After police searched the apartment of a woman protesting a Yerevan property development, locals say hopes of change after the 2018 revolution are fading.
When anti-government protests swept Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, in the spring of 2018, Seda Grigorian was on the streets alongside thousands of like-minded marchers.
Seda Grigorian
After protest leader Nikol Pashinian was made prime minister, he drew cheers of approval from crowds who gathered to hear him speak: The revolution, he vowed, marked the beginning of a new era in which the voices of Armenia’s citizens would be heard, and the years of corruption and trampled rights were over. Several months later, Yerevan Mayor Hayk Marutian was voted into power echoing those sentiments, giving many hope that deeply controversial demolitions of historic buildings, and charmless high-rise developments would end in the city.
Three years after the revolution, Grigorian says her hopes of wholesale change faded as she tailed two plainclothes policemen rifling through her family home on November 6, searching for “a can of red spray paint.” The search was part of a criminal investigation sparked by her opposition to a high-rise project in Yerevan.
Grigorian, a media professional, lives in the leafy suburb of Phys-Gorodok in the northwest of Yerevan. The suburb is named after the Soviet-era physics institute it was built around in the 1950s.
Phys-Gorodok is beloved by locals for its park-like green space and is seen as something of an oasis in Armenia’s often hectic and fume-clouded capital city.
In February 2021, Armenia’s Culture Ministry declared the suburb a “local cultural monument,” effectively preserving its unique atmosphere. But shortly afterwards, a section of Phys-Gorod disappeared from the “cultural monument” map exactly in the area where property developers had planned a 12-story building.