Category: 2022

WCVB Chief Meteorologist Cindy Fitzgibbon (Photo provided by WCVB Channel 5)

Cindy Fitzgibbon has made history in the Boston television news market. After 27 years in the industry, she has been promoted to chief meteorologist at WCVB Channel 5.

“It’s a big honor,” expressed Fitzgibbon. “It is something that I never thought I would see.”

Fitzgibbon, an Armenian American and native New Englander, sat down with the Weekly for a virtual interview almost a week into her new role leading the station’s StormTeam 5. Behind her was a bustling newsroom getting ready for the noon broadcast. 

Her day had started at 1:44 in the morning amid heavy downpours overnight. Fitzgibbon said she allows herself two taps of the snooze button on her iPhone before getting ready to head out the door and make her way into the newsroom in Needham. During her short commute, she’s on the phone with her EyeOpener producer, who is busy building the rundown for the live newscast that begins at 4:30 a.m. Fitzgibbon, who appears on air every five to ten minutes, creates and updates her own weather graphics throughout the fast-paced newscast, which ends at 7 a.m. Then, she does live cut-ins for ABC’s Good Morning America through nine o’clock. After a team meeting at 9:30 a.m., Fitzgibbon goes back on camera for promos and the Midday newscast. She’s off the air at 12:30 p.m. and dedicates the remainder of her day to her family.

“[My kids] have grown up with their meteorologist mom who gets up and goes to work in the middle of the night, but then I’m available. I’m around. I am present. I am involved in what they’re doing,” said the proud mom of two high school athletes, “I stay up as late as I can with them before I have to go to bed to prepare for the next day. It’s the best of both worlds. I get to do both.” 

WCVB announced Fitzgibbon’s promotion following the retirement of veteran meteorologist Harvey Leonard. Fitzgibbon is the first female chief meteorologist in the Boston market, a significant chapter in her career and a celebration of women in the field of broadcast meteorology. In 2018, the American Meteorological Society, of which Fitzgibbon is a member, studied the underrepresentation of female meteorologists in leadership roles. Researchers found that women make up 29 percent of all broadcast meteorologist positions, but only eight percent claim the title of chief. 

“Traditionally, a chief meteorologist has been male, and traditionally, the chief meteorologist works nights Monday through Friday. It’s just kind of the way it always was,” explained Fitzgibbon. “That is clearly not the standard anymore. It was just slow in coming to Boston. Finally, we have our first female chief meteorologist in this market.”

Decades before breaking barriers in Boston, Fitzgibbon was just a young girl growing up near Portland, Maine with an eye to the sky. “I was always very curious about the weather, and I was obsessed with snow,” she said. Fitzgibbon even maintained a journal of snow measurements that she would share with her disinterested friends. “Had there been such a thing as social media and Twitter, I’m sure I would have been sending those amounts in to the local meteorologist,” she said.

One week after graduating from Lyndon State College in Vermont in 1995, Fitzgibbon packed her bags for her first on-air job in Bismarck, North Dakota. “I was as green as green can be,” recalled Fitzgibbon, who, at the age of 21, became that market’s first accredited meteorologist. She would soon move on in 1996 to WPTZ (Burlington, Vermont-Plattsburgh, New York market), where they were starting a brand new morning show. Four years later, she traveled to the Sunshine State and became the first female degreed meteorologist at WBBH in Fort Myers, Florida.

Fitzgibbon would eventually make her way back up the east coast to New England, where she would begin her decades-long career in the Boston market, delivering her morning forecasts at WFXT (Boston 25) and now at WCVB Channel 5.

“The weather is tough here in New England. It’s a craft that I have been trying to perfect for 20 years in this market,” she said. “You’re always learning as a forecaster, but the longer you spend forecasting in an area, the better you get.”

In addition to meteorology and motherhood, Fitzgibbon is also passionate about her Armenian heritage. A descendant of Genocide survivors, Fitzgibbon has fond memories of growing up around her Armenian aunts and cousins. She remembers her maternal grandmother speaking Armenian with her and teaching her the language. “It’s important for me that my kids recognize their heritage and know what that means,” said Fitzgibbon.

