Four Outings and an Opera (Armenia)
I’m writing this entry on a minibus from Yerevan to Tbilisi. I decided to spend double what I did travelling in the other direction last week in the hopes of getting a more comfortable bus where I’d have the space to stretch out a bit and write. Turns out this minibus is about the same as the one I took from Tbilisi to Yerevan—my first hint was when the booking website revealed (after I bought my ticket) that the name of the carrier was “Cheap Transportation”—but I got there early and managed to get a good seat and there’s space enough to write.
The last five days have been busy as I’ve tried to squeeze as much Armenia as I could into a week. I went on four out-of-town trips, two using group tours and two going solo. This was my attempt to find a balance between the general travel principle that slower and less packaged travel makes for richer experiences and the desire to see as much as possible in a limited amount of time—this is the basic tension at the heart of all trip planning, I find. It’s not just stubbornness or cheapness that makes me resist the package tour. It’s that going your own way allows you to see a lot of the stuff in between the photogenic sites, and that’s where a lot of the richest encounters happen.
I could have eased this tension somewhat by renting a vehicle, which would have given me more freedom to explore Armenia at my own pace. But, like a dummy, I left my driver’s license in Istanbul. I wanted to empty my wallet of all non-essentials and it didn’t occur to me at the time that a driver’s license might be worth holding on to.
A lot of Armenia’s most attractive sites are fairly remote. Many of their notable churches and monasteries were deliberately built in locations that would be harder for invading armies to reach. Armenians have a long history of being at the crossroads of empires, and neither Ottoman nor Persian overlords were especially partial to Christianity. This makes for some spectacular settings but it also makes access a little tricky. If I’d wanted to spend twice as much time in Armenia, I could have worked it out with a combination of minibuses and hitchhiking, but compromising a little on the principle of slow travel might mean I also see Kyrgyzstan this summer.
Anyway, and without further ado, let me recap the last five days.
Saturday: Geghard Monastery and Garni Temple
This was the first of two day trips I undertook under my own steam. I made my way to the outskirts of Yerevan and hopped on a marshrutka to Goght. Marshrutka is a common name for minibuses in the post-Soviet sphere—I think it derives from the French marche-route. They tend to be a bit cramped and packed, not unlike the dolmuş in Turkey, which is etymologically related to dolma, or stuffed pepper. The minibus is the pepper, on this analogy, and the passengers are the filling that’s stuffed into it.
I should pause here and say how much easier travel has become since I started doing it a quarter of a century ago. I can mark my age by observing that I’ve used traveller’s cheques. Nowadays, ATMs are pretty much everywhere (although I also have a stash of crisp US $100 bills for emergencies and, originally, for Iran, which is cut off from the international banking system). I can mostly pay by card anyway. I can buy an eSIM for my phone that gives me local cellular access for less than $10 per week, and that phone has Google maps and Google translate and a host of other handy apps. One of them is Yandex, which is basically an Uber for the post-Soviet sphere, but it also provides good information about public transportation, which Google maps seems to struggle with in this part of the world. I was able to read about public transport to Goght online but I was also able to check on the schedule and know where to be when thanks to Yandex.
Goght is the nearest town to Geghard Monastery, most of which dates from the 12th century. I could have taken a taxi or hitched a ride from Goght but decided to walk the remaining three kilometres. The road out of Goght has a neatly paved raised sidewalk covered in cow pats. On the way out of town, a woman running a fruit stall—you see them everywhere in Armenia—let me have two apricots for free. Apricots (scientific name: Prunus armeniaca) are allegedly indigenous to Armenia (although actually probably not) and they’re in season. These were possibly the two juiciest, sweetest apricots I’ve ever eaten.
The monastery is situated on the side of a rugged valley cut by the Azat River. The walk out permitted me to marvel at the scenery, which is just as well since the monastery itself was a mob scene. Rows of tour buses lined up, as well as private cars. It was a national holiday in Armenia, which I’m sure didn’t help matters, but it seems like all the main tourist sites here get pretty heavy tourist traffic.
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| Geghard Monastery seen from a distance |
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| Mingling with the crowds at Geghard Monastery |
I had the same experience at Garni Temple, which was a short marshrutka ride back in the direction of Yerevan. The temple is probably the best preserved pre-Christian structure in Armenia, although its preservedness is owing to its having been almost entirely reconstructed in the twentieth century after a 1679 earthquake flattened it. In style the temple is very Greco-Roman—it dates from the 1st century—but the pagan religion of Armenia was different from the Greco-Roman pantheon.
