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Five-year-old Alexandra Celebrates New Year's Eve in a Cellar

Ani Gasparyan

For six months now Alexander Shumovich, his wife, refugee Elvira Martirosyan, and their five-year-old daughter Alexandra have been living in the basement of the apartment building located at 43 Bagratunyats Street in Yerevan.

Last December, when the winter cold became unbearable, Elvira Martirosyan turned to the NGO Mission Armenia for help. Now Elvira takes hot meals home five times a week from one of the soup kitchens the organization has set up, and social worker Gohar Amyan has visited the family of three to find out how they ended up in this situation.

I went with Gohar to visit the family—we had to clear away a number of obstacles to get there. We found ourselves in a dark area and located a metal door with difficulty. Inside, we found a woman and an angelic little girl sitting in a candlelit room.

A small gas-stove, a mirror, some other household goods, and bags of clothes were scattered around or piled along the walls. Elvira invited us in, warning us not to be frightened of their ‘companions' - the rats.

Elvira Martirosyan was born in 1963 in Baku, Azerbaijan. She attended the Baku Conservatory, and then left to get married. Some time after her son Raphael was born she and her husband, who was serving in the Soviet Army in Armenia, were divorced.

“In 1988 I came to Armenia with my son. At first we lived at my aunt's apartment but later I enrolled at the Yerevan State Conservatory to continue my interrupted studies. And we shared a room in the Zeytun student dormitory with two other girls. We lived under trying conditions and I regretted breaking off relations with my ex-husband and refusing his financial support. I called and told him that we were in Armenia. From time to time my ex-husband would take Raphael to his relatives but he had no contact with me,” Elvira recalled.

Elvira graduated from the conservatory and began working at a music school in the village of Arevashat in the Ararat Marz. Her ex-husband was moving to Moscow at the time. As Elvira was barely making ends meet he offered to take the boy with him.

“I agreed because I was in extreme situation, with no apartment of my own, and I didn't want to be a bother to my aunt. A while later my son Raphael came to Armenia and I realized that he couldn't stay with me, since he was living in luxury with his father. And Raphael went back to his father. I haven't seen him since,” Elvira continued.

Elvira looked for a way to deal with her failures and her own state of mind. She began attending a spiritual center called Word of Life . Her aunt also went to the center.

“I was just a human being looking for God. I had questions that needed answers. But I didn't know the way; I didn't know whether I was on the right track or not. My aunt introduced me to a woman who promised to find a temporary apartment for me. It was 1999. I gathered up my belongings and went with the woman to the apartment where I was supposed to stay. She told me that I would occupy one room in the apartment and that someone else – a man – was living in the other room. I didn't know who that man was – perhaps a drug addict or a murderer – and I began praying and God told me to go there… A middle-aged man opened the door and we met. It was Alexander, my future husband,” Elvira said.

Her husband's family moved to Armenia from Ukraine in 1967 and found housing in Yerevan in an apartment at 43 Bagratunyats Street – the same building in the basement of which Alexander, Elvira, and Alexandra live today. Alexander Shumovich's family moved to Armenia at the initiative of his Armenian mother, Roza. She divorced her husband and decided to move with her two sons to her homeland. When Elvira met Alexander his mother was already dead and his brother, Yuri had moved to Russia.

In 2001, two years after Alexander and Elvira were married, their daughter Alexandra was born.

“The woman who brought me to this house didn't tell me anything about her connection to this family. I found out later that she was my brother-in-law Yuri's former wife. After their divorce Yuri left her one-third of the apartment and headed for Russia and the other part was left to my husband, Alexander. When I was pregnant with my daughter, Yuri's ex-wife came and told us that she intended to rent out her part of the apartment to another family. Just imagine, how would two different families live in one apartment? True, I was not registered in the apartment and had no legal right to oppose her but I felt that we would not be able to solve the problem without conflict,” Elvira said.

The apartment became a bone of contention and the two parties decided to sell the apartment and divide the profit. But they didn't go to court since the center they attended banned court proceedings. They decided to solve the issue through their spiritual center.

“How could these people who uttered God's name be such scoundrels and liars? They cheated us and drove us out our apartment – giving us pennies. The spiritual trial that took place was a swindle. Of course, the main wrongdoer was Yuri's ex-wife who wanted to get hold of the entire apartment. In documents they diminished the area of the apartment belonging to us (which was the larger part of the apartment) - allegedly by mistake. We found that out later when Alexander had already signed the papers. Then we found out that we were supposed to sell only the part of the apartment that belonged to us. We got an equivalent of $4,000 in Drams which we couldn't use for anything. When we were out on the street we spent a night here and a night there – at our friends' homes. But how long could we live like that? This basement belongs to one of our neighbors; he let us live here. Now I want a lawful trial that will return to my husband the apartment where he had lived for almost forty years,” Elvira said.

Elvira Martirosyan is a refugee and is legally entitled to a dwelling. But she is unable to deal with the necessary papers. The department on migration of the ministry of territorial administration is in charge of such issues and the Mission Armenia, NGO has interceded with the department for Elvira Martirosyan.

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