Eastbound
In Yerevan
A friend of mine had moved from Saint Petersburg to Armenia after February 24th, 2022, like many other Russians at the beginning of the war with Ukraine. I wanted to go to Yerevan to see what it was like. I was fascinated by Armenian culture, because I barely knew anything about it. By the time I got the money to travel and the permission to leave work for 12 days, my friend had already returned back home. Yet my fascination had remained. Thus, on November 1st, I was sitting on a plane eastbound, my partner next to me.
The geographical location of Armenia makes it a special place, between East and West, with a peculiar character and identity. For instance, Armenian language has an independent alphabet and although it’s an indo-european language, it is not related to any other one. In comparison, Germanic languages (English, German, Swedish…) or Indo-Iranian ones share common alphabets or signs, sounds and word roots, making them part of greater linguistic “families”. The oddity of Armenian culture is also reflected in its traditional religious cult: the Armenian Apostolic Church is an independent branch of christian faith and practices, actually one of the oldest forms of Christianity. Yet, contrary to what one may think, this singularity is not the product of isolation: due to the strategic position of the territory they inhabit, on an elevated plateau in the middle of the southern Caucasus mountains, Armenians have been subjected to constant aggressions from neighboring civilizations. In the early modern age, it was part of the Persian empire. During the Ottoman empire, Armenians were recurring victims of pogroms operated by the Turks, which culminated in a genocide (1915). And then came the Soviet Union, colonizing and occupying Armenia until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since ancient history, it was an independent State only once – precisely for one year, between 1921 and 1922. Then, once again, from 1991 until the present times. Needless to say, the occupations and cultural contaminations throughout the centuries left a sensible mark on the present culture of the country. Coming from dull Germany, it was astonishing to be somewhere so different.
It took us some effort to get oriented in Yerevan, where we spent the first six days of our journey. The streets were crowded, chaotic and loud. A thick layer of smog constantly infolded houses, trees and churches. Street police or army men were standing in the middle of crossroads, whistling and gesticulating, directing the accumulation and flow of cars and trucks. We had to learn to read the flow in order to cross the roads, for the cars didn’t stop for us; and even when we finally learnt it, we still felt like anxious stray cats going over the busy streets. There are sixty different bus companies that serve different routes in and around the city – the routes themselves grew organically, dynamically, without central planification. Consequently, the system is somewhat cryptic . The locals just seemed to know how things work, in a purely oral, practical way. By observing and asking around, we eventually learned to make it work too.
Convenience is the essence (or the logic) of Asian cities. Yerevan is no exception in this regard. Cheap goods for daily use are to be found at every corner of the street, in the tunnels to the subway, at crossroads, as well as snacks, drinks hot and cold, shoes, phone cables. This gives the city a comfortable touch: it makes it feel man-sized. Cities are places of consumption, where you have to exchange money in order to be provided with essential goods, where to be self-sustaining is impossible. Yet in Yerevan, where you can buy anything you need at any time of the day, on weekdays and Sundays, you don’t feel lacking. Primary and essential goods - (warm) food, coffee, clothes, gas – are cheap. There was a coffee machine at every street corner, where coffee cost 100 dram (around 0.25 Euro); needless to say, the coffee was not spectacular (tastewise), but it was accessible. Another machine caught my attention – it looked like an atm, but if when you unlocked the touch screen you would find several functions. On this device you could pay for virtually any service: bills (water, electricity…), university fees and parking tickets, as well as bank transfers (even from and to Russian bank accounts, which are notoriously sanctioned by many countries in the West).
On our second day in Yerevan, we visited the Sergey Parajanov museum. An old man sold us the tickets and let us into this space. We shared the room with a school class (in my memory they were all girls) who were given a guided tour of the exhibition – sadly we couldn’t eavesdrop, since they spoke Armenian. The place was a museum, but also a memorial. I was already familiar with Parajanov’s work – a visionary, Soviet film director and artist of Armenian descent, renowned for visually rich, poetic, and unconventional filmic language. His work, characterized by its intricate use of color, symbolism, and folklore, defied the norms of Soviet realism, leading to frequent clashes with the authorities. Visiting this small museum made me feel even closer, diving even deeper into his poetics. For Parajanov, collage was a condensed film – this became evident walking through the rooms of the exhibition, where several mixed-media collages were on display. I was excited to see real costumes from Sayat Nova and some sketches for the film. I almost cried when I saw the Gioconda collages, inspired by visions Parajanov had during his time in prison. It’s not the resilience of the artist that touched me, but rather his language, his work and the love that overflowed the objects left behind and carefully collected, carefully arranged.
