On Armenia

Or "The Greatest Place in the World"

Excuse me while I go a bit Matt Lakeman on you all. We’ve all dreamed of doing it.

Armenia is suddenly in the news. This is a good thing, though not for good reasons.

A couple of days ago, news came through that Armenian security services had foiled a plan by a Russian-backed cell of 7 seditious agents to overthrow Armenia’s freely and fairly elected government (how quaint to think it still possible in this day and age to launch a junta with fewer than 10 people!). Around the same time, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy issued a formal expression of delight in a Substack post that neighbouring dictatorial petrostate Azerbaijan was recently able to ‘liberate’ the ethnically and religiously Armenian province of Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia’s ghastly democratic clutches, as part of the decades-long ongoing exchange of liminal territories that is a key part of both countries’ respective national identities (and which forms a considerable part of Azerbaijan’s origin myth).

Between these two developments, Armenia’s name has suddenly appeared in people’s mouths. Thinkpieces have begun to emerge. People in our clueless and impotent West seem to be warming up to the world’s oldest Christian nation.

Or they’re remembering that it’s still on the map at all.

Or, at least, they’re understanding that it’s a useful stalking horse for their usual political obsessions.

This is of some sentimental importance to me because I recently visited Armenia for the first time and, as I have since made clear to dozens of friends and acquaintances (to the receipt of almost blanket incomprehension and incredulity), I think it may well be the greatest place in the world. I am concerned about its place in the world and about its security. I worry that in the near future it may well suffer existential reversals, like further incursion by the Azeris or reversion to Russian puppet-statehood. I worry that even if it doesn’t suffer these things it will still go ahead and do something dumb like joining the EU, becoming a minor vassal state made immobile by European bureaucratic norms instead of becoming the Eurasian Singapore, which it easily has enough human capital and territory to do (having as much of the former and far more of the latter than Singapore ever had, in fact).

I wrote at some length about the place during my visit and upon my return. I considered publishing the account at the time but, in a moment of wild megalomaniacal overestimation of the reach of this newsletter, I didn’t. Why? For the most onanistic of all reasons; because, like a fine little Met wrapped in my cosseted traveller’s entitlements, I thought that if the article gained any traction I would be doing my small part to flood Armenia’s stunning desert-pink boulevards and fine lush hills with unwanted tourist footfall. That’s all they’d want, I wagered to myself, to become the Barcelona of the mysterious Caucasus. Never mind that I was actively encouraging everyone to whom I spoke to go there, and moreover to go there now, “before everybody notices it.”

Which exhortation I may well shortly change to “before something happens.”

Well, withholding my notes was a self-evidently stupid thing to do — because everyone should know about this place. Maybe, if everyone did, there might be a slightly greater collective will to stop bad things from happening to it. This, for reasons I hope I am about to make you understand, would be a good thing.

Armenia — The Basics, History

There is no such thing as a nation with an uninteresting history, but Armenia has one of the most fascinating basic profiles of any nation on the planet. Its known history is old and its founding myths date it older still. Armenians often refer to their nation as Hayastan, a nod to the story that Armenians are the descendants of Hayk, the founding patriarch of the Armenian nation and a descendant of Noah, whose Ark ran aground on Mount Ararat after the Great Flood. Mount Ararat is the sovereign symbol of Armenian statehood, and the subject of ardent demotic affection, though it is territorially located in Turkey.

While Turkey borders Armenia to the West, it is bordered by Iran to the south, Georgia to the north, and Azerbaijan to the east. Armenia thus enjoys several obvious and not entirely enviable distinctions. Firstly, it is surrounded on two sides by arch enemies. The older of the two enemies is historically responsible for the attempted genocide of Armenia’s people (a responsibility that Turkey still denies). The younger enemy, meanwhile, has made its blood-feud with Armenia a pillar of both national identity and government policy. To the south, and across the Iranian border, Armenia finds its surest local ally, an ally which happens to be an avowed and sanctioned geopolitical enemy of many of the countries Armenia would ostensibly like to align itself with. To the north, through gorgeous poetheim Georgia, is the sight of the Russian Federation. Having spent much of the 20th century as a Soviet client state, and no doubt given Russia’s recent history of adventurism, Armenia looks north with an understandable wariness.