During the 2020 Artsakh War, Fitzgibbon helped raise awareness on social media about the atrocities taking place in her homeland. “I felt compelled to put it out there to a broader audience that might not be aware,” she explained. “There was a part of me that was impacted, and I wanted to share my Armenian heritage and share what was happening to draw more attention to it to an audience that might not know about it.”

Fitzgibbon is a frequent headliner of events hosted by Armenian Heritage Park, and she is also a member of the advisory council for the Armenian Women’s Welfare Association (AWWA).

Viewers in Boston can continue to count on Fitzgibbon as WCVB’s chief meteorologist to deliver accurate and informative forecasts to start their day. Fitzgibbon says she is also excited to spearhead a Hearst Television initiative called “Forecasting our Future” with special coverage focused on the impacts of climate change on local communities.

Entrance to the Sergei Parajanov Museum (Courtesy of the museum)

Nestled on the cliffside of Dzoragyugh, a former district of historical Yerevan, stands the Sergei Parajanov Museum, a former workshop of a carpenter. But how did this marvelous museum, in dedication to a worldwide film icon, come to be? Designer and chief architect of the museum, Arshak Ghazaryan, lifts the veil to reveal the difficult journey to immortalize Parajanov’s artwork. 

While initially striving to become a painter like his father, who instructed many of the great Armenian painters of the 20th century, Ghazaryan ended up falling in love with architecture and graduated from Yerevan State Polytechnic University in 1976 with a degree in the field. 

Ghazaryan worked on many projects during his career as an architect. He worked in the ARMSTATE Project Institute, which took on a multitude of projects. In 1983 he became the chief architect for the Dzoragyugh Ethnographic District Project, which operated under the Department of Preservation and Restoration of Historical Monuments, the first of its kind in the Soviet Union. In the future, the Sergei Parajanov Museum would become part of the Dzoragyugh Ethnographic District Project.

In 1988, photographer and director of the Folk Art Museum, Zaven Sargsyan, who later became the director of the Sergei Parajanov Museum, brought Parajanov’s collection of collages from Tbilisi, Georgia to Yerevan. These collages were created by Parajanov during his imprisonment and were said to have saved his life while in captivity. An exhibition was created, and many Armenians and foreign visitors came to view it, including Ghazaryan.

Ghazaryan and many other artists like Sargsyan and Grigor Khanjyan believed in the necessity of a house-museum for Parajanov. After witnessing the exhibition at the Folk Art Museum, Ghazaryan came up with the idea of a site in the Dzoragyugh Ethnographic District.  

Ghazaryan relayed this idea to Khanjyan, the informal advisor of fine art to Karen Demerdjian and the curator for the Dzoragyugh Ethnographic District Project. Khanjyan went to Demerdjian and requested that the cliffside building in Dzoragyugh, only half-built at the time, should be gifted to Parajanov as a house-museum. 

“Demerdjian agreed, and the decision was made,” said Ghazaryan in a recent interview with the Weekly. “After that, Parajanov’s other artwork was brought from Tbilisi [to Yerevan] overnight. It was a major project. We were rushing for that building to be given to him because Parajanov was already sick.”

Parajanov was seriously ill with diabetes at the time, and his health was failing, often struggling to walk. 

Architect Arshak Ghazaryan, filmmaker Sergei Parajanov and former Sergei Parajanov House-Museum director, Zaven Sargsyan pictured outside the work-in-progress museum. Photographer unknown.

Ghazaryan met Parajanov for the first time outside the future house-museum. Even though this was their first meeting in person, Ghazaryan felt as if he had met Parajanov long ago when he first watched Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors on television.  

“My impression of him had already been formed 20 years ago when I was a teenager,” recalled Ghazaryan. “For me, he was a spring of pride, an Armenian and a great artist. The most important element was that even though he had done so much work and had so much knowledge, he had no arrogance whatsoever.”

Together, they toured the building as Ghazaryan explained the vision for the project: a space for an art studio, museum and living area.

Inner courtyard of the Sergei Parajanov Museum (Courtesy of the museum)

“I was anxiously waiting to hear what he had to say. I asked, ‘What would you advise us to do better?’ He said, ‘Continue like this. Whatever you have done is good.’”

