I did a post yesterday on a Cosmonaut mosaic that I had stumbled into in a very old industrial area of Yerevan. This area being nothing but factories ranging from the 1920s to 1960s. Nothing in the area is really new. It's all old, crumbling, and speaks of a completely different era if repurposed. It was here that the sun was intense, no nature around to protect you from the harsh UV. The heat almost unbearable. No longer are the famous drinking fountains of Armenia found around here. This was purely administrative and industrial back in the Soviet Union, and little has changed since. Such areas are like a time capsule here. You can stumble across all kinds of strange pieces of history, much like that mosaic!
Without getting into trouble, I walked around in search of little details in the area, behind some of the factories but still not within their walls. Old cars and buses are left ignored, rusted over and either full of little details of the past or just rubbish. Everything here spoke of man-made creations. Rustic steel and sheets of metal everywhere, no regular beautiful walls or fences. Where once such things would've been found, it's now a scrapyard where even the nearby locals just take whatever is left and repurpose it. I found this old car, of which I had never seen before but on this day saw many still being driven around. Its interior still very Eastern with the patterns over the seats. I thought of who it once belonged to. What stories it held that it couldn't tell.
Elsewhere, large industrial roads open up. There's nothing here but a similar feeling of decay, heat, and concrete. There was no real life here, everyone around seemed aged, tired, and precisely the type of people one would find within such a space. The hardworking wrinkled hands, scorched from the sun above. Nobody young ends up such fields. I suspect this area always looked this way, where there were no trees. No nature unless it's around the administrative buildings with locked-away gardens keeping away the signs of the natural world. This was no place for nature. No place for caring of the world's preservation. Intense chemical and coal factories that would've once poured pollutants into the air above from the many smoke stacks.
This was another world. One I had never seen before. It felt strange to say the least. And I wasn't even within the heart of it all. Merely at the entrance of another realm. Still, I would think of the past. The propaganda posters which would've reigned over every window and doorway to remind the workers that were placed here what it was all for. In such areas where there is no beauty, the inhabitants needed something to give them motivation. Particularly under the strong heat of the sun which only exacerbated the senses through the smell of burning metal, chemicals, and all else beyond the regular natural world.
And here we return to the mosaic. Again, by the side of a major street but still so empty. The only people around a group of aging individuals. People of the forgotten era. They now stand around under the shade, passing the day just figuring things out one step at a time. In an era they have no patience for and no intent to understand. Born of the industrial and the manual, now in the space of the digital and the significantly faster paced. And with so many stories that also remain untold.