At the top of Mount Hatis, the wind hits hard. Artur Petrosyan, tanned face and hiking shoes, jumps between the crumbling stones of a low wall and explains that “it must have been a perimeter wall”. The archaeologist of Yerevan, the Armenian capital a few kilometers from the summit, has rarely had such easy terrain to excavate: he only has to bend down to pick up shiny pebbles, “man-made obsidians, like this arrowhead”.
This fortress of IIIe millennium BC was to be excavated in the coming months. Until bulldozers raked the site in early July. Because, soon, a giant Jesus of 33 meters must be built on this site. Including its pedestal, it will measure 77 meters, the highest Christ representation on the planet, even higher than the famous Redeemer of Rio de Janeiro and the Polish Christ the King, in Swiebodzin, current record holder.
At the origin of the project, Gagik Tsarukyan bathed in various cases of corruption. Without a defined ideological program, his party, Prosperous Armenia, is accused of vote buying.
This titanic project is straight out of the imagination of Gagik Tsarukyan, one of Armenia’s most powerful oligarchs. The businessman is at the head of an empire, Multi Group, which brings together dozens of companies (from the media to the extraction of minerals) on which he took control after the fall of the USSR.
In the 1980s, he spent seven years in prison for gang rape before being cleared by the courts in 2001, and is now immersed in various corruption cases. A deputy, without a defined ideological program, his party, prosperous Armenia, is accused of vote buying. These scandals tarnished his reputation but did not tarnish his closeness to the country’s successive leaders. The government of the current prime minister, Nikol Pashinian, has shown its sympathy for the monumental Jesus.
Neither study nor license
The project should attract millions of faithful, according to its instigator, but above all house a shopping center within the concrete support. Restaurants, souvenir shops, casino… The place will be able to offer jobs to the inhabitants of the villages below.
In the region, the oligarch is known to everyone: along the expressway leading to Yerevan, a game consists in counting the storefronts of the companies belonging to him… Mount Hatis was offered to the Tsarukyan Foundation in obscure circumstances by a local notable, who had himself bought it from the municipality of Akunk, in 2008, at a disproportionately low price.
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