Eleven years ago Shakeh Havan-Karapetian came to Armenia from Boston with a pioneering patriotism mixed with realistic expectations. The result of her life journey is a business that today is a Yerevan institution.
Artbridge café/bookstore introduced a consumer concept that has since been mimicked, but hardly matched. So ingrained is the café's still-modest presence that Yerevanians use it as a landmark for giving directions along Abovian Street, the capital's most popular thoroughfare. Locations are often found by saying whether the destination is above or below Artbridge; on the same side of the street or the opposite side of Artbridge.
Like her popular meeting/reading/eating spot, Havan-Karapetian has made slight adjustments to her transitional surroundings over the years, but the durability of Artbridge and of the owner's life in Armenia is due to the stability of her founding principles: respect, honesty, compassion.
When Artbridge's doors opened in 2001, it was a lonely but, to many, welcome early-morning café offering breakfast beginning at 8:30 a.m. Except for hotels serving guests only, no place had bothered to risk a "rise and shine" service in a society for which 10 a.m. is routine daybreak.
"Even now, while you can buy flowers at four o'clock in the morning, you still will not find a place to have a cup of coffee [early in the morning]. This helped me to attract people," Havan-Karapetian says.
The Artbridge boutique style that combined a village-like interior with contemporary tract lighting and original, rotating art was an immediate attraction, especially to the non-Armenian international community. By its first full summer season, Artbridge had become the go-to place for diasporans—especially youth drawn by the café's mix of home and homeland (i.e., American-brewed coffee as a side to traditional Persian-Armenian dishes and delicacies). Soon, though—as Yerevan culture started catching up to the coffee-house style—Artbridge became a hangout for locals, too.
At first, university students and young professionals looking for a spot to socialize that was not a disco or a mafia bar made up Artbridge's local clientele. Later, though, it became a business lunch or shopping date destination.
"When I told my friends what I wanted to open, everyone would laugh, saying, 'Nobody reads books, who are you opening it for?'" remembers Shakeh.
"For myself" was the only answer.
Havan-Karapetian, 50, brought a bit of Boston's cultured lifestyle to Yerevan and, as it turned out, there were a lot of Armenians glad that she had created it—even if for herself.
In the very beginning, the café lived off the income of the bookstore, which featured new editions of Armenian classics alongside travel books, fairytales and used English paperbacks, the latter constantly restocked by a one-for-two trading scheme. Artbridge also became the first shop of its kind to sell tickets to Yerevan cultural events. (Previously, tickets were purchased only at performance venues or at designated kiosks.)
"That (the reliance on book sales) was unexpected for us, but the cafe was not working so much and the bookstore, in fact, was subsidizing it," the owner says.
Born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in the United States, Shakeh moved to Armenia in 1999, following her husband's death, with her daughter Sarine, who was three then, and son Zare, who was seven. She says that decision reflected her desire to change everything in her life and start writing from "a new, blank and very challenging page."
A manufacturing engineer by training, Shakeh had never run a business prior to coming to Armenia. She knew, though, what kind of business she wanted to bring to Armenia — a place where a single person like herself would go, take a break, and do some reading, without being disturbed. And she wanted a place where waiters or waitresses would not look at that customer as if to say (in the manner of Armenia's Soviet style): "If you are finished, then get up and go."
"Perhaps from a purely business point of view this (relaxed policy) is an obstacle, because you will have fewer vacant tables and less customer turnover, but I've thought of options to compensate for that," she says.
When Shakeh was just starting everything, one of her acquaintances gave her a piece of advice—"the most important thing is to think half a step ahead of all the rest."
Over the past decade, she has found her way through the maze of a changing business climate in Armenia, and has secured from it a home. She has learned patience with a foreign and slow-to-evolve system that frequently challenges preconceptions as well as moral conviction. It is a lesson necessary to endurance here, and one some diasporans never learn, before giving up on Armenia.
At least one principle, she says, has proved solid: "If you make money, return it (into society) in some form," she advises.
Shakeh's expression of this principle is seen most clearly in a program she set up to encourage literacy in the provinces and remote villages, through book fairs.
By agreement with publishers, books are sold at cost outside Yerevan. The overhead of transportation, staffing etc., is covered by Artbridge, which also usually organizes a concert or an exhibition of paintings alongside the book fair.
"I believe that love of books should become a tradition," says Shakeh, who feels the success of her investment in Armenia when children in remote villages visit the fairs and start looking through the books she has brought.
"With this project we create a link between children and books rather than sell books," she says. She does not want to donate books, out of principle, since she believes that one has to "earn" them. "When you buy a book, you value and appreciate it in a different way," says Shakeh. She says she "has not regretted for a single minute" her move to Armenia. Nor does she hold hard feelings against those who have left in search of opportunities she has found here, but that were out of reach for others.
"A young person who has a mindset of conquering the world has to make a choice, and very often it is normal that they will go, so that later they can come back with more appreciation (of what they had). Otherwise, if they are always wanting to leave, but can't, they will always be dissatisfied with what they've got here," she says.
Despite her investment and commitment to Armenia's development, Havan-Karapetian, like other repatriates, must tolerate an indefinite status until she should decide to change it.
"I've been here for 11 years, I am no longer a diasporan Armenian, but I am not a native Armenian either," says the open and personable businesswoman. "I do not know who I am.
"I can vote in two countries (the United States and Iran), which do not interest me at all. I cannot, though, vote (nationally) in Armenia, where I do take interest."
Entering her second decade in Armenia, Shakeh says she is thinking about applying for citizenship to replace the 10-year residency card she has maintained. Prior to last year, she hadn't thought much about getting the Armenian passport, as there really isn't a lot of difference between the residency card and the passport, she says.
Holding a residency card, she can own her business and even accrue a pension. The card even allows her to vote in local elections, and it was that experience in the 2009 Yerevan mayoral campaign that made her rethink the value of the passport—because being a citizen would allow her to have a vote in national politics.
"Voting for mayor was a special experience," Shakeh says, adding that casting a local-election ballot gave her a taste of participating in a presidential race.
Meanwhile, as she ponders citizenship, she says: "I have no country, but I do have a people."
