Speaking to One Another - The International Raoul Wallenberg ...

Every year descendants of survivors from Khastur village of Alashkert gather from different parts of Armenia and Russia inorder to spend a day together.girs’s” dances, preparing “Ergirs’s” food etc. Many of them have special days for periodic meetings, especiallyin cases where former fellow-countrymen are separated and live in different places.The “Ergirian” microworld renders homage to “Ergir’s” intellectuals, to the leaders who organized selfdefenseduring the massacres, to those perished in the self-defense movement; it keeps worshiping Andranik,whose high devotion and fidelity made it possible to save the surviving part of the population ofthe “Ergir” ; this world shares the impressions of those who visited the “Ergir”; it makes sure the genocidememories are inherited by the next generation; it condemns any form of retreat from the “Ergir’s”customs, etc.Almost all of our narrators bear firmly in their mind their grandfathers’ stories about the splendid landscape, streams, water, flowers and forests of their “Ergir”; “My mother used to tell me that everything grew perfectlywell there, everything was perfectly tasteful ... “we could smell the ripening apples in the neighboring villageand . we would say that apples in Tapavan are grown” (An extract from the story of Arpik Shahinyan). “We hada woman from Bingyol, an old woman born in Bingyol. Well, whenever we offered her to taste some fruit she wouldsay: “Dear my! Where is my Bingyol water, my Bingyoul fruits...This is completely uneatable... how you can eat this?”... She would say: “Look , we had watermelons of such size that when children sat on them their feet could not reachthe ground. In Bingyol, we had a spring twelve months a year” (from the story of Vard Abajyan). Hrachya Hov-97