As construction got underway in 1988, the Karabakh movement had begun as well. After that, everything began to get complicated.

“But in every situation, Karen Demerdjian, Grigor Khanjyan and city hall were doing everything so that construction could continue. It was going very slowly. Then construction stopped, not because of the movement, but because there was a complaint written to Moscow by a nearby tenant.”

Complaints were issued that the building violated many codes and that it was disturbing those living nearby. This delayed construction until mid-1989, as Ghazaryan and his team worked to garner approval again and prove that they were, in fact, not in violation of any codes.

“We were rushing. We all understood that we had to be quick so that he could live there at least one day for it to become a house-museum.”

Everyone working on the project was in a hurry because in 1989, Parajanov had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and his health was rapidly declining. He underwent a pneumonectomy, a lung removal surgery, that same year in Moscow, but his condition unfortunately did not improve. Despite this, he was still active, even traveling to Germany in 1990 where he received an award and announced the creation of his house-museum and workshop. 

On July 17, 1990, he returned to Yerevan extremely ill and was taken to the hospital.

“The last time I saw him was in the hospital. In three days, he died…on July 20,” shared Ghazaryan. 

Parajanov was a beloved artist, filmmaker, director and a champion for artistic liberation. His artwork still continues to inspire the modern world and has even shaped pop culture in America. He never got to see the museum come into complete fruition and was never able to live in it. Thus, the museum is not considered a house-museum. The museum officially opened in the summer of 1991, a year after his death.

Entrance hall of the Sergei Parajanov Museum (Courtesy of the museum)

“Parajanov would go in and out of the museum during its construction,” said Ghazaryan. “His energy remained in the museum. That is why the museum lives on today.”

While talking about the final moments that he spent with Parajanov, Ghazaryan said, “We didn’t speak. We just looked at each other. Before he died, he kept saying over and over again ‘I will live in Dzoragyugh.’ I told him very quietly, ‘Dzoragyugh is waiting for you.’”

The Sergei Parajanov Museum atop the Hrazdan Gorge in Yerevan (Courtesy of the museum)

The third installment of a multi-part series, this article was originally published in Armenian by Mediamax, on June 6, 2022.

Avetik Chalabyan’s legal representatives have published the co-founder of ARAR Foundation’s article penned at the Armavir Penitentiary Institution, where he is currently being held under trumped up charges.

Avetik Chalabyan

In my previous article, I had outlined the first pillar of Armenia’s existential decision, the regathering of Armenians. We acknowledge that reality will always differ from our plans and visions; however, we must develop and formulate them around a united approach, followed by plans for systematic implementation. Therefore, I will continue the series with this article, focusing on the second pillar, modernization.

Beginning from the establishment of the Artaxiad Dynasty, followed by the adoption of Christianity and the creation of the Armenian alphabet, Armenia and Armenians became progressive, educated and creative elements in the region up until the end of the 14th century, where Armenia finally came under the rule of Turkish power, where they created a wonderful civilization through generations, with its influence reaching as far as the French Provence and Calcutta in India.

Whether the majestic capital city of Ani, the University at Tatev glowing with its scientific minds, the divine Book of Lamentations by Narekatsi and countless other intellectual and spiritual contributions over centuries, the Armenian nation, hidden in mountains and clinging to her lands, summoned its power and talent to enrich humanity, to enlighten mankind and solidify its place in the annals of human history.

Even after that, when Armenia descended into four centuries of darkness and slavery brought about by the Turkish race, Armenians exiled from their homeland continued on with their creative spirit to serve humanity wherever they ended up. However, these four centuries left an indelible mark on the Armenian homeland. During these 400 years, all urban planning, building of churches and monasteries, scientific and artistic endeavors were deprived of their benefactors, political leadership ceased to exist, and the creative segment of the society became exiled and detached from its roots. Even after the subjugation of eastern Armenia by Russia, it took at least half a century for the regathering of Armenians and gradual improvements in living conditions that enabled them to become organized to lead the modernization, economic and cultural developments in the South Caucasus. 

