25 November 2014, 11:28
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Living Under a Cracked Roof

Photographer Anahit Hayrapetyan has photographed two apartment buildings located on “Tetsi Krug” and Artsakh Streets, as well as their inhabitants. Two decades earlier these people fled to Armenia from Azerbaijan. This photo series provides a glimpse into the lives of the some Armenians from Baku who fled to Yerevan as refugees, in hopes of rebuilding their broken lives despite living in broken buildings.

An inhabitant of one of the refugee buildings shows his family tree.

“I drew these lines without a ruler” says Lyudmila Abrahamyan, a self-taught painter and refugee from Baku.

A photo of the son Emma Abrahamyan (another refugee) lost during the Karabakh war.

This building on Artsakh Street, once a dormitory, now serves as an apartment building for numerous families.

The communal bathroom in its grey colors. “After the events at Sumgait I came to Yerevan," this woman told us. "I was pregnant. I searched for my husband’s body for a long time, but we never found it”.

It seems that nearly all the apartments are in the same desolate condition.

Emma Mirzoyan shows us the cracked roof of the building. Her family left Baku in 1988: “We changed several buses in order to get to the refugee building. Our son was in the army then, we wrote to him and told him to come to Armenia directly."

The view from Emma Abrahamyan’s window.

The window doubles as a refrigerator.

There are numerous families who live in this refugee building. 

The self-taught painter, Lyudmila with her oil paints.

Donik Abrahamyan, who once worked in the oil industry, and Emma Mirzoyan are refugees from Baku.

Emma Abrahamyan first moved from Artsakh to Gyumri, then to Yerevan after the earthquake. Now she lives alone: she lost one of her children during the war, and the other has moved to Russia to find work.   

 

"Yerevan" magazine, N 11, 2014

Այս հոդվածի հայերեն տարբերակի համար սեղմեք այստեղ։

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