Another of those obvious and unenviable distinctions is that Armenia is, alongside Georgia, the only Christian nation of note in the region. In fact Armenia was the first nation ever to declare Christianity its national faith, ordained in 301 AD by King Tiridates III (I have to say I find Armenian naming traditions among the most aesthetically/phonetically beautiful and hopelessly grand in any language). The first-adoption of Christianity is a signal example of a national-psychological trait that has defined Armenians all-ends-up throughout their history, which is their tendency to make astonishing left-turns into profound cultural refurbishments with almost no precedent to guide them and heedless of the ostracism and general difficulties this furious will-to-independence may incur for them. I’m not sure whether the Armenian language is a progenitor of this attitude, or just another reflection of it. Either way, Armenian is the only language in its particular Indo-European branch. And apropos of nothing but magnificent, stubborn animus, in the 5th century a linguist, theologian and statesman-saint named Mesrop Mashtots decided to single-handedly invent a new script for it. This magnificent script was my first exposure to Armenia, as I sat in the graveyard where many of my family lays buried and admired the elegant lettering on a cluster of graves belonging to Armenian Londoners near where my grandmother rests; script which looked to me then, as it does now and in the most wondrous possible way, like it was just dreamed up on a whim by a gifted lexicographer.

(I thought at first that the Armenian-only branch of the language tree was called the Info-European line — unfortunately I appear to have just misread Indo-European in that instance, though, as I often find myself doing, I really wish that what I’d misread was the truth.)

Armenia’s geopolitical heyday was actually well before the conversion to Christianity. Interesting pre-historic bits of technology are dug up intermittently in Armenia, including the world’s oldest shoe, its oldest wagon, its oldest skirt, and its oldest wine-making facility, and the region was well-settled through the Bronze Age. But the first Armenian state-proper dates back to the 9th century BC, and the Kingdom of Armenia grew and reached its greatest glory under Tigranes the Great in the 1st century BC, becoming briefly the most powerful state east of Rome. Before and after this peak period, it alternated between independence and subordination to other empires, part-and-parcel of the extremely mixed blessing of being found on the boundary of two continents. It was one of the only parts of the region that Alexander the Great did not conquer, though a copy of the Alexander Romance is one of the earliest surviving extant texts in the Armenian language.

The Kingdom fell to the Sassanids in the 5th century AD and became part of a rather delicious-sounding marzpanate within the Sassanian Empire, though the Armenians fought successfully to maintain their Christianity after this ostensible subjugation. Then empires gave way to caliphates and Armenia became an administrative division swapped between the Umayyads and the Byzantine Empire, before the coming of the Seljuk Turks. All of this exchange led to some interesting little historical episodes, like when an Armenian named Ruben — later Ruben I, Prince of Armenia — led a gaggle of his countrymen into the gorges of Tarsus of Cilicia, where he successfully petitioned the Byzantine governor of the region to cede them land to found the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, or ‘Little Armenia’, which later became a key far-outpost of Christendom in the times of the Crusades.

Then, after centuries of incessant invasions by Central Asian steppe interests, came the Ottomans, under whose precedence it is generally no controversy to say that the Armenians suffered a great deal. Having been divided into a western and an eastern half (the latter of which was ceded to Russia in the 18th century), the Ottomans pursued a plan of forced resettlement of Armenians outside of their homeland. They were one of few minority groups within the strict Muslim social structure of the Ottoman empire to bullishly maintain their Christian faith. As ‘gavur’ (‘infidels’) they were subject thus to the kinds of punitive expeditions — looting, further resettlements, forcible religious conversion, random outbursts of murderous violence — that you might expect. The first attempt at an Armenian genocide was mounted by Sultan Ahmed III in 1725, where the complete extermination of the Armenians of Artsakh and and Syunik was ordered on the grounds that they had conspired to prevent the Turkish army from accessing the Caspian sea.

As the Ottomans’ logistical demands grew with increasing territorial ambition, they began to keep manpower flowing into their janissary ranks via a special tax, the ‘devshime’ (‘blood tax’), wherein Christian children, including Armenians, were taken from their homes and forcibly converted to Islam. This was begun in the reign of Murad I in the 14th century and seems to have persisted as late as the 19th century.

Amazingly, in spite of such privations, the Armenians prospered within their enclaves of the Ottoman empire. They were disproportionate contributors to the Ottoman economy, taking up vital roles in crafts, trade, and industry. They managed, to an impressive extent, to maintain free market policies in their mercantile activities, trading more with foreigners than the imperial average and acting as pillars of the Ottoman banking sector. They put an unusually pronounced focus on education, so that even many Turks started lobbying for their children to attend Armenian schools and be taught by Armenian tutors. The first typesetters in the empire were Armenian, as were its first newspaper proprietors and theatrical impresarios, while the Palians were architects to the royal court. One H. Limonjian created the first formal musical notation in the empire. The first Turkish opera was written by an Armenian. Armenians were so tied into key Ottoman state functions that upon their murder and expulsion, swathes of the Turkish state ceased functioning owing to a lack of available professionals — everything from state accountants to vintners — to staff positions previously held by non-Muslims.

