Armenia

Alex Aghajanyan, Seda Aghajanyan, Ofelya Beroyan, Iren Kostanyan, Nadezhda Hakobyan, Laura Mkrtumyan, Armina Sargsyan

"Barekamutyun (Friendship) Metro Station in Yerevan" (2022)

This competition entry deals with the role of friendship in the Soviet ideology and its post-Soviet transformations through the study of history, memory and the landscape of the Yerevan Barekamutyun ("Friendship") metro station and its environs.

The Yerevan Metropolitan was constructed in the 1970s and was officially opened in 1981, on the initiative of Karen Demirchyan (First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia from 1974 to 1988). It has 10 stations, one of which is named Barekamutyun ("Friendship") and symbolises the friendship between Armenian and Russian people. In all Soviet countries there were monuments, arches, squares etc. named after friendship, for example, the Friendship Square and the Friendship metro station in Armenia, the People's Friendship Arches in Georgia and in Ukraine. After the collapse of the USSR, names of many places were changed and Armenianised, but the idea and the name of "Friendship" was preserved.

The authors emphasise that, no matter how much the Soviet Union tried to establish friendship between the peoples under its rule during the USSR years, in the post-Soviet years lots of conflicts, even militarised, between those people arose, such as the war in Nagorno Kharabakh, current war between Ukraine and Russia, etc.

The entry won the prize “Best Critical Approach to the Topic” in the Armenian History Competition 2022. The topic of the competition was “Between Forgetting and Remembering: Soviet and Post-Soviet Memory Landscape in Families and Communities”.

Watch a detailed presentation of the entry on YouTube (with English subtitles)