After the museum (and after a long walk to and from the children railway, an abandoned playground, that led us to a sketchy area, near the Cognac factory Ararat) we retreated to a lively wine bar and store on Saryan street – a road in the Kentron, the inner city, with many cafes and restaurants where mostly Russians work and go out. The employee suggested we try his own wine, which he grows, harvests and bottles in the Areni region. We ordered a whole bottle along a charcuterie board of Armenian cheese and meat. The food and alcohol were divine. When we left the bar, tipsy and lighthearted, we stumbled into a local designer store, where I fell in love with a quilted jacket. The designer and store-owner made Instagram stories of my boyfriend whilst he was trying on clothes and I tipsily chatted with her in my broken Russian. She asked whether he was my husband and she repeated several times how beautiful he was. I walked out of the store wearing my new jacket already.
Eager to leave the city for a day, yet unwilling to drive a car in the mess of Armenian traffic, we booked a guided tour to see some of the ancient monasteries in the north east of the country. On a Tuesday morning, we left the hotel early to get to a travel agency, where a tourist bus was waiting. With other 45 passengers, mostly Russians, we were driven to Lake Sevan, Sevanavank Monastery, the town of Dilijan (although just for a quick stop), Goshavank Monastery and finally Haghartsin Monastery. We left at 9 am and came back around 8 pm, spending the whole day driving from one monastery to the other. The tour guide, an Armenian man, probably barely touching 30, probably already a father, had beautiful, crystal-blue eyes. In the monastery of Goshavank he stood under a cupola and sang an old Armenian hymn – some of the tourist ladies took a video of him (with the flashlight on). He was soft-spoken and soft-mannered – he always addressed the group with “Dear Friends”. Yet, when he got asked any questions, his answers were completely elusive, as if he had just learnt his parts by heart.
Even though the tour was a bit awkward – for instance as we (the tourists) sat through a three-course restaurant-meal in almost complete silence for 45 minutes, too shy to try and initiate a conversation – it was stunning too. We entered the Armenian forests and natural parks at the peak of autumn, brown and yellow and red everywhere. There were many souvenir vendors on the steps before those ancient churches we visited, offering pomegranate juice and oil paintings along rosaries and postcards, yet the old stones imposed a solemn silence. Those places, almost abandoned, felt like archeological sites, even older than they actually were. They testified something long gone, not yet forgotten. The guide told us there is only one single monk left in the whole Apostolic Church of Armenia, and he lives alone in a monastery in the South. Where have all the other monks gone? What will become of these stones?
On our last morning in Yerevan we took a cab to the Tsitsernakaberd, the Armenian Genocide Memorial complex. It was a beautiful, quiet morning – the sun was shining and the smog of the last few days had finally cleared up, for a soft rain had fallen in the previous night. When we arrived at the memorial complex, which is situated upon a hill in the western part of the city, we were greeted by Mount Ararat. Its presence, quietly witnessing not only the city of Yerevan, but also, I dare say, the whole country, alas from afar, was breathtaking. The mountain was massive and lonesome, permanent snows covering its peak, shades of blue and gray. It suddenly became clear why this very mountain held such symbolic power, its magic quality, its relation to the bible. Ararat is Armenia. It has become a solitary mountain, strictly surveilled and not open for tourism. Now a Turkish territory, military permit is necessary for those who want to climb it. But from afar, we could look at it. We took many pictures and we took our time. Then, we turned to the other side.
