several older folks, though. I'd put the median age somewhere in the forties.

Kids: I had the same experience in Tirana, Albania. Came there from Bucharest, where you don't see a lot of kids. Tirana had kids /everywhere/.

BTW, the "gh" represents a soft fricative that's something like "uhkh". So, it's pronounced something like "Patuckney".

Doug M.

[Gareth Wilson]

You're just making these names up, aren't you?
Just kidding. Although I did check Google to confirm it existed. Are those kind of consonant clusters common in Armenian? To my laymen's eye it looks more Georgian.

[Dennis Brennan]

re: municipality name. Insert obLovecraft joke here.

Brings back memories of when I was doing some sort of project in high school (details forgotten) and learned that a town in eastern Turkey is named Batman.

Of course, us folks in Pennsylvania have no business making fun of anybody else's town names-- we have plenty of wacky ones here.

[Carlos]

The 'gh' in Armenian is often the product of a sound change from a variant 'l' sound, about 1500 years ago. So it very well might be one sound change away from a word like "Ptolemy", while a little peculiar to eyes and ears canalized by the English language, doesn't present too many difficulties.

And hell, Poughkeepsie /pkIpsi/. Ia ia mamaroneck.

[Doug (not Muir)]

R'lyeh Wagn'nagl Fhtagn! Aaaiii!!!

I mean, you're in Ptghni without an HPL reference?

[Pilot Padget]

Ptghni.

I'm only going to say it the once, because it looks WAYYYY too much like one of those words which, if one says them too often, will summon some Eldritch Tentacular Horror from a dimension Man Was Not Meant To Know. And I like my soul where it is, thanks. Plus I'm quite fond of (what remains of my/what passes for) sanity.