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| Garni Temple |
As with the walk out to Geghard, the real pleasure here came in the freedom to wander away from the crowds. Garni is on the edge of the canyon cut by the Azat River and a steep trail led down to the valley floor. I enjoyed a solitary hour of tromping along the valley before reaching the “Symphony of Stones,” where columns of basalt loom over the valley in a kind of inverse of the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland.
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| Down in the Azat River valley |
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| The basalt columns of the "Symphony of Stones" |
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| Mashtots Hayrapet church |
Sunday: Anoush
Sunday was a rest day, where I spent a good chunk of the day setting up this blog and writing the first two entries. But I also made time for a little culture. The Armenian National Opera and Ballet Theatre is a grand building occupying a central square not far from where I was staying and flanked with statues of Aram Khachaturian and other Armenian luminaries I hadn’t heard of.
I booked a ticket to see Armen Tigranian’s opera Anoush, which is apparently a major touchstone of Armenian musical culture. Composed in 1912, the opera fits the trend set by Dvořák, Bartók, and others of incorporating elements of indigenous folk music into the classical music tradition. The plot also incorporates aspects of Armenian folk culture.
Opera isn’t known for the density of its plots or the complexity of its characters—plot points take a lot longer to lay out when you have to sing about them. The plot of Anoush is pretty straightforward: boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy dishonours girl’s brother in a wrestling match, vengeful brother kills boy, girl goes crazy and jumps off a cliff. A tale as old as time, really. But, as any opera lover will tell you, you don’t go to the opera for the plot.
In this case, the plot wasn’t just a frame to hang beautiful music upon, but also a frame to display Armenian traditional culture upon. We had some great folk dance sequences and group choruses. And the costumes were great: furry hats for the men, tresses of long braided hair for the women, everyone elegantly decked out. (The set was less impressive—one of the towering boulders on the set had the unfortunate tendency to wobble when performers bumped against it.)
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| Curtain call at Anoush |
Part of the attraction was simply being able to get inside the grand opera house. And in case the culture inside was too highfalutin, part of the square in front of the theatre was fenced off so that kids could zip about in bumper cars.
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| Inside the opera house |
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| Bumper cars outside the opera house |
Monday: Debed Canyon
Coming into Armenia from the north, I was gobsmacked by the beauty of the landscape. The north of the country is greener than the south, and more mountainous. The highway from Tbilisi into Armenia follows the Debed River, which cuts a deep canyon through the mountains. The river is brown and turbulent and in a real hurry to get somewhere.
Like most of the rest of Armenia, the area is also home to some remarkable religious buildings. It’s also about a three-hour drive north of Yerevan so I decided to see the area the quick and dirty way by booking a thirteen-and-a-half-hour group tour extravaganza. It’s definitely an area I’d love to revisit at a slower pace.
Our tour guide wanted to keep us entertained on the long drive up and so gave us lectures about Armenian history and culture. The sound of other voices was very distracting to him (even though he had a microphone!) and he would give a death glare to anyone who was talking at the same time. This was unfortunate because I was sitting next to a chatty Armenian-American woman called Taleen who was visiting from California and who didn’t have the patience for history lectures. The two of them competed for my attention for most of the drive up.
These impositions were a worthwhile price to pay for the trip. The three highlights for me were Haghpat and Sanahin Monasteries, both UNESCO World Heritage sites, and Akhtala church.
Haghpat stands on a promontory overlooking the gorge. Among its interesting features are recessed niches with a tiered overhanging structure resembling the muqarnas of Iranian mosques. I’m not sure if this is a matter of cultural influence or deliberate flattery—I was told on a separate outing that Armenian churches sometimes took on aspects of Islamic aesthetics to make it less likely that invading armies would destroy them.
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| Haghpat Monastery |
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| Muqarna-like recesses in one of the churches at Haghpat |
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| Inside Haghpat Monastery |
Because a lot of myrrh gets burned in Armenian churches, the smoke picks up beams of light streaming in through the windows, creating an especially atmospheric effect.