The memorial to the victims of the genocide constists of twelve large basalt slabs arranged in a circle and leaning inward, towards the centre. At the heart of the memorial, a few steps down, deeper in the ground, lies an eternal-burning flame. Some flowers had been laid down in a circle around the flame, on the stone floor. Music was playing constantly – violins and choirs. I couldn’t identify where the music was coming from, but it must have been close to the centre. It was a sad, slow music, the kind of music that gets played to evoke a sense of solemnity, of sorrow – and it worked. Even though the music was not aiming or able to represent the indescribable horror, the incomprehensible evil that was done to the Armenian people, it made me feel something. I couldn’t picture it, I couldn’t reflect on it, but I felt a knot in my throat, a knot triggered by the waves of sound approaching my body. And for a second, maybe without thinking, maybe unconsciously, I mourned: nothing needed to be said. Then, after a while spent in silence, we walked past the graves of some army heroes who fell during the conflicts with Azerbaijan in the Karabakh region, which lasted until the beginning of this year, 2024. We had seen portraits of soldiers painted everywhere in the streets and on the facades of buildings. Some of the graves looked freshly dug, with a heap of black soil and flowers on top.
Afterwards we visited the museum, where the research on the history of atrocities before the genocide as well as documentation on the genocide are on display. It’s a place of education. I won’t digress on the things you can learn in this museum, for I don’t have the knowledge or the capacity to educate you on this topic. But one thing hasn’t left my mind ever since. In one of the last rooms, several real-time reports and testimonies on the genocide are on display. You can read bulletins and magazine reports about the Armenian genocide from the early 1920s. You can look at postcards and flyers depicting and explaining what was going on. European and American diplomats travelled to Turkey and saw this happening right before their eyes, between 1915 and 1923. They wrote about it in the press. They discussed it in political summits. The public eye was watching, yet nothing was done to stop it. The world was then at war. This was barely a hundred years ago.
From the window of the minivan that drove us from Yerevan to Tbilisi on a sunny november Wednesday: bare, brown hills and blue skies. We briefly wondered whether they’d always been bare, or if they’re the product of (soviet?) deforestation. I still don't know the answer. Suddenly, a herd of sheep, goats, cows and a village: simple shelters built out of panels, metallic or wooden, bricks, concrete, stones, even car tires. Ruins and abandoned Soviet factories. People lived in this region. Elderly ladies with a veil on their head sat on stacked tires and watched the street. The streets in the valleys were empty, we crossed few cars on our journey. They were also simple streets – no lanterns, the concrete wasn’t even painted with the distinctive white stripes that usually mark the edges and the road and the middle. Here it must be pitch dark at night. Had I been traveling alone, in my own car, I would have made a stop to get something from the street vendors, their Ladas from the seventies parked just off the road, their produce on display on bare concrete. They sold corn, gas cartridges, fruit and vegetables. But the minivan I sat in was speeding towards the Georgian border. Also, the other passengers didn’t seem to be as excited by the landscape as I was. Most of them (we were in total 6 people, plus the driver) played puzzle games on their smartphones. One of them slept through most of the journey. A young man, probably barely eighteen, wearing a bright yellow turban, was the only one who spoke to us, although in very broken English. First he borrowed my power bank. He said he came from India but lives in Qatar, then proceeded to display his Qatari residency permit as if to prove it. He had been on vacation in Turkey and Armenia and he was traveling to Tbilisi to catch a flight back home. He was slim, innocent, really still a child. I peeked into his smartphone as he watched his own Snapchat postings. Unfortunately, he hadn’t acquired a visa for Georgia, so the border police held him longer than the rest of us. The driver (a young man, probably Georgian, probably in his late twenties, short, soft and red-haired, his face, arms and hands covered in freckles – I speculate, from not wearing sunscreen while driving) got impatient and urged us to leave after twenty minutes or so. I suppose he didn’t want to get stuck in traffic jams entering the capital, or maybe he was being paid a fixed rate for the drive, so his hourly wage would have lowered if he took longer? At least, this would explain all the speeding and rushing on the streets. He got two speeding tickets at the border. I remember quietly rejoicing about the fact that I couldn’t look at the speedometer in real time, for I was sitting in the third row, way in the back of the van. Yet, I could sense we might have touched 150 km/h or even higher.
And so we entered Tbilisi: at once, the traffic became less chaotic, the architecture of the buildings reminded us of Vienna or Ljubljana. Just then and there I thought how different it all had been, even though I couldn’t quite grasp it. Somewhere in my body, I felt relieved the trip had just become easier, because Georgia felt more like Europe, more like home. Maybe I’ll write about it, too.