Visiting one post-Soviet state, you can then recognize it in all others – the similar patterns of urban planning and the identical buildings, structures, roads, pipes, wires, tiles, etc. However, an outsider delving inside under the extreme familiarity of the material environment finds an extreme “strangeness” of social interactions and practices. The “Outside In” series is about emplaced paradoxes and nuances. It spotlights the mundane in Armenia’s peripheral locations, where the seemingly unspectacular encounters with people and things allowing us to capture the unique features of the territory.
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Outside In
Essay 13
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?
T.S. Eliot
Things of Fear
Growing up, I was captivated by Gothic horror—from Nikolay Gogol’s “Viy” and “Terrible Vengeance,” to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” just to name a few. This period was followed by more philosophical literature, still tinged with an eerie undertone, such as Goethe’s “Faust, a Tragedy”, Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” and “Screwtape Letters” by C. S. Lewis. Oh, those sweet rebellious pleasures of nerdy youth, reading horrors in the dead of night under a blanket with a flashlight.
As an adult, mermaids, ghosts, witches, vampires, and other evil spirits have lost their frightening vibe. Dentist’s bills and housing prices nowadays are far more terrifying than fictional beings. In fact, I would jump at the opportunity to buy a haunted mansion—especially if there’s a discount for otherworldly inconveniences. A proper branding campaign would help cover utilities and renovation. Perhaps some money would even be left for a retirement fund as the thought of dying in poverty is much more terrifying than that of the fiercest spooks and deadliest curses.
On a serious note, Homo Sapiens are the most dangerous species—insatiable, violent and ruthless. As the French philosopher Michel Foucault famously argued in a debate on human nature with the American linguist Noam Chomsky, “humans commit violence just because they can.” Purposeful destruction lies at the core of our “civilization,” and it becomes more and more profound with the rise of new technologies. Mountains torn apart by mining, waters drained to dust, forests on fire, and smog instead of fresh air. However, one day nature will fiercely and inevitably strike back. The lizard will sit in the sun, the grass will grow between the cracks, and we as a species will be extinct buried by the detritus of the sea. Mildly put, it sounds unsettling to me.
As Halloween is almost upon us, the time has come for pumpkin carving, munching on candies, and sinister mystical stories. Perhaps my story will not really be sinister, definitely not mystical, and might even be a touch comical. What is there to fear in a small Armenian town where “there is nothing” [Arm: ban chka]? Apart from war and earthquakes, on a daily basis the answer is the slow creeping wilderness, the untamed and self-willed ecosystem that reclaims what is its. When people leave, nature feasts.
Jackals’ “Concerts”
In the forests of the Armenian Highlands, lies a small town stripped of Soviet modernity with no more than metal corpses left of industrial buildings. For the past 30 years, the town has been reclaimed by a tide of greenery and with it, wildlife has returned. Birds make nests between roofing tiles, their songs filling the crisp morning air. Hares and graceful forest cats peep through bushes. But as evening comes, the seemingly romantic idyll becomes dominated by the haunting calls and eerie howls of jackals. These nocturnal creatures were part of the landscape long before it was “cultivated” by the Soviet state when mining and industry drove them deep into the wild. Now, they have returned as a stark reminder of unpredictable forces beyond human control. This instance sparked fear and a certain melancholy among town’s residents who viewed it as a sign of civilization’s collapse. Learning that they can’t quite manage the world around them, they feel left behind and invisible.
On the day of my arrival to town, I became acquainted not only with its human residents but with the non-human ones as well. Walking uphill in the dusk for dinner, I heard jackals howling for the first time in my life. The shock permanently imprinted the moment in my mind. A chill ran down my spine and every hair stood on end, a visceral response to severe fright. And that it was. To my untrained ear, the sounds resembled the shrieks and cries of tortured babies. Later I learned that jackals are known for their unique vocalization—eerie wails, yips, and barks. Their howls, occurring in a coordinated chorus, seemed to be amplified across the valley, bouncing off the mountainsides in an echo. The sounds were anything but melodic evoking a primordial fear of the wild, of feral predators lurking unsettlingly close to dwellings.
Jackals are not aggressive enough to attack people first, though they are notorious for their audacious raids on poultry houses and barns. Over time, I not only stopped fearing them, but even found a strange enjoyment in these non-human “concerts” which occurred twice a day, around 6 p.m. and then again at 1 a.m. Each time, it felt like an eerie roll call, with distinct voices echoing through the night as if in dialogue. I imagined the exchange going something like:
- Hey what’s up?
- Not much. And you, still alive? How’s the wife and children?
- Good, good! Did you hear that Ashot got married?…
The “dialogues” would be repeated, with new voices joining in, lasting around fifteen minutes before cutting off abruptly, only to start again later in the night, and like clockwork, every day after that. The howls were so reliable and consistent over time that I could set my watch by them. As I embraced the presence of wilderness, unable to uninhabit the place, for a while it seemed that symbolically the jackals and I struck a balance of peaceful coexistence. Until one winter day, when a face-to-face encounter with a jackal gave me an aorto-tearing fright once again and made me question our status quo.
The Encounter
It was early December, I had stayed up very late, finishing some writing. To mark the end of the process, I decided to step out to have a smoke. I threw on a sweater over my pajamas and left the apartment. The stairwell was pitch dark and silent. At the same time, my neighbor Arthur, who worked as an on-call taxi driver, also came out as he had an early fare. The light from his apartment lit up the stairwell. And there on the mat in front of my neighbor’s apartment was a jackal curled up asleep. We lived on the third floor, so the sight of the wild animal was anything but anticipated. I couldn’t stop myself from screaming, whether out of fear, surprise, or both, I couldn’t tell.
My scream startled Arthur’s wife, who rushed out and, upon seeing the jackal, joined me in screaming. The downstairs neighbors quickly poured into the stairwell, adding their voices to our chaotic chorus. With all the commotion, the jackal seemed more terrified than any of us. It rushed down the stairs, chased by the sound of our screams and leaving a trail of droppings behind itself. On the first floor, the poor thing was attacked by the militant Seda, who managed to hit it with a flashlight in her hand. The jackal sobbed from pain and the injustice of life, the hostility with which its peaceful sleep was interrupted by humans. Quickening its pace, the animal finally darted out of the building, vanishing in an unknown direction. When the chaos finally subsided, we cleaned the poop marking our unexpected nighttime visitor’s path and went back in. My desire for smoking in the dead of night in a dark stairwell vanished, just like the jackal.
By the next morning, the story had spread, discussed by young and old alike. With each retelling, new details were added, spicing it up from a farce into a chilling town legend. During my stay, I had never heard even a slightly scary or mystical story associated with the town. Now, there was a legend of “the bloodthirsty jackal,” that nearly bit off Arthur’s leg. I guess every town needs its own bit of creepy folklore. For a long time, mothers did not let their children go outside after dark, some residents even set traps near their doors. They were kept in place until one nearly ensnared an elderly, half-blind lady, who almost stepped into it. This is something that might have been quite misfortunate for her ability to walk again. But that is a totally different story.
*Author’s note: All names are pseudonyms used for data protection reasons. The text is written partially drawing on data collected with financial support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 865976).
Drawing by Maria Gunko.
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