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| Frescoes and divine light at Akhtala Church |
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| More divine light at Sanahin Monastery |
One of the things that hit home while looking at these Medieval structures was the sheer miracle of their existence. The masonry uses heavy blocks of stone, cleanly cut and with very little mortar between them. How people a thousand years ago managed to arrange structures on this scale, and with this level of intricacy, boggles the imagination. I still don’t understand how people build stone arches that don’t collapse.
We had maybe six hours up in the rugged north before heading back south with the tour guide and Taleen taking turns to talk at me. The roads were bumpy enough that my phone overcounted my steps for the day by about five thousand.
Tuesday: Khor Virap and Noravank
It was close to 11 by the time I got home from my Debed Canyon trip and I had to set the alarm for 7 to be up for my second tour the following day. This one took in some sites in Armenia’s south and was mercifully shorter than the previous day’s tour. We also a much more sympathetic guide, who recognized that some people wanted history lectures and some didn’t and told us we could choose how much to listen to—no death glares for the people who tuned out. I got there early enough to get one of the single seats (the minibuses have two seats on one side of a central aisle and one on the other) so that I’d have a little more peace. This tour took in Khor Virap and Noravank monasteries, as well as the “bird cave,” which contains the oldest site of wine production that we know of.
Khor Virap has a significant place in Armenian history because it was here that Saint Gregory the Illuminator, who brought Christianity to Armenia, was imprisoned in a dungeon for twelve years by the pagan king Trdat III. Gregory got the last laugh, though (although judging from the frescoes in Akhtala, he probably didn’t do much laughing), and the site is now a monastery. Notably, the monastery lies right near the Turkish border and is the closest I came to Mount Ararat. I doubt that anyone has ever complained that Ararat was too small. Noah and co would have had a long climb down through the snow if that’s where they disembarked.
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| Khor Virap Monastery |
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| Mount Ararat as seen from Khor Virap |
The road from Khor Virap to Noravank continues on to the Iranian border. All along the way are stalls selling wine in nondescript plastic bottles for “export” to Iran. A friend tells me that, in Iran, it’s important to know an Armenian if you want to get your hands on some wine.
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| Wine for "export" to Iran |
Noravank means “new monastery,” but, like New College in Oxford, it dates from the Middle Ages. It has a beautiful mountain setting as well as a number of exquisite architectural features, like a set of symmetrical steps on the main church that flank the entrance and lead up to a second storey. The stone and wood carving are great too. Armenian churches tend to have elaborately carved wooden doors.
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| Noravank |
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| Some of the lovely features on Noravank's main church |
Our guide made herself available to tell us about the history of these places, and to talk us through some of the features, but she also made it clear that she’d leave ample “selfie time.” Apparently that’s the time you get to look at the place on your own. It has been weird noticing how so many visitors to these places spend less time looking at the places they’re visiting than they do looking at a camera lens. One sign that Instagram has eaten away at the human soul was seeing women taking duck-face selfies or making cutesy poses at the genocide memorial. I don’t like to criticize tourists too much when I’m a tourist myself but geez.
The bird cave is so named because swallows in the hundreds have made nests on the surrounding cliff face. They look like massive barnacles packed together on the vertical rock. It was mesmerizing watching the busy swallows flitting up to their nests, depositing whatever was in their beaks, and flitting off again.
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| Swallows' nests on cliff faces |
But it’s what’s inside that counts. Armenians have been making wine for a lot longer than there have been alcohol-deprived Iranians wanting to buy contraband. The inside of the cave is an active archaeological site—the open areas were covered in grids of string for archaeologists to keep a record of where every item was found. Along with huge clay pots that had been used in the earliest recorded wine manufacture, archaeologists found the world’s oldest leather shoe here (now on display in the history museum in Yerevan) and human remains that showed evidence of human sacrifice and cannibalism. Evidently finding the right meat to pair with your wine is as old as wine making itself.
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| Ancient wine jugs under archaeologists' grids |
Wednesday: Kasagh Gorge
And on that cheerful note, let’s turn to my last full day in Armenia and my second solo trip. This one took me about an hour’s marshrutka drive north of Yerevan to the town of Ohanavan. This marshrutka had bucketloads of character: some missing front panelling that left part of the engine exposed, curtains on the windows, and seating that must have been assembled in a Soviet factory. It’s curious how a machine comes to seem more human the less efficiently it runs. It’s the Bartleby in all of us that distinguishes us from our tools.
