Mother Armenia Monument

This guide to the Mother Armenia Monument in Yerevan begins at an ordinary market stall in 1960, where seventeen-year-old Genya Muradian was waiting in line for vegetables with her mother when a mustached stranger began staring at her. That stranger turned out to be the sculptor Ara Harutyunyan, searching for a face and body for a monument to Armenian motherhood on a pedestal recently emptied of a toppled statue of Stalin. You'll hear how Genya's family was talked into letting her sit for the sculptor, and what she noticed about her own face once the statue finally rose over Victory Park. For decades afterward, she kept a secret about it from everyone, including her husband.