Treasures of Yerevan

There has been a football stadium in Yerevan’s Vardanants Street since 1935 when the old Dinamo Stadium was opened. In 1931 the city’s Dinamo Sports Club had asked the City Council of Armenian Commissars to provide a suitable site for a new football stadium for the city. A centrally located 16 hectare site was provided and after two years of construction, the new stadium was inaugurated with a match between Dinamo’s arch rivals Spartak Yerevan (later Ararat Yerevan) and KBKT Moscow.

Despite several renovations the elegant curves and classical pillars survive into the modern era, and provide Yerevan with a visually stunning national stadium. The first major renovation of the Dinamo Stadium came in 1953 under the auspices of architect Koryun Hakobyan who was also partly responsible for Yerevan’s much lauded concert and indoor sports venue called the Hamalir. The Dinamo Stadium gained its wonderfully ornate western facade during this initial refurbishment. However, by the end of the 20th century the stadium played very much second fiddle to its crosstown rival, the mighty Hrazdan Stadium. Opened in November 1970 it was also the work of Hakobyan, a former weightlifter, he was a favourite of the Soviet Union’s Politburo and became known as the “People’s Architect”.

Koryan Hakobyan

In 1999, with the help of a sizeable injection of funds from UEFA, a two year project of upgrading the Dinamo Stadium began, costing €3 million. The beautifully sympathetic modernisation turned the venue into a fully covered all seater stadium for the first time. The classical colonnades and Hakobyan’s facade, adorned with flag poles and bas-reliefs, were retained and the stadium’s extraordinary new roof turned the venue into a modern, but beautiful, international standard venue capable of holding 16,000 spectators.

Even though the stadium was owned by the City of Yerevan it was renamed the Republican Stadium (Hanrapetaken in Armenian). The closing year of the century was a pivotal one in the Pink City’s long history. On October 27th 1999, five masked gunmen lead by dissident Nairi Hunanyan broke into the Armenian Parliament and killed eight people including prime minister and national hero Vazgen Sargsyan and the President of the National Assembly, Karen Demirchyan. Sargsyan had risen to prominence as the commander of Armenian forces in the 1989-1994 Nagorno-Karabakh War with Azerbaijan. He was appointed Defence Minister and had only become the eighth Prime Minister of Armenia in the June of the year of his assassination. As a remark of respect, the Republican Stadium became the Vazgen Sargsyan Republic Stadium and his image was incorporated into the entrance to the stadium.

The first game in the upgraded stadium came in October 2000 when Armenia took on Ukraine and raced into a two goal lead before the Ukrainians spoilt the occasion somewhat by rattling in three goals, two by Andrei Shevchenko, to take the points in a World Cup qualifying match.

The 16,000 capacity was reached in October 2003 when a European Championship qualifying match bought Spain to Yerevan. In 2008 the capacity was reduced to 14,403 when more VIP sections were installed by Israeli company Green Diversified.

Across town the Hrazdan Stadium and its iconic Soviet era floodlights dominate the city skyline. A proposal for a stadium in the gorge of the Hrazdan river was first muted in the 1950’s when Soviet First Deputy Chairman Anastas Mikoyan, a close ally of Stalin, visited the city and could see the natural amphitheatre of the gorge from where he was staying in the Presidential mansion.

However, work on the project did not start until 1969. Under the exacting eye of Koryun Hakobyan and fellow architect Gurgen Musheghyan, the work was remarkably completed in just eighteen months, no doubt more than a little pressure being exerted from Moscow to finish in 1970 to mark the 50th anniversary of the “Sovietisation” of Armenia.

The 75,000 capacity stadium cost five million roubles which included financial support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. It was officially opened in November 1970 in front of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, although the planned parade had to be put back 24 hours due to heavy snow.

The magnificent stadium became home to the city’s powerhouse club, Ararat Yerevan, regular challengers in the Soviet Top League. The first official football match at the Hrazdan took place in May 1971 when an all time record attendance of 78,000 was set for the visit of Kazakstan’s Kairat Almaty.

The mountainous stadium became a fortress for Ararat and in 1973 they won the Soviet Top League and Soviet Cup double. It was the third season running the League had been won by a non-Muscovite club after successes for Dynamo Kyiv in 1971 and Zarya Voroshilovgrad (now known as Luhansk) a year later. The legendary 1973 Ararat side was commemorated in 2016 by Tigran Barseghyan and Vladimir Antashyan’s quite extraordinary bronze statues of 19 Ararat players and coaches standing behind the vast Soviet Top League trophy. Sadly, it was reported in May 2020 that four of the bronze statues had been stolen from their lofty position overlooking their fortress.

The Soviet Union national team even held two international matches, against Finland and Greece, at the Hrazdan in 1978. The stadium was privatised in 2003 and the new owners, the Hrazdan Holding CJSC, set about modernising the stadium. It became all seater for the first time with a reduced capacity of 54,208. The renovation was completed in 2008 and held an international for the first time in eight years when Armenia took on Turkey. It was something of an ironic opening fixture as one of the best views of the stadium is afforded from the Tsitsernakaberd Genocide memorial, erected in 1967 to remember the 1915 genocide of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks.

The owners of Hrazdan spent €6 million on the stadium in 2012 with the view to obtaining the grading to enable the hosting of UEFA finals. Now trading as Hrazdan Leasehold Venture CJSC the owners fell out with the Armenian Football Association and the mighty stadium was mothballed in 2016 and a year later even the pitch was dug up.

