My curiosity has finally returned! I'm back to wanting to just mindlessly roam streets and search for interesting aspects of history and beauty within them. There are times in the day where the sun still comes out a bit and the light is quite beautiful, and that had me wanting to enjoy it with a few explorations around some nearby parks I had yet to actually explore. The parks nearby were built during the Soviet era, and often enough that means they have some sort of structure or pieces of art in them that reflect that era. In Armenian tradition that tends to include large sculptures of various folklore or Soviet symbolism. A lot of the time these pieces of art stand out quite a bit, they tend to be quite large, semi-finished in the sense that half of the initial rock remains.
I think in the future I'll write individually about some of these parks and their history, but today wasn't really the best day to go about photographing some of them. One of which was only now undergoing a massive amount of reconstruction which had huge machinery around, and huge holes in the ground where they intended to replace many of the trees. It was void despite being quite beautiful. And I took the Helios 44-2 with me which just wasn't wide enough to capture the main details of the park itself. The others were also a bit tight, one had significantly more greenery in it but again the focal length wasn't the best decision of mine. It sat around the general area of a charge and had some religious statues around the overgrowth, as well as a Soviet era structure of many different crosses. That was interesting to see given there's usually a narrative that such creations were simply banned then. Here that wasn't so much the case.
What was particularly interesting was that despite these parks mostly being in quite busy locations, they were each largely empty. A few Russian skateboarders filming their little videos. A group of teenagers taking some social media videos around some trees. And perhaps the odd person walking a dog. It was surprising to see so much of these larger parks empty. But that made me realise that for many most of the comfort here doesn't come from these larger parks with some missing nature, and instead their comfort tends to come from the courtyards around their apartments which do have a bit more green around them. I suppose you have to go out of your way more to come to these larger ones, which was the case for me. Having to walk through old streets and busy roads to get there. I even thought of getting the bus to them a few times.
Still it was nice to get out and explore a bit. I had fun taking photographs and looking ahead and how I could return to these parks and photograph them properly, but also actually research them a bit and see what they may have looked like in the past. Perhaps even find some information out on the art that remains within them. Especially one of the parks dedicated to motherhood. Perhaps its name and themes come from the nation's stronger ties to Christianity.
