The Yard Bakery – In The Years of The Pan-Armenian National Movement

Bread and lines, you say? In our yard back in Soviet times, there has been a great bakery (Հացի փուռ, hatsi pur, bread bakery).

Half the town would buy lavash there, especially before the New Year. One could visit our yard and in just 2-3 days see all his acquaintances whom he had not been seen for 1000 years. A proven way to do so!

In the famine years, the horrendous lines began as well. The store workers wouldn’t give bread via the back door even as a favor to close ones. But they would give dough.

Once, we took a dough for bread and tried to bake it. Grandfather found one thing in the basement with a hole in the middle. Something left over from the times of WWII. It was supposed to be put on a potbelly stove or a kerosene stove like the Fujiks.

I do not know. Maybe the dough was wrong, maybe something else, but we only got a thin cracker out of it.

The bakery would soon run out of flour (or something else) and be closed down. Then, in the second half of the 90s, they would again try to run it, but they’d bake simple bread instead of lavash.

It would be then bought by media magnate and chairman of the public radio Armen Amiryan. In its territory, he would build a house for himself.

But our yard is still called pri hayat (Փռի հայաթ, bakery courtyard) out of habit.

Vardan Bagiryan