From now on, “168 hours” will include old and new pictures and stories of events in the upcoming editions. This time we will write about the pictures of Vova (elephant), which were taken by the chief-editor of Photolur agency Halbert Baghdasaryan in 1970. We welcome your suggestions too.
A sensational incident happened in Yerevan in 1970: Vova run away from the zoo (elephant). It went out of the zoo, moved down Miasnikyan street and was about to reach the bridge at the end of that street. A lot of citizens of Yerevan witnessed that incident, because they wanted to see the elephant walking on the street and watch the process of returning the animal to the zoo. Photographer Herbert Baghdasaryan didn’t believe this; he thought this was a joke. “There was a big crowd of people there.
People walking from the back side of the elephant were in three meters distance. And people, who were walking from the front side were in a twenty meters distance. The furious elephant was moving his head, and people were rapidly running away. There was a little hill near that street and people were climbing that hill. They did it, but still I don’t understand how they could do that, because it was impossible to climb that hill”,-says Herbert Baghdasaryan. Vova was mad and unpredictable. It was damaging cars and was very dangerous for people. The mad animal had to be returned to the zoo. But how could they do that? There were a lot of soldiers in the streets. There was also a tank there. “At first they were trying to push the elephant with the tank. But there was no result. Vova wasn’t like the existing elephant of our zoo, Vova was very big. Finally, due to their efforts the elephant walked to the gates of the zoo, but still they couldn’t make it enter the zoo”,-says Herbert Baghdasaryan.
There was no soporific bullet there to make the elephant sleep. A decision was taken to kill it. They shot the elephant, but the wounded animal didn’t want to die and was still very dangerous. They had shot the elephant’s head too, but it didn’t want to die, it was running and was still very active. They surrounded Vova and then pressed it to the wall with the help of a tank. Being pressed to the wall by a tank, Vova could survive several hours: “It was still breathing, it wasn’t easy to kill that huge animal”. Anyway, Vova’s bloody body was taken to the zoo to feed other animals.
The citizens of Yerevan still remember Vova and tell stories why Vova got angry and ran away from the zoo. The trainer of Vova, Ivan, didn’t leave Armenia after that incident and stayed in Armenia. He continues to work at the zoo.
This story didn’t finish, on the contrary, it continued. Although a lot of photographers had taken the pictures of that incident, the central newspapers published articles stating that Vova had been returned to the zoo and was there. “People were calling us from Moscow and asking us to send them pictures to prove that the animal had been returned. We said that the elephant had been killed, but the newspapers didn’t reject the information, because the news about the incident had already been published in the central Soviet newspapers. Then this accident was published in foreign newspapers”,-said Herbert Baghdasaryan.