From the Rubble

Nothing had prepared me to witness the desolation of the Armenian earthquake, neither years of describing the effects of terror in Northern Ireland nor the shock of the Greek-Turkish conflict in Cyprus in 1974. War carries its own rough cure of hatred: a natural calamity provides no such obvious conduit.

It is, of course, not so much the huge extent of the ruination of Leninakan, Spitak, and some of their surrounding villages; not even the sight, still common eight and nine days after the event, of bodies with their flesh blackening being dragged from the rubble. It is the comprehensive desolation of the survivors: the zomboid gait of the groups of unshaven men who pass along the streets; the miserable stares of the women huddling about the wood fires they have lit outside the collapsed masses of their former homes.

JL

About the Author

John Lloyd

Nothing had prepared me to witness the desolation of the Armenian earthquake, neither years of describing the effects of terror in Northern Ireland nor the shock of the Greek-Turkish conflict in Cyprus in 1974. War carries its own rough cure of hatred: a natural calamity provides no such obvious conduit.

It is, of course, not so much the huge extent of the ruination of Leninakan, Spitak, and some of their surrounding villages; not even the sight, still common eight and nine days after the event, of bodies with their flesh blackening being dragged from the rubble. It is the comprehensive desolation of the survivors: the zomboid gait of the groups of unshaven men who pass along the streets; the miserable stares of the women huddling about the wood fires they have lit outside the collapsed masses of their former homes.