For all this, civil rights were little spoken of and hardly ever guaranteed for non-Muslims in the empire. They could not hold public office or serve in the military. They could not wear fine clothes or ride horses, and limits were put on the kind of houses they were permitted to build and live in. They were taxed more heavily and often found themselves indebted to multiple creditors (Kurdish tribal chiefs, local administrators, the state treasury) at once. The lack of equal rights in property and finance for Muslims and non-Muslims occasionally produces an historically humorous footnote. For instance, Ottoman Muslims would be charged higher interest rates on loans than non-Muslims, because it was understood that should Muslim claimants press a case against, the non-Muslim Ottoman had no chance whatsoever of a fair hearing.

It is not, however, generally a very funny story. Amazingly it was only through Western pressure exerted deep into the Empire’s decline that an Ottoman Constitution was passed in 1876, granting certain inalienable rights to all citizens, whatever their faith, though these rights were primarily declarative and seldom if ever exercised. While the nominal Armenian position in the Empire improved with increased trade with the West, the primacy of this over-achieving minority class, who with their ceaseless entrepreneurialism and westerly orientation seemed to be considerably more favourably positioned for the coming collapse than the Ottoman majority, began to attract deeper resentments.

So it was that, at the turn of the century, large scale massacres of Armenians within Ottoman-controlled Western Armenia began. While further motions had been added under Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin specifically to guarantee the safety of Armenians in Ottoman territory, in 1894 Ottomans seized on protests in the Sassoun region to massacre entire villages of Ottoman Armenians. Peaceful demonstrations in Istanbul in 1895, intended to protest non-implementation of reforms, were violently suppressed and followed by killings of Armenians in the Ottoman capital, action which then spread to the provinces of Trebizond, Derjan, Baberd, Yerznka, Keghi, Charsanjak, Baghesh, Urfa, Karin, Malatia, and other imperial cities with prominent Armenian presence. Armenians organised in self-defence, though little but international notice and intervention could save them.

And, indeed, sympathy for the ‘Armenian Question’, such that it was referred to within and without the Sultan’s regime, spurred a wave of Armenophilia, particularly in France, which remains one of Armenia’s great European supporters (and, alongside India, one of its chief international arms merchants today). Fridtjof Jansen (who won the Nobel Peace Prize in part for his efforts for the Armenians), Jean Jaures, Anatole France, and Victor Berard were just a few of the notables who condemned the violence. This did little practically to mitigate the situation, and by 1896 the Hamidian massacres (named after Abdul Hamid II, the last Ottoman sultan) had escalated things to the point where ‘massacre’ became too small a word. 300,000 Armenians were killed in these pogroms in two years, while 100,000s of others were displaced or forcibly converted to Islam, marking the slide into genocide-proper.

Armenian political parties, international appeals by the Patriarch of the Armenian Apostolic Church, and campaigns of organised guerrilla resistance by Armenian hajduks all failed to improve the Armenians’ situation. While in 1904 the Great Powers pressed for rights reform, the helm of the dying Ottoman Empire began to fall to the Young Turks, a group of exiled revolutionary intelligensia who formed a constitutionalist opposition movement against Abdul Hamid II's absolutist sultanate. Far from signalling a positive turn to liberal reason in Turkey’s political history, the Young Turks made the Armenians a symbol of the decadence they asserted had poisoned the empire, and made their extermination a matter of systematic national policy as part of a general pursuit of purging all non-Islamic elements from Ottoman society.

First, the Armenians of Cilicia were liquidated in April 1909. In 1911, ‘Turkification’ of all non-Muslim citizens was mandated by the government. As momentum built towards World War I, and Ottoman fortunes continued to suffer, the violent, judicial, and civil mistreatment of the Armenians intensified. Once war broke out, the Young Turks aligned themselves with Germany, to try to guarantee, upon victory, the security of one of their key policy aims — the expansion of Turkey’s eastern border for contiguous contact with the Turkish-speaking Islamic peoples of the Caucasus. The Armenians were considered, physically, to be in the way of this. The subsequent declaration of jihad upon the Western allies put more domestic heat on the Armenians, who then as now (though not in any simplistic sense) could reasonably have been considered unusually Western for an Asiatic people, and thus a perfectly justified target for religiously- and politically-motivated attacks.

And so began in-earnest the story of the Armenian genocide that some of you will be vaguely familiar with, prosecuted in stages, with killings on the order of 10,000s often carried out as restitution after successive Ottoman military humiliations, their armies full (amazingly) of Armenian conscripts. After several rounds of decimations had been inflicted on Armenian servicemen, and with no Western shrift left to provide scant cover for them, Armenian civilians were next targeted. Political and intellectual figures were arrested and executed or deported. Armenian clergy were treated with extraordinary cruelty. Systematically divested of their leadership and fighting-age men, the remaining Armenians had little chance. The government’s Central Committee of the Union and Progress Party (CUP) pursued a completely systematic and highly centralised policy of extermination that was explicitly used as a model by Hitler 15 years later. Ministers of the interior, bureaucrats of various levels, police, and gendarmerie were all party to the strategy and its execution.

