La Ville en Rose (Yerevan)

I’ll start the “story” part of the blog from my crossing from Georgia into Armenia. I’d originally planned to spend the first week of my solo travel hiking in the mountains in the north of Georgia but the forecast predicted a week of solid rain so I decided to head south instead.

The last-minute change of plans complicated the border crossing somewhat because it’s recommended to apply for an e-visa before entering Armenia. I did that online the night before I left but once I’d submitted my payment I was told it takes an average of three days to process. So I headed to the border assuming I’d just have to process the visa the slow way at the border and pay the visa fee twice. But I was surprised when the guys processing my visa told me my name was already in the system and my e-visa had been approved that morning.

I got a taxi from the bus station with a young Russian photographer who was coming to town for a photo shoot for a couple days. He lives in Tbilisi—one of many Russians living in this part of the world to get away from the war. I asked him about the anti-Russian sentiment in Tbilisi. Georgia is in political turmoil due to a pro-Russian government dragging the country farther from its hoped-for membership in the EU and there’s pro-Europe and anti-Russian graffiti all over Tbilisi. He said he hadn’t encountered any ill will directed specifically toward him and felt happy and at home in Tbilisi.

First Impressions of Yerevan

The superficial impression—which hasn’t yet been dispelled—is that Armenia feels much more like a post-Soviet state than Georgia. My first hint of this on the way in was passing a sign in Russian directing me to an “avant-garde shooting range” just off the highway. I like to picture grizzled vets taking aim in a Dalí-like landscape, but the more mundane truth is that avangard was used in the Soviet period to denote the vanguard of political consciousness, and so ultimately came to become a byword for anything good. Including, as it turns out, shooting ranges.

Yerevan, the capital, does little to dispel that post-Soviet impression. The outskirts are lined with huge, charmless apartment blocks and the centre of the city is laid out according to a rational grid-like plan encircled by a ring road. The central square—now Republic Square rather than (as it was formerly) Lenin Square—is lined with monumental government buildings and the national museum. Livening things up somewhat, these buildings, and many others in the city, are constructed from volcanic pink tuff stones, earning Yerevan the nickname “The Pink City.”

 

A view of Yerevan's Republic Square

Stepping up the monumental architecture a notch is the Cascade, which houses the Cafesjian Centre for the Arts. It feels like the sort of structure the hero of an Ayn Rand novel might have designed—funny how fascist and communist aesthetics converge in some ways, notably in their ambition to overawe a human sense of scale. Originally conceived in 1922 but not completed until eighty years later, it’s a series of five massive terraces that can be climbed in 572 steps, with each terrace featuring sculptures ranging in style from heroic to quirky.

 

The Cascade

One of the terraces on the Cascade

Hiking up on Thursday morning I was approached by a Korean called Paul who lives in Australia. He’s been living in Australia for decades but I could barely understand his English. He’s widely travelled and enthused about his time in Canada and the beauty of “Pampu.” When I didn’t understand him at first, he seemed to think the solution was just to say “Pampu” five more times fast. It took a bit of detective work to tease out that he was talking about Banff.

Paul was the second recently-retired Asian person I’ve met on this trip. More congenial was Frankie, with whom I shared a day trip tour in Georgia. He’d recently retired as a civil servant in Hong Kong, in a career that began when Hong Kong was a British colony. I asked him about the recent political changes in Hong Kong and he remarked simply, “I think I retired at the right time.”

 

Saturated with History

On a sightseeing front, I’ve made four significant stops: at the Matenadaran, the history museum, the Armenian Genocide Memorial complex, and the Sergei Parajanov museum.

The Matenadaran (Armenian for “book depository”) is a museum, repository, and research institute that’s the world’s largest collection of Armenian manuscripts. It’s also crack for book nerds. Classical Armenia was the first state to adopt Christianity as the state religion, in 301, thirty-six years before the Roman emperor Constantine was baptized. They got their own alphabet a century later thanks to Saint Mesrop Mashtots, whose statue (in predictably monumental form) stands at the entrance.

The basic form of the illuminated manuscripts and scrolls isn’t all that different (to my untrained eye) from the kind you might find in a western European collection of Medieval manuscripts, although, obviously, the script is different. There’s also a real delicacy and detail to the decoration.

