Tour to Gyumri from Yerevan

This strange city does not let go. Like an old photograph, like a painting under a layer of dust, where black can turn into color, and color into black. Alive. And that is why there is a very acute feeling of one’s foreignness. You stand like a scarecrow between ten hairdressers, and you realize that you will never choose the right door. This makes me a little uncomfortable. This is what happened to me in Italy: after a noisy, open Rome, where the owner of the shop first tried to explain the way, and then “locked” him. our shop with a chair to lead a clueless pregnant woman to the right intersection, we ended up in Florence. In two Florences: one was bristling with maps and stood out so sharply against the background of the locals, as if we had all been dipped into a bucket of green paint when getting off the bus. The second, the real one, meandered through the narrow streets, fed the cats fish, placed trays of vegetables on the sidewalk, hung striped mattresses from the windows, took the children to school, and smiled welcomingly. And somehow it was immediately clear that becoming one even for love would never work out. But there is one huge difference from those Italian experiences. This is the feeling that in fact there is no other Gyumri other than the one that was destroyed a generation ago. The living city is a transparent drawing on top of a torn photograph. People without houses, houses without people. It's so impossible. Open a marriage agency and bring them together until their legs fall off to dance. Although I don’t dance, my mother still has the ballroom book. Strange, unexpected layout of the center, these straight streets intersecting at right angles, sometimes suddenly climbing steeply upward. And the resistance of a separate building: in defiance of the neat square of the yard, a house suddenly stands at an angle, behind the entrance door a staircase runs steeply into the sky - as if into another dimension. In some places, houses that are already familiar to the eye straddle each other and the topography - and this looks more like a challenge. Abandoned locked yards. Signs from the past. Trying to fix the present. Several thousand people are homeless. And bewilderment: is the power in stones, in the past, in symbols? It's just food, a living wage. Without a person, all this is meaningless. And it is incredibly difficult for a person without a roof over his head to isolate himself from the darkness. This scar will one day become so old that it will no longer pull and attract the attention of girls. And the city, of course, will be rebuilt. Creation and opposition are two winds that blow through you at the crossroads of the old city. Maybe that's why he is still incredibly handsome, despite... And very sobering: like an echo from a well into which you did not shout.