Gosh, an Armenian mountain community

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The village of Gosh

Much of Armenia is mountainous. Gosh is a fairly typical mountain village, surrounded by forest interspersed with grassland. The traditional livelihood of households in the community is a mixture of arable and pastoral agriculture, with a system of transhumance, taking animals to high pastures in the summer and bringing them down to the village in the winter.

Gosh has a special status as the place where the Armenian legal code was written, at the monastery set up here in the 11th century. The monastery was later sacked by the Mongols but the ruins of the buildings remained and the site was eventually resettled by people from further north. The monastery buildings were renovated in the 1950s and are at the focal hub of the village, although the church is not functional (there is no functioning church in the village). Although some visitors are brought fairly regularly up from Yerevan to see the site, they visit only briefly and don't contribute, at the moment, to the livelihoods of the village. There are plans to make Gosh a site for the development of ecotourism through a World Bank project, drawing on the presence of the ancient monastery buildings and the forested mountains. This may mean some benefits to local livelihoods.

Meeting people in Gosh

To find out how people were coping with the situation, we visited and interviewed a number of families and individuals in Gosh, and went with them to their fields, the forest and the pastures to learn about their livelihoods.

We met people like Hasmik and Manvel Grigorian, who returned from Russia in the early 1990s so that Manvel could fight in the war against Azerbaijan but who find it impossible to make ends meet, often having trouble getting enough money to buy bread. They live in the old village steam baths, which was state-run but has now closed because no-one can afford to use it. Manvel, who calls himself a `child of nature', spends a lot of time in the forest and he and his sons collect mushrooms there to sell. Someone else who depends on the forest, taking his small herd of pigs to pasture in clearings, was Shura Vartenian.

We met Arsabek and Kishmish Minasyan, an old couple in their 70s who can no longer manage on their pensions after a lifetime of hard work. Like so many families in the village, they have a family member - their son - in Russia, working to send back some cash to his family. Another old person we met was Amelian Eznah, who has to manage on her own since her husband and all her children have died and is finding it very hard. We met her carrying firewood from the forest.

Norik Sargossyan, the village leader, hopes very much that things will get better. Like most Armenians, he is very attached to his homeland and does not want to leave. The headmaster, Haykaz Amirkhanian, was not too hopeful about the prospects of his students for getting work or for leaving the village. There is, he says, almost no work available - either in the village or in towns.

But we found that there were others who were more hopeful of the future - people such as Zinawora Arzimanian, Edik Daftian and Gayane Amirhanian, who have started taking their animals up to the high summer pastures again and feel that they are taking control of their lives.

A bit of background

The Soviet system, introduced in the 1920s and 1930s, collectivised the organisation of agriculture in Gosh as in other parts of the country. Not only arable farming but the keeping of animals was organised on a collective basis. Transhumance continued but it was collectively organised, with families taking turns to spend time in the high pastures in summer and animals looked after communally.

The Soviet system increased the productive capacity of the village, and improved local livelihoods, by bringing new lands into cultivation. Until Soviet times, households cultivated land quite close to their homes. Under the collective system, households continued to cultivate that land individually but lands at some distance were cultivated by the collective farm. Individuals received cash as well as income in kind from working on collectives. Cheap transport to town made it possible for the produce of the collective farm to be sold and also enabled people from the village to work in towns nearby like the spa town of Dilijan. Electricity was introduced and the state introduced services and amenities. These included a secondary school, health services and amenities such as shops, baths and a hairdresser.

With the collapse of the Soviet system and independence, the people of Gosh have seen their livelihoods collapse back into self-sufficiency. The lands cultivated by the collective farm are too far away for most people to be able to transport produce from them and in any case it cannot be marketed because the transport system has all but collapsed and there is a very reduced market in town, where there is much less cash, and practically no possibility for export any longer. Most households simply cultivate the land around their houses, and eat the produce. They have practically no possibilities for earning any cash.

The village is surrounded by forest which could add significantly to livelihoods through the use of wild resources, or through ecotourism. However, the area is now protected forest and the penalties for hunting are severe - we were told by one villager that the penalties for killing an animal are greater than those for killing another person.

Pasturing animals is a problem around the village, because taking animals through the protected forest is prohibited. There is an ancient system of transhumance in the area, with animals being taken to high pastures for the summer months, but this all but broke down in the early 1990s, when the collective farm was disbanded.