A 17th century book showing the seven days of creation

A wildly elaborate 19th century scroll

I spent a very happy hour there and could have spent longer. On my way out, I happened upon some sort of graduation ceremony in front of the Mashtots statue, in which a bunch of cute kids were being eagerly photographed by adoring parents while a mascot in a teacher’s uniform led the ceremony.

 

 

Next stop was the History Museum of Armenia in Republic Square. Armenia is one of the oldest sites of permanent human settlement—Yerevan has been settled for over 5000 years and among the museum’s treasures is the world’s oldest shoe. More impressive to me was the exquisite metalwork dating as far back as the third millennium BCE. I also loved the intricate carved doors dating from the Christian era.

A necklace-like pectoral dating from the 22nd or 23rd century BCE

A helmet of King Argishti I from the 8th century BCE

A 15th century door with a detail of the middle below

One takeaway from the Matenadaran and the history museum is the strong sense over a very ancient and very cohesive sense of history and nationhood. In many ways, it seems to me—and when I ran this by one Armenian, he was inclined to agree—there are some striking parallels between the Armenians and the Jews. Both ancient cultures that have preserved their distinctive culture and religion despite oppression and attempts at forced assimilation by more powerful neighbours, both placing great weight on the written word, both with extensive diasporas that have managed to flourish as canny businesspeople and scholars.

 

The Genocide Museum

 

And of course there’s one other terrible parallel between the Armenians and the Jews, which is as targets of genocide. The most intense phase of the Armenian Genocide took place between 1915 and 1917 and resulted in the destruction of up to 1.5 million lives. I knew the outlines of the history before visiting the museum attached to the memorial complex but I learned about it in much more detail, as well as being confronted directly with the enormity of it.

 

The Armenian genocide remains a highly sensitive political issue. The Turkish government vigorously rejects the word “genocide” and it remains a very sensitive topic in Turkey to this day. The Turkish-Armenian intellectual Hrant Dink, who called for an honest reckoning with the history of the genocide, was assassinated in Istanbul in 2007 by a Turkish nationalist who was later photographed smiling with the police who arrested him. The Turkish author Orhan Pamuk has required armed bodyguards in his visits to Istanbul after acknowledging the genocide.

 

On the memorial complex is a stand of trees, each one dedicated to a foreign leader who has publicly acknowledged the genocide. It’s one of the few places you’ll see Vladimir Putin’s name commemorated for being on the right side of history.

 

One reason this is such a fraught issue in Turkey is that the genocide is threaded into the founding of the Turkish republic. The main perpetrators were a nationalist wing of the Young Turks, who wanted to modernize the sclerotic Ottoman Empire. They were ousted with the Ottomans’ defeat in the First World War, but the borders of modern Turkey took their shape with Atatürk’s consolidation of power, which involved claiming for Turkey the western half of historical Armenia, which had been largely cleared of Armenians in the previous decade.

 

The most salient symbol for Armenians of this historic loss is Mount Ararat, which looms over Yerevan, but now lies within the borders of Turkey. Ararat is near enough and huge enough that at first I couldn’t quite believe that I was seeing the outline of a mountain rather than a cloud. The air here is not the cleanest and so the mountain is only dimly visible through the haze. But, from a Vancouver-centric perspective, it looks like a gigantic Mount Baker, about twice as high on the horizon as the north shore mountains look from Vancouver’s beaches. It’s right there, and a symbol of Armenian nationhood—the name “Ararat” is everywhere here—but it’s on the far side of a closed border.

 

And the genocide leaves a deep mark on Armenian identity. This is no doubt true in all sorts of ways I won’t ever understand but I saw one striking manifestation of it in the museum. In the panel about the main perpetrators of the genocide, notably the Interior Minister Talaat Pasha and the War Minister Enver Pasha, there were scratch marks all over their photos. Even now, and in a museum, someone felt such rage that they had to attack their very likenesses.

Scratched out photos of Enver Pasha and Talaat Pasha

One of the things I learned about in the museum was the ruthlessly successful campaign of retribution against the perpetrators in the decade after the First World War. Unlike the Nazi genocide, there was no legal reckoning for any of the perpetrators, most of whom escaped to Germany and lived under assumed names. But Armenian agents managed to track them down and assassinate almost every major figure that was involved.