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| My marshrutka north from Yerevan |
The marshrutka strained and groaned as it chugged up into the hills north of Yerevan. The drive took us by a curious mix: derelict lots, lots with half-constructed buildings, only some of which looked like they had any prospect of being completed, tire shops, and then the occasional gaudy palazzo with faux marble statues of Greco-Roman heroes atop pedestals.
The goal was to walk the eight kilometres between two monasteries, Hovhannavank and Saghmosavank, through the Kasagh Gorge, which runs between them. Hovhannavank is perched right at the edge of the ridge and was worth a half hour of admiration before I headed down into the canyon.
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| Hovhannavank |
The first kilometre and a half went very slowly and had me worried the whole trail would be like this. And really “trail” is a bit of a misnomer. Everything was heavily overgrown and with enough brambles to make me very careful in my negotiations with the foliage. Frogs (or toads?) leapt into the water as I plodded by. Farther along, I came across another colony of swallows’ nests glued to a cliff face. For the three and a half hours of the hike, I only came across one other group of people, who were hiking in the opposite direction.
Mercifully the trail opened up a bit and I was able to enjoy the hike a lot more. With a mind less encumbered by where my next step would take me, I could marvel at the miracle of water. Its eddying route follows the path of least resistance, at every point avoiding confrontation with the hard earth around it. But give it enough time and it will carve a canyon out of that earth.
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| Kasagh Gorge |
I arrived at Saghmosavank as families were gathering for a wedding. I didn’t spend much time poking around the church because I didn’t want to disturb. I paused a short while to pull burrs out of my socks and shoes while young men in swish clothes and swish cars (one had a jumbo-sized spoiler and a fire-breathing dragon painted on the side) pulled up. I have a cushy job and like to do physically demanding things for fun. With these guys, I expect it’s the reverse: many probably have physically demanding jobs so they like to make their leisure time as cushy as possible.
Because I was eight kilometres north of Ohanavank at this point—and Ohanavank is itself a tiny town that only gets the occasional marshrutka—I decided to take my chances with hitchhiking on the way back. I was told hitchhiking in Armenia is common and safe and this turned out to be mostly true. Safe as in not sketchy but only as safe as the driver you’re with.
Within five minutes I was in a car with Samuel, who unfortunately spoke neither English nor Russian. That limited conversation to the exchange of names and places of origin. Where was he from? “Karabakh,” he said with a heavy heart. Nagorno-Karabakh is the disputed territory that Armenia won from Azerbaijan in a brutal war in the early 1990s, and which Azerbaijan seized back in two swift offensives in 2020 and 2023. The region was besieged, with its one supply road from Armenia blocked off by the Azerbaijan army, until the ethnic Armenians in the area surrendered and were forcibly removed.
This is a good moment to reflect on the way that Armenia’s historical and present traumas converge. A couple Armenians I spoke to about it don’t regard Azerbaijan as their principal foe. As they see it, Azerbaijan is just a puppet of imperialist Turkey. There’s certainly truth to this analysis—Azerbaijan won the most recent war thanks to arms supplied by Turkey, while Armenia’s erstwhile allies in Russia were too distracted by the war in Ukraine to provide them with much in the way of support. My guide on the Tuesday outing believes Turkey is intent on creating a corridor joining it with Azerbaijan and will try to seize more Armenian territory in order to do so. The guy I had a drink with last Saturday was certain that this was all a prelude to a Turkish plot to wipe Armenia off the map once and for all.
That last scenario seems far-fetched to me—although what do I know?—but it speaks to the way that the memory of the Armenian genocide carries through to the present. Certainly neither Turkey nor Azerbaijan extends much goodwill toward Armenia—although there’s been a recent minor thaw in Turkish-Armenian relations—and I can understand why Armenians feel themselves to be a beleaguered little country next to their powerful neighbour to the west.
In any event, Samuel was a very kind man who was only a menace in the way that he drove. I’ve seen a lot of damaged and wrecked cars in Armenia and, from the way people drive here, I’m hardly surprised. Given his age and place of origin, it’s very likely Samuel has been shot at by people bent on ethnic cleansing so I guess it’s understandable that he might have a higher tolerance of danger than I do.
And now I’m back in Tbilisi. I plan to spend tomorrow catching up with some work (or rather actually doing some work) and then on Saturday head toward the mountains!
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