Tony Aivazian has rebuilt his childhood home of Hajiabad, one of a cluster of Armenian enclaves in Iran, from memory in his home in Redondo Beach, California, USA

The project started out as a simple exercise of memory, the Los Angeles Times reported. Aivazian wanted a way to recall his hometown when neither photos nor the possibility of going back to visit existed.

So he drew a map of Hajiabad, where he was born. He included all 75 homes, which he numbered on a map, as well as the location of the town’s church, school, store and cemetery.

But it wasn’t until a year later, when Aivazian’s wife Seda was about to throw away a coffee table that the retired security supervisor hit upon another idea: “It slowly came to my mind that I wanted something that I could really show my children and my grandchildren, where we came from. I want them to know that in a way that was more than just paper.”

In 2012, Aivazian took the coffee table and converted it into a base for what turned into a two-year project to build a model of his hometown. Using pressboard to build homes originally made out of mud mixed with fibers, Aivazian began “constructing” his childhood village.

Aivazian employed all manner of materials to recreate the home, using plastic animals from a toy store for livestock and toothpicks to create the rungs of a ladder connecting the second story to the roof, where grapes were dried. 

Aivazian lived in Hajiabad until he was 13. His family left the village and moved to a larger town, Abadan, before eventually moving to the capital city, Tehran. In 1978, the Aivazians left Iran and moved to Cupertino, California, and, in 1992, to Redondo Beach.