 

One of the (few?) upsides to empires is their cosmopolitanism. Istanbul is such a rich city because it was the capital of an empire that stretched from the Balkans to Mesopotamia. You see it in the features of the people: Turkish nationals range from blonde hair and blue eyes to much darker skin tones. Istanbul has been enriched by the long-standing presence not just of Turks but also Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and others. But crumbling empires often turn violently to nationalism. One of the early moves in the Armenian genocide was to round up the intellectual and religious Armenian elite of Istanbul and kill them.

 

Other Adventures

 

I visited the genocide museum on Friday and followed it up with a lighter visit to the house-museum of the filmmaker Sergei Parajanov. I confess I’ve not seen any of his films—although I’ve been told by a couple cinephiles that he’s a really big deal—but I was told the museum was weird enough to be worth visiting regardless, and on that score it didn’t disappoint. In addition to making films, Parajanov dabbled in various other arts, making all sorts of weird sculptures and display cases, which speak to an imagination that was wild and somewhat unhinged.

Parajanov's weirdness on display

Later that same day, I took a walking tour of the city, which helped orient me a bit and gave me various bits of local knowledge. The most memorable was when one of the other people on the tour asked if there was a national sport in Armenia. Only half joking, our guide replied: “chess.” Apparently there are several years of mandatory chess classes in school.

 

The walking tour was partly for the sake of informing myself and partly for the sake of being social. For the most part, I’m happy doing things on my own, but I’m aware that, with two months of solo travel planned, I should make some efforts to get out and meet people.

 

In particular, I’m exploring ways to meet locals. The dating app Bumble has a friends function but no one in Yerevan seems to use it. Couchsurfing has undergone big changes since I used it in Iran—following the trajectory of the Internet more generally, it’s gone from a free-to-use grassroots organization to a paid-subscription-only commercial operation—but at least it still seems to be active in Yerevan. So I had a drink last night with a guy who works as a tour guide.

 

He was in a bit of a foul mood, as rain had decimated his tour group for the day, and reacted with thinly disguised aversion to the news that I lived in Turkey. I got a long list of Armenian contributions to Turkish culture—apparently it was an Armenian who came up with the moniker Atatürk (“Father of the Turks”) for Mustafa Kemal—and a reminder that Turkish people weren’t really from this part of the world, having come from Central Asia only a few centuries ago. It’s more like a thousand years ago, but you get a sense of how deep history is in this region when they can still count as newcomers by Anatolian standards. When I told him I was planning to go hiking in Georgia, he asked me why, and told me that there’s plenty of great hiking in Armenia. I did come away with a helpful map as well as what looks like a great app for the small amount of hiking in Armenia I will make time for.

 

I’m staying in an Airbnb near the Cascade, which feels like a family home that hasn’t changed since the 1970s. Which is part of its charm. I discovered that trips in Armenia outside Yerevan will work better as day trips (more on that in the next post) so I arranged to stay on a few extra days. It works better for both of us (shhh!) if I just pay her in cash rather than through the Airbnb app so I met her this morning to pay her. She’d given me a price in dollars and I asked if I could pay in Armenian dram instead. Whether through a typo or autocorrect, she told me it was fine if I wanted to pay in dramas. I like the idea of composing a short play for her each day to cover my apartment fee.

 

We met outside a metro station so I figured I really should go down and explore, even though central Yerevan is very walkable. Yerevan has the second-shortest metro in the world (after Yekaterinburg, whose metro I’ve also ridden!). According to my guide on the walking tour, it was built despite a rule in the Soviet Union that only cities with over a million people could have a metro. Yerevan fell below this bar but cunning Yerevantsis arranged to clog up the streets when a Soviet bigwig was visiting, creating traffic jams wherever his car went, so that, on his return to Moscow, he declared that something had to be done to alleviate the traffic problem.

 

The metro was completed in the early 1980s and doesn’t seem to have changed much. Dingy and smelling of damp, it has nothing of the majesty of Moscow’s metro. I tried to take a photo of my rickety train after I got off and a uniformed martinet with a tight bun and low heels strode over to me and told me that photographs were forbidden and insisted on watching me delete the photo. So no photo to share here. I’m not sure what she was afraid I would do with that information.