"What car do you drive?" asked the village head at Sevkar, Vladimir Margaryan.
"A Niva," I replied.
"Yes, a Niva is good to drive up the mountain," he said, "The weather is dry.  If it were to rain slightly, the Niva would not be able to go up."
"So how do you go up if you need to, when it rains?" I asked.
"We either don't go up, or we use a 66 - a Ural - to get there, if we have to."

We were leaving the village of Yenokavan.  The paved road came to an end and the dirt road going uphill began.  I asked Tatul Teloyan, the deputy village head, who was coming with us to visit his family, "Can you drive a Niva?"

"Yes," he replied.

"You must definitely drive better than me then," I said.

"Definitely," he replied.

We switched places and I soon realized that having Tatul with us was a stroke of good fortune.  Having later seen the potholes and bumps in the road, I thought that I would definitely have turned back halfway.  Tatul avoided those potholes and bumps with the skill of a virtuoso and optimized use of the car, while driving at a maximum speed of twenty kilometers per hour throughout the journey.  We covered the thirty-kilometer distance separating the village from the mountain in about two hours.  We reached the houses of the mountain dwellers of Sevkar towards evening.

"How is life in the mountains?" I asked the first person I saw.

He looked at me suspiciously then answered, as if to himself, "There is no life in the mountains, the mountain is a source of living."

"How do you live, if there is no life?"

"We don't live, we just stay here.  Rather, they," indicating the people around him, "are staying, but I am leaving this winter."

I tried to ask him his name.  He asked to be put down as The Man Who Was Tired of Mountains.

"Since when have you been tired?" I said, trying to get him worked up.

"I went to the army from here and then came back," said The Man Who Was Tired of Mountains and took a few steps away from me, letting me know that he was in no mood to talk further.

This pessimistic start was like the bad road - I wanted to turn around halfway - but there was no way back.  I could see a herd of cattle on the hill.  They were marching like soldiers and separating in droves.  Each animal knew its stable.  They would gather there and wait to be milked.

Amalya Avetisyan has around 40 head of cattle.  She has lived with her husband in the mountain almost her whole life.  Their grandchildren come and help them in the summer, but they are by themselves in the winter.

"It has now been thirty-five years," said Amalya, without diverting her gaze from the squirts of milk, "Whatever we do, we do ourselves.  There is nobody to help us."  By "nobody to help" she meant the lack of state aid.  "There are no factories to which we could sell our milk. We make cheese and take it to the city, selling it door to door there."

Amalya said that a few times some people came and tried to buy milk from there, but then stopped coming regularly, probably after seeing the bad road.  "They also try to buy it too cheap.  I wouldn't mind selling it to them if they would name a normal price," said Amalya, explaining that they give everything by giving the milk, "We only keep the cream, but we use that to feed the pigs, which is also good for their fat.  It is difficult to sell our cheese, but we manage."

"There are no young people in the mountains," I noticed.

"Why, are there any in the village?" I was asked in reply, "Young people want to live - what would they do on this mountain?"

"Aren't you satisfied with life on the mountain?"

"I'm satisfied, why wouldn't I be?  This mountain supports me and my home.  I manage to make just about as much as I need, but I can't make a little extra to put aside."

It got dark quickly on the mountain.  Objects illuminated by the last rays of the sun turned into silhouettes before one's very eyes, and the silhouettes themselves disappeared quickly, leaving only the vague blur of lighted windows from the villagers' houses.  The first section of houses on the mountain had electricity, while the others lit their homes using oil lamps.  They were even deprived of the possibility of watching television.

Tatul's family was in the second residential section on the mountain.  Misha Teloyan, Tatul's father, greeted us.  He was the village head at Sevkar for fourteen years during the Soviet period.  He had spent almost as much time on the mountain.  "How would we live if we didn't do this much?" he asked.

We sat around the table and the journalist-mountain dweller interview became warmer.  Misha demonstrated his skills as a toastmaster and used the intervals between toasts to speak of the problems in the village and on the mountain.  "Don't believe them when they say our country is poor.  We are not poor, we are stupid," said Misha Teloyan.

The conversation revealed that Sevkar had a thousand hectares of hayfields in that beautiful area, of which only seventy hectares was being used.

"We are utilizing only about seven percent," said Misha.

"What about the rest?"

"The rest just remains the way it is… nobody seems to care."

In the morning, he showed the hay collected next to his house.  "I gathered this in four or five days.  This is enough for one winter.  But a thousand times as much remains and goes to waste.  That is very bad, we might be deprived of our territory in the future and it might turn to desert."

I tried to find out why the villagers did not make use of that bounty and the explanation was all too familiar, "We have no place to sell our products.  If we had a market for it, we would produce milk and sell it, but now we make it into other products (cheese, sour cream and so on) so that we can get it to the city."

During the Soviet years, there was a processing plant on the mountain, but it no longer exists. Misha understood that there was no state control any more and he placed his hope in businessmen, "Let them come and get rich on our mountains.  We will be happy and so will they.  And we will not say that we live in a poor country."

See also: The People of the Mountains