This process continued on until the end of the 20th century. Thus, in a span of 100 years, modern Armenia became the scientific, industrial and cultural leader in the South Caucasus, moving past its more resource-rich neighbors.

It is the bitter irony of fate that Armenia took significant steps toward modernization while under 100 years of Russian subjugation and managed to waste all its advantages during 30 years of self-rule to become the weakest link in the South Caucasus. The nation that had given tens of thousands of scientists and engineers to the world lost to its semi-barbarian neighbor, who has been able to technologically equip and modernize its armed forces while Armenian armed forces were left with military equipment and strategies and logistical capabilities from the previous century.

Today, Armenia has reached a strange crossroads, where on the one hand a significant technological node has been developed in her capital city, integrating itself into the global value chain and creating significant value for the country, and on the other hand, its provinces are saddled with poverty, technologically lingering in the first half of the past century. On the one hand, we have private schools, whose graduates are accepted into some of the world‘s best universities, and on the other hand, we have staggering illiteracy indices in the provinces. On the one hand, we have some of the highest number of scientific publications in the former USSR, and on the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the population has no connection with the scientific advances made in the country. And, we are conceding college graduates to the majority of CIS countries.

This crossroads, as paradoxical as it may be, has a simple explanation in the wild capitalism that has reigned in the country after independence. The oft aggressive initiators of this wild capitalism have established their sovereignty over the country, utilizing her natural resources, scientific-technological and cultural capabilities. Over time, they have formulated two parallel realities: a privileged minority that reinvents itself in prosperity, education and modern professions with subsequent new economic opportunities; and the resource-deprived majority that continues to linger in its poverty and misery.

The rapid rise of Nikol Pashinyan to power is resultant from the delayed reaction of the destitute segment of our society (today reaching 60 to 70 percent of the population) against the wild capitalism, the forgiving of its many sins and the strong allergy toward its potential return.  However, the modernization processes started by Pashinyan were doomed to failure from the beginning, as they were implemented under a false agenda, dictated by neoliberal policies espoused by foreign powers supporting his government and with half-baked recipes. To date, Pashinyan’s administration can be proud of only two accomplishments: asphalting certain local and country-wide roads and making some improvements in the efficiency of the tax system. For the sake of justice, these achievements have resulted in increases in supporters of Pashinyan, especially in the provinces, where well-maintained asphalt roads were unseen luxuries during the rule of the previous authorities. 

Therefore, any new government coming after Pashinyan will have to face a critical imperative to modernize Armenia; however, that modernization will be impossible without changes in our political-economic model and a significant redistribution of public good through state levers. This will demand a new “public contract,” where a segment of the society that has succeeded and reached a significant level of well-being, will voluntarily start to help the other segment that is still experiencing poverty, by the calculation that poverty must be eradicated in Armenia over the next 20 years, where the overwhelming majority of the country will prosper and will be able to take advantage of the fruits of modern scientific-educational and technological advances.

If the new government after Pashinyan can implement this public contract, then there are at least a few important areas for modernizing the country, upon which not only public resources should be focused, but also various resources coming from abroad. The first and the most critical one is education. I have noted above that although Armenia is the most developed scientific and technological country in the South Caucasus, it is also the most uneducated one. That’s because education is available only to a minority of the society.

Today, only one-third of high school graduates are admitted to institutions of higher education in Armenia, not all of them graduate, and only a quarter of that number receive technological specializations that create competitive value for Armenia. Over the next 20 years, the number of people receiving higher education in Armenia should double, and the number of graduates in technology should at least triple. Along with the increase of the general quality of higher education, this will provide an opportunity to make a significant breakthrough in the economic competitiveness and general quality of the population of Armenia. Such a breakthrough, however, requires enormous efforts. The small number of recipients of higher education in Armenia is not so much a matter of educational supply, as of demand.

In the conditions of poverty and limited availability of high-quality education, most young people in Armenia have neither the opportunity to prepare for university exams, the financial means to study there, nor an idea of how they will capitalize on their education after graduation.

