By Martina Sanna

Anahit Matevosyan and her 21-year-old son Farhat Hajiyan have lived in a Gyumri house with no water or heating for the past eight years.

The scent of coffee, a traditional offering for visiting guests, greets me as I enter what passes as a house on the outskirts of Armenia’s second largest city. The coffee is boiling on an old gas stove, the only piece of furniture marking the presence of a kitchen. The bricks in the walls are nothing more than a pattern on fading wallpaper, partially revealing the rusty sheet metal that lays beneath.

Anahit Matevosyan and Farhat Hajiyan in the domik (PHOTO: Martina Sanna)

The devastating 1988 earthquake claimed 25,000 lives in the northwestern Armenian Cities of Spitak and Gyumri, destroyed half a million buildings, and left more than 500,000 homeless.

Prior to the collapse of the USSR, Soviet authorities promised to fully rebuild the city within two years. During its final days, the Soviet Union succeeded in constructing 5,628 apartments. Since then, the job has been assumed primarily by allocations from Armenia’s state budget, followed by various diasporan organizations (notably the Hayastan All-Armenian Fund), and various international organizations (the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, and the Red Cross).

While 5,391 families had their housing issues resolved during 2008–2021, there are scores of people like Anahit Matevosyan still living in temporary shelters locally known as domiks (Russian for 'little house"). They settled there, in those small toolshed-like metal structures, with the hope of getting normal housing. They’ve been waiting for nearly forty years. 

Matevosyan was five when the earthquake hit Shirak. When the first shock struck at 11:41 local time on December 7, 1988, she was attending kindergarten. She was trapped for hours under the ruins of the building before her uncle’s wife, whose daughter was going to the same kindergarten, managed to find and rescue her.

“I will never forget that day,” says  Matevosyan. “She saved my life.” 

After the earthquake, Matevosyan recalls bleeding from her eye while playing outside. She complained to her mother about it for years before it was revealed that she suffered from pressure on the brain due to a head injury she received during the quake. Anahit and her family remained in their home, now tilted by the quake, until they had to move out when its fragile foundation started to give way.

In 2003, Matevosyan was assigned a room in the local dorm, a few meters away from the abandoned iron foundry on the outskirts of Gyumri where many homeless families had been resettled after the earthquake. Farhat, her first son, was born there.

Anahit’s room at the dorm (PHOTO: Martina Sanna)

“The conditions of the dorm were impossible for living,”  Matevosyan recalls. “It was so cold we slept with our coats, with everything on. We had nothing. I was alone with the kids. My husband was in Russia, working all year. He’d return every December.”

In 2017, Anahit Matevosyan left the dorm and moved into a domik whose owner was temporarily absent. Shortly afterwards, she found out that her husband had started another family in Russia, leaving her and her kids with no support. They were also waiting for the government to resolve their housing situation.

“They told us that we were not eligible to get a house, as they were prioritizing those living in multiple story buildings that collapsed during the earthquake,” says Matevosyan. “My parents' palace was a one-floor family house. They said that after finishing with them, they would start giving houses to us.”

The Armenian government, in the early 2000s, committed to finalizing the post-earthquake rebuild of the city. In 2001, Vladimir Sardaryan (Head of Disaster zone issues at the Ministry of Urban Planning) announced the government’s intention to finish the housing program by 2003. In 2008, then Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan promised that the homelessness problem in Gyumri’s  “disaster zone” would be resolved by 2013. The current government expects to finalize the housing program by 2027. AMD 108 million (US$283,000) has been planned for this purpose under the 2026 state budget.

Additional complications result from a growing trend over the years in which some of those receiving government housing have sold these apartments and stayed in their domiks.

“It makes it more difficult to keep track if a family is living in a domik because they are waiting for a house, or if they already received it and sold it for cash,” says Matevosyan.

Exterior of Anahit’s Domik in Gyumri (PHOTO: Martina Sanna)

In addition, after Armenia’s defeat in Artsakh in 2023 and the consequent exodus of more than 100,000 civilians from their homeland, the housing problem throughout Armenia increased.

“We are waiting for the people of Artsakh to receive housing, then it will be our turn,” says Hamaspyur Khachatryan, a 75-year-old woman who spent the last fifteen years living in the same dorm that used to house Anahit and Farhat. When the earthquake hit, she was buying groceries at the Gyumri market to celebrate her son’s birthday. She was thirty-seven. “We still hope that eventually we’ll get a house. How long can a person survive in these conditions?”

Entrance to the dorm (PHOTO: Martina Sanna)

Matevosyan shares her former neighbor’s views of the dorm, where she remembers living with no running water, raising two kids in freezing winters with temperatures typically below 0° in northern Armenia. 

In recent years, the government adopted a policy of obtaining and destroying domiks after moving families to their new homes to prevent them from selling the house and returning to the old shelters.

Since Anahit and Farhat don’t own their domik, when the owner finally receives a new housing and has the domik destroyed, their only option will be to return to the dorm. 

Matevosyan has gone to the Gyumri Municipality several times to raise her housing issue. When former Gyumri Mayor Vardan Ghukasyan was arrested last October on bribery charges, she was there in the crowd.

“He was trying to raise the issue again, to do something for people in our situation, but then he was arrested,” says Matevosyan. “Now I put my hope in God. I only wish for four walls.”

Matevosyan, due to her medical condition, cannot work long hours. The family relies on Farhat, who is a seasonal worker harvesting apricots or potatoes in the fields two hours by car from Gyumri. He says that seasonal workers are required to pay for transportation to the fields and for lunch on the spot. The salary for a twelve-hour day of work is typically AMD 5,000 ($13).

Farhat, nevertheless, appears to have a more optimistic view of the future. He was just ten years old when the family left the dorm. He remembers playing outside with the other kids and being sad to leave them when they moved to the domik. Now, aged twenty-one, returning to the dorm isn’t an option.

“I don’t want this for my mother,” he tells me. “My plan is to work, to build something better for us. I don’t like to spend all day with nothing to do.”

When I ask if he trusts the current government to solve the housing problem in Gyumri, or if he believes a change in administration could bring quicker results, he responds that he doesn’t really know.

“I did not go to vote during the last elections” he says. “I was busy in the fields. It was apricot season.”

Top photo: 1988 earthquake destroyed Gyumri’s old meat market © Martina Sanna