Ashken, her daughter Tsovinar, and four grandchildren eat sausage, cheese, boiled meat on days when there are funerals at the cemetery nearby their home in the town of Aragatsavan.

It is an Armenian custom to toast the dead with a shot of vodka and “oghormatas” (rest in peace), at the graveside. Mourners typically bring food with them to “chase” the vodka down.

But, to Ashkhen’s good fortune, most often there is more drinking than eating and the leftovers remain at the graveside and become a buffet for Ashkhen’s family.

“They bury and leave, only then I go, collect and bring it,” says Ashkhen, age 74.

There are also drinks left which are either stolen by a drunkard neighbor or Ashkhen takes and trades it for food. At home there’s always vodka brought from the cemetery and when on rare occasions she has guests Ashkhen says, shyly: “Sorry, I have no coffee, but I can offer you vodka.”

Once an urbanized town of 8,000, with four factories, Aragatsavan now has about 5,500 residents and no working plants.

“The All-National Armenian Movement ate our town and made a village from it,” says the deputy head of the village Hovsep Sahakyan

Since the end of the USSR, villagers manage to live at the expense of farming and cattle-breeding. The richest are those who have apricot gardens, who during the harvest season, being excited with their income even buy cars, but in winter just sit empty.

It is, too, a village of extremely poor – especially families in which there is male leader. Like Ashkhen’s family.

Three of daughter Tsovinar’s children are “illegitimate”. Only the oldest, 15-year old Arman, is from Tsovinar’s husband. The family hasn’t heard from him for more than 10 years. They think he might have died in the war in Karabakh.

She has three children, ages 4, two and four months, by a married man from the village with whom she has had a love affair for about 10 years. She’s had four abortions, but stopped having abortions because they cost about $30, and her lover, Vardan, stopped paying for them. Tsovinar, age 35, also says the abortions were weighing on her conscience.

The last time she had an abortion, Tsovinar says: “. . . the doctor took it out and he showed me its leg and I swore I would never commit a murder. I felt what a sin it was.”

Tsovinar has three sisters. They have disowned Tsovinar because of her “bastard” children. She has two brothers, but they left to find work in Russia and no one has heard from them.

Her other children have turned against Ashkhen because she does not condemn Tsovinar and accepts the grandchildren.

Other villagers, too, have turned against Ashkhen’s family.

Tsovinar has refused to allow Vardan to see her anymore. She says he never helps with care of the children. She has taught the children to say “I spit in my father’s face, because he doesn’t bring me candies”.

“Whenever he wanted to he came to see my daughter just for pleasure,” says Ashkhen. “Now, the mother doesn’t allow the father to come.”

Vardan also took possession of two hectares of land that belongs to Ashkhen from which they were growing hay.

Armenianow.com