DOCTOR Diana Minasyan is originally from the Armenian capital Yerevan, and works at Cork University Hospital and St Mary’s Orthopaedic Hospital.
She came to Ireland in 2002, initially working outside her profession, and living in Mulloughmore, Co Sligo, in her words “a tiny, beautiful village.”
The Armenian woman “clicked” with the Irish natives, and notes a shared sense of humour. “It’s very, very similar,” she says, “and I clicked with it very well.”
Minasyan was schooled in Yerevan during Soviet times and received a high quality education, which came with a heavy workload. It wasn’t all hard work, however, and the games she enjoyed alongside her school friends would certainly be familiar to Irish children of the 1970s and 1980s, with football, hide-and-seek and skipping among the favourites.
Despite the Soviet system, the Armenians always managed to keep their native language predominant, but times would get tough in more ways than one for this proud nation.
By the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms were hastening the end of the Soviet Union. Minasyan remembers the period well.
“It was economically really bad,” she says, citing the interdependence that had existed between the 15 constituent countries of the USSR. “If a TV was manufactured, the screen might be produced in Kazakhstan, and the remote control in another country.”
The USSR’s collapse was also a factor in the eruption of tensions over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region disputed between Armenia and Azerbaijan, while the country also had to cope with the horrendous Spitak earthquake, which resulted in the deaths of at least 25,000 people.
But through adversity, the humanity of the Armenian people has stayed strong and true.
“Armenians are very hospitable, really, really warm people, have a fantastic sense of humour through the hard times, are great hosts, very generous people and very emotional,” says Minasyan, who finished school in 1990 and commenced medical studies in her native city.
Back in Ireland, Minasyan has found it “easy” to make friends with the Irish, and from time to time meets up with fellow Armenians for home-style barbeques and traditional dishes such as dolma.
She visits her native land once a year, and has noticed some infrastructural improvements. One addition on the Yerevan map is an Irish bar. “But I don’t know where they get their Guinness from,” wonders Minasyan, who has tasted this strange version of the black stuff.
– Catherine Reilly