As a result, education remains largely the privilege of the children of the educated section of the society, and this watershed is gradually deepening. Therefore, if we want to carry out a real educational revolution in Armenia, we must address the deep problems conditioned by poverty, in particular:

• In all large settlements (with at least 1,000 inhabitants), there should be state-funded kindergartens. Children’s education should start from preschool age and be free.
• In these settlements, schools should be modernized, and the state should provide not only free education, but also food, uniforms and school supplies.
• The state order in universities should be expanded several times. All state universities should establish regional branches with the state subsidizing their work.
• Additional educational opportunities should be created everywhere in the country; “TUMO box” type facilities should be available to all children.
• Private schools should receive funding from the state per student equal to the state, which will create a competitive environment and continuously improve the quality of school education.
• Universities should be completely depoliticized and focus on creating quality and demanded educational value together with employers.
• The top two to three leading universities of Armenia, continuously improving the quality of education, should appear in the list of the top 500 universities in the world, with the goal of achieving higher positions in the future.

This is a very ambitious program and is possible only with a significant effort. It will require not only significant material resources (additional 300-500 million US dollars per year), but also thousands of dedicated people who will implement the program. Repatriation is important here, as most of the fighters of such an enlightenment movement must be recruited from abroad, be it a physics teacher in a border village or a professor of biotechnology at the best university in the country. The good news is that all of this, albeit on a limited scale, has already begun (e.g. TUMO centers, Ayb schools, Root laboratories, Teach Armenia and similar programs). This movement is already gaining momentum and proving its vitality. Therefore, the task of the next stage will be to scale the programs that have already proved their viability, to make them accessible to every child and thus to overcome the most important challenge of Armenia’s modernization.

Interconnected with the previous one, the most important task of modernization will be to change the existing territorial distribution of the population in Armenia. Today, 30 percent of the population of Armenia lives in villages, and 20 percent in settlements with urban status, which are basically big villages. Such a structure of the population has been formed historically, in particular, as a result of de-industrialization during the period of independence, but this is not an optimal solution for the 21st century. The situation is complicated by the fact that most of the rural settlements are small and do not have enough scale to provide minimal social infrastructure. Today, the average Armenian village has approximately 1,000 inhabitants and 400 hectares of arable land, neither of which is sufficient for normal socio-economic activity. If we also take into account that this average is also conditioned by the presence of several dozen large settlements, it is obvious that most of the rural settlements are not viable in the long run, where there is already a continuous outflow from them.

As difficult as it may be, the possible solution is to concentrate the population in Armenia in smaller, but large, well-off and prosperous settlements, where the social infrastructure necessary for modern life is available, there are quality educational opportunities, and the concentration of labor and infrastructure make them attractive for investment. This process has already started in Armenia, but it must be implemented with much greater determination. To this end, priority settlements in each region should be identified for development, and the state should start investing in improving the social infrastructure of those settlements, modern planning for expansion and creating favorable conditions for attracting investors there. To avoid arbitrary decisions, centralized public investment must be combined with the ability to take the initiative, present innovative projects and attract investors. This will also create a competitive environment throughout the country and will stimulate the local settlement development initiative. Ultimately, the goal is to move approximately one percent (about 30,000 people) of Armenia’s annual population from low-income and rapidly evolving settlements over the next two decades to improve their quality of life, creating new economic opportunities and providing access to children. There will be modern education and its associated benefits.

I would also like to address an important question: who will be the engine of modernization? If during the years of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union the main impulses of modernization were given from the imperial center and carried out on the spot by creative Armenians, then in the coming decades, most likely, there will be no such “imperial” umbrella. Armenia must modernize by cooperating with Russia, the European Union, the United States, China and other technologically advanced countries (for example, Japan, Korea, Iran, India) and try to take advantage of the accomplishments of these countries. In the current highly polarized geopolitical situation, this will require a very complicated tug-of-war, but it is absolutely necessary if we want to expand the resource base from which the ambitious project of radical modernization of our country will be fed.

After all, only such modernization will allow us not only to develop the country and make it competitive in the modern world, but also to accumulate sufficient resources for the effective defense of the country and the advancement of our national goals. Each of you should ask yourself what you are doing to modernize our country, and what you can do in the next stage to increase the existing results tenfold.