Meanwhile, Ararat, who had been continuous members of the Soviet Top League from 1965 to Armenia’s independence in 1991, had a huge fall from grace. They have only one Armenian title, in 1993, and fell some way below the new dominate Yerevan club, FC Pyunik. Pyunik’s ten consecutive Armenian championships between 2001 and 2010 have come under serious scrutiny with allegations of bribery and corruption. Match-fixing in general has caused seemingly irreparable damage to attendances in Armenian League matches and Ararat have been forced to play home games in modest venues like the Mika Stadium and the Yerevan Academy Stadium, with only the odd bigger match being held at the fabulous Republican Stadium.

The most recent Governmental talks surrounding the Hrazdan Stadium leave it’s future still somewhat in limbo. Armenian FA President Arthur Vanetsyan has lobbied Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan for a new national stadium, calling Hrazdan “obsolete” for international competition. When pushed for a resolution with the impasse with the owners of Hrazdan, Vanetsyan stated negotiations were currently ongoing with a view to returning Armenian Championship football to this leviathan of a stadium. In many quarters, eyes would mist over at the prospect of Ararat, the mountain kings, returning to their spiritual home.

This article first appeared in the September 2020 edition of Groundtastic Magazine (No.102)

The Death Match

Should you ever go to the wonderful Valeriy Lobanovskyi Dynamo stadium in Kyiv, please take a moment to look at the small steel sculpture tucked behind the ticket office. The sculpture of four men gazing into a distant horizon is a memorial to the four former Dynamo players that lost their lives in as a result of the infamous “Death Match” in 1942.

The German army had invaded Ukraine in 1941, silencing the mighty roar of the Russian guns and forcing the population into a cruel level of starvation. During the German occupation of Ukraine, football was largely banned and Soviet clubs were dissolved. Dynamo, of course, were favoured by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), to the Nazi’s, therefore, the very embodiment of communism, and were immediately forced to disband. Many of the professional players in Kyiv joined the Red Army or the partisan resistance movement.

Charged with instilling a pacification process in the city, Lieutenant General Friedrich Georg Eberhardt suggested football matches be arranged between the local population and the occupying forces teams.

It was therefore, unwittingly, permitted that eight Dynamo players and three from Lokomotyv, who had remained in Kyiv and were now consigned to working in the Kyiv Bread Factory No.1 owned by a Dynamo supporter, could form a team called FC Start and play exhibition matches promoted as the “City of Kyiv All-Stars”.

Under the impression they were facing a team of bakers and blissfully unaware they had all been professional players, the first matches organised against Start were against a team of the Wermacht’s Hungarian and Romanian regiments. The match against the Hungarian regiment saw Start win easily by 6-2. They then defeated the Romanian regiment 11-0. It was reported that Start player Ivan Kuzmenko trained with a ball three times heavier than a standard ball so his shots were so hard the Romanian keeper would duck out of the way to prevent injury! Then a German army team were beaten 6-0.

The Germans then sent the stronger Hungarian team MSG Wal to play Start twice in a few days. Wal were beaten 5-1 and then again 3-2. The Germans by now trying to save face then sent their crack undefeated “all Ayrian” Luftwaffe side known as Flakelf to play Start, who defiantly wore red shirts, but they were humiliated 5-1. A rematch was ordered and despite commands for Start to “ease up”, the Kyiv side won yet again 5-3. Flakelf’s second and third goals had come in quick succession, after the Start goalkeeper had deliberately been knocked unconscious by some rough play by the Germans, and had pulled the score back to 3-3. He then came to his senses and Start roared back to claim yet another victory.

It was the last straw for the Germans. According to the Russian version of events, five Start players were arrested and tortured, Nikolai Korotkykh died during the torture and Olexander Tkachenko was never seen again. The other three players were sent to the labour camp at Syrets. During their internment there was an uprising against the camp’s administration and the remaining Start players Ivan Kuzmenko, Oleksey Klymenko and goalkeeper Nikolai Trusevich were singled out and executed by firing squad. Their bodies were tossed into the mass graves in the ravine at Babi Yar alongside nearly 34,000 bodies of Kyiv’s Jewish population, massacred in September 1941.

There has always been a historical dispute over the version of events surrounding the death of the Start players, the official German report into the atrocity cited the reason for the arrest of the Start players was not due to the Flakelf result at all and, indeed, the game had been played in good spirits in an unguarded stadium. According to the Germans, some days after the 5-3 game Start played another Ukrainian side, Rukh, and had soundly beaten them 8-0. Rukh’s trainer, Georgi Shvetsov, was said to be so incensed at the result that he told the Gestapo that certain Start players were working for the NKVD and it was for that reason, say the Germans, the five players were arrested.

The 5-3 match was played on August 9th 1942 at the Zenit Stadium in front of 2,000 spectators paying an entry fee of five rubles. This would have been considered prohibitively expensive at the time and was designed to deliberately keep the crowd small in case of further embarrassment to the Wermacht. They had also banned a lot of the local press from attending.

The Zenit Stadium was renamed the Start Stadium, and still stands in a very run down form in Sholudenka Street, a ten minute walk from the main train and metro station, Vokzalna. The entrance remains impressive with the name Start still proudly displayed in Cyrillic. The stadium appears to be no longer used for football, the remaining small stand is strewn with graffiti and the extensive wooden bench seating has been either vandalised or appears to be suffering from subsidence. The pitch is badly rutted and uncared for. Local children run around the wrecked turf, while parents sit smoking on the few serviceable benches left intact.

Also inside the dilapidated stadium, and notably having avoided the attention of the local vandals, is Anatoly Kharechko’s Death Match memorial sculpture. Unveiled in 1981, and cast in bronze, it depicts a naked athlete trying to kick a ball but being attacked by ungodly creatures. While the scene of this tragic episode in World War II may be crumbling into oblivion, the two memorials at both stadiums remain poignant reminders of this sombre time in Kyiv’s footballing history.

This article first appeared in the December 2019 issue of Groundtastic Magazine (No.100)