It was autumn in 2008, shortly after the Ossetian war had started in neighboring Georgia, when I first had zhingyalov hats.
I’d spent the summer in Armenia, specifically Kotayk Marz, about an hour from Yerevan, but still rural enough to allow permit long sheep crossings and great ambling walks into the hill country—which in Armenia is everywhere; it is all hill country and each hill has for its capitol a monastery, many of which, I visited.
After a summer spent roving with sheep, and through dark and quiet monasteries, I was lean and sun-burned. I frequently felt wolf-like, descending the hills in the evening, returning to the village, glowing peaceably there in the valley. Even in the homes, there was the smell of stone and lanolin; I sniffed it hungerly coming down from the twilight heights.
And now the autumn had stolen over the country like evening coming to the valley and I was in Yerevan visiting probably for one of the first times. The stone configurations of the city, after the mud walls and dried manure fires of the country were almost cyclopean. I had walked down from the hills and into the Valley of the Kings. At Sasoonsi David, at the Cascade, I expected sphinxes, but the edges of Yerevan are turned down into the countryside, and even without the flocks, one could well imagine their bleating transit comingling with the traffic.
Anna and I were in the liminal area where the center of Yerevan butts against the neighborhoods surrounding it. At Barikamutsyun, there is a large market in the autumn, and stalls sold dried apricots and fresh persimmon, peppers pickled in plastic Coke bottles and sweet and syrupy wine more purple than anything I have ever seen in the natural world except cabbage.
Anna bought me lunch at a small bakery stand—I went by the same stand a few years ago. It was summer and there was hardly anything there; maybe it was too late in the day, but maybe it was something else. When I was there with Anna, she ordered me zhingyalov hats, among the best I ever had because it was the first time I ate it. Tortilla-like, but simultaneously crisp and oily-damp on the outside, and the inside was a mountain field cooked down and distilled, snapping with summer green, and mellowed with autumn frost. “Hats” is bread and “zhingyal” is “greens” which Armenians usually call “kanachi”. So, they could call the bread “kanachiov hats” or ‘bread with greens’, but they don’t because “greens” doesn’t have the same lexical quality as “zhingyal”. Using the word from Nagorno Karabakh or Artsakh (as it is called in Armenian) evokes the green mountain stronghold where these greens come from, much in the same way we, in the States, speak of “Vermont maple syrup”. When we consider what we want on our pancakes, it makes it more palatable to summon frost-scarred apples in a neglected orchard near a barn, red, orange, yellow foliage and Robert Frost presiding over the whole thing. If the New England American English dialect had a different word for maple syrup, we’d use that word when we wanted to speak about enjoying maple syrup, but American English hasn’t been around long enough to splinter in such a way; Armenian has, hence zhingyalov hats.
The pastry well-deserved the name, though. For what was essentially street food, zhingyalov hats did preserve the mountains, the springs, and the verdure which surrounded them. Most of Armenia, especially in the south, is pretty dry, but Artsakh is green, perhaps another reason why the word “kanachi” doesn’t fit. In a way, zhingyal is greener than green.
Zhingyalov hats wasn’t too common, though. Most places I visited in Armenia had piroshki. Every time I was in Yerevan and up by Barikamutsyun, I’d stop by the stall and have zhingyalov hats—my favorite snack in the whole country.
Back in the States, I looked for it in Glendale. I looked for it in Buenos Aires and other places with large Armenian populations, but while they had familiar cakes, drinks, and even Grand Candy, no one ever had zhingyalov hats. It was like something that couldn’t really be replicated, or, if replicated, it couldn’t be sold (there are plenty of Youtube videos which show you how to make it).
After seven years, I was glad to find the bakery stall still there by the Barikamutsyun Metro and, amazingly, it was autumn when I visited. My wife and I sat there on the curb and ate tsitsak peppers, drank syrupy sweet wine and shared a generous portion of zhingyalov hats which, due to its questionable structural integrity, we had lain over our knees as we ate, to avoid losing any of it. With the smell of dry, stony, smoky Armenian autumn as digestivo, it was one of the best meals I ever ate, but it wasn’t the best zhingyalov hats I ever had, not even close.
This was in 2017, and we were between homes, taking a long time getting back to the States after living overseas. I was no longer a volunteer, and no longer subject to any regulations beyond the law of the land and, as such, at last free to visit Artsakh.
As we moved south from Yerevan the autumn twilight deepened, the light sunk to the horizon where the mountains moved up. The light turned golden and so clear that mountains, beyond mountains, beyond mountains were still visible as a kind of slate backdrop on part of the sky. You looked at them and thought, “That could be Iran it’s so far away.”
We got into Stepanakert at night, and, though we were there for a good four or five days, most of what I remember was either in evening or night. At any rate, I remember fires, and smoke and moving quietly between things as one does when traveling.
I think our second day in Stepanakert, we took a marshutka up to Shushi and, while waiting, stopped into a bus station café. The type of place which is ubiquitous in Armenia, especially near transportation points. In the autumn, it is cold inside; the men are bundled up in black coats, smoking, chatting. The women come from a back kitchen when you enter and have an aura of flour and deep fatigue about them. The tables have a small dish of salt and maybe a small plastic vase and plastic flower.
Our poor Armenian hushed the room briefly while we ordered. Everyone straining to hear an accent, or discern something about us before asking. After a respectable pause, someone asked “a kuda vi?” Assuming we would understand Russian. “Amerikaits enk,” we replied. Which resulted in a stream of Russian beyond my understanding. We channeled the conversation back into Armenian, and I strained to hear the difference between Armenian and Artsakhi Armenian, but I don’t notice anything. Meanwhile, our food arrived.
I don’t want to belabor the point, but this small, hole-in-the-wall place at the Stepanakert bus station had the best zhingyalov hats I ever had the pleasure to eat. The rest of the time we were in Artsakh, we were either eating there, or wishing we were eating there. In fact, to this day, my wife and I still share many moments when we wish we were eating there.
I’m not accustomed to eating greens, so I don’t have the vocabulary to explain how delicious these pastries were; they simply had something comfortably familiar from the natural world in them, something pleasant that you only find when you’re outside. I guess the best way to put it is that usually food tastes like something ‘inside’ to me. It smells like ovens, and kitchens and fire, it tastes like it came from these things. I guess it tastes “man-made” for lack of a better way of putting it. The zhingyalov hats from Stepanakert tasted like this, too, but it also had something of twilight, of frost, of clover being munched by lamps, and, of stone. Simply, I’ve never eaten anything else that somehow preserved the thrilling smell of wet autumn stone in the same way.
But since October, when nearly 110,000 Armenians fled Artsakh, that bus station, and that café stand empty. All around them are empty stores, empty streets, empty homes. The autumn evening seething through the windows left open, overflowing like fog onto the streets and running downhill to the bus station to fill the café. When someone moves in, will they have any idea of the enormity they have usurped in just one space, just one plate?
Where is that recipe now? Has it made its way to Goris, up to Yerevan? Likely, like the world’s 7-8 million Armenians, it could now be anywhere. But, finding it in Glendale, Buenos Aires, or even Yerevan, will it ever taste the same?