Attempts to call attention to the Ravished Armenia fell on deaf or otherwise mortally occupied ears. The Armenians were ground between the rotting teeth of an empire in its death agonies, an empire which only held on long enough to see that 1,500,000 of them had been killed in its jaw before it died. About 65% of all living Armenians were killed in the genocide. Many thousands of surviving orphans were forcibly married or converted to Islam and raised as non-Armenians. The genocide’s architects — Talaat, Enver Pasha, Jemal — are regarded as heroes in modern Turkey, Turkey which denies the genocide ever took place at all. In fact, in what may be the most pathetically unconvincing display of counter-myth-mongering I’ve ever seen in the scope of such an issue, the Turks have tried to spin a story that the Armenian genocide was carried out by Armenians against Turks.

I have put huge emphasis here on the genocide — perhaps needless to say, it is not the only thing of importance to have occurred in Armenian history, which is far richer than the scale of the Armenians’ numbers, and the ancientness of their civilisation, and the intensity with which ulterior parties have tried to eradicate it, should reasonably allow. But it is a fact of no lesser centrality to the modern Armenian than the Holocaust is to the modern Jew. And it is emblematic of the trait that is most dominant in their walk through history — a fairly breathtaking capacity to endure catastrophe and flourish. These are people who once kept company with the neo-Assyrians and the Hittites. They have endured to see the birth of South Sudan and East Timor and may yet see in the Bektashis.

The Armenians actually tried to declare the First Armenian Republic while all this was going on, but, while heroic, the undertaking was doomed by the ongoing war, territorial disputes, and an influx of refugees from Western Armenia spreading subsequent rounds of disease. After World War I ended, new borders were drawn for Armenia by Woodrow Wilson — now referred to as Wilsonian Armenia — and there was briefly a question of taking the country under United States protectorate.

This was immediately de-tabled, however, by a prompt invasion by the Turkish National Movement, the self-proclaimed government of the new Turkey, inflicting more misery upon Armenia and resulting in the requisition of much of the western Wilsonian territory. The awesomely-named Republic of Mountainous Armenia was then declared by Armenian forces under command of the nationalist Garegin Nzhdeh in April 1921. They spent some time fighting off both Soviet and Turkish intrusions in the Zangezur region of southern Armenia, but after receiving territorial assurances from Moscow, the Armenians decided they could not sustain their resistance any longer, and submitted to life under the Soviet banner.

Relatively little of wide note happened in Armenia between the 20s and the coming of Gorbachev, whereupon the people began demanding an end to wildly pollutive Soviet industrial practices. By 1990, independence fever was growing, and the New Armenian Army became the spearpoint of these feelings. In September 1991, statehood was declared. Its first order of business, the cause having been prosecuted at any rate since 1988, was the (re)conquest proper of Nagorno-Karabakh, a region that is generally recognised as belonging to Azerbaijan, but which is populated by ethnic Armenian Christians, who, it is not unreasonable to suppose, would not be quite so secure there under Azeri watch. The First Nagorno-Karabakh war, in which unacceptable ferocity was shown by both Azeris and Armenians, broadly went in Armenia’s favour where territory is concerned, until a subsequent blanket land and air blockade by the Turks and Azeris threatened to cripple the Armenian economy. In 1994 Russia stepped in to broker peace. Armenia retained Nagorno-Karabakh and the territory would remain in Armenian possession until 2020.

Beyond this, Armenia made perhaps the most convincingly full switch to a free market economy with full franchise and nominally free elections of any among the former Soviet Central Asian possessions. It has not been all cognac[1] and lavash, however. A spate of imprisonments and detentions of opposition leaders by the country’s Republican party led to a ‘Velvet Revolution’ in 2018, whereupon thrice-elected president Serzh Sargsyan was deposed in an entirely bloodless and populist coup that had the broad consent of the electorate. This is significant for where the country is now. The premiership of Nikol Pashinyan, who led the movement, and the movement itself, are considered ostentatious gestures of alignment with European values on the part of the Armenians, and an equally dramatic rejection of post-Soviet dynastic authoritarianism that Russia has tried successfully to maintain in most of its other former Central Asian possessions, not least Azerbaijan itself. This is presumably the reason why Russia has chosen to back the most recent unsuccessful coup attempt against Pashinyan.

Armenia — The Basics, Politics

Armenia has simultaneously diversified its economy since independence and also increased share of GDP spent on agriculture, given the perils of being food dependent while being intractably surrounded by nemesis. The country has small but non-geopolitically-significant stores of natural resources like copper, zinc, coal, gas, and petroleum. Alongside exported consumables (especially high-end alcoholic spirits) and jewellery making, Armenia is growing its service sector and knowledge economy, with a proportionately strong IT sector and steadily increasing tourism.

An influx of Karabakh refugees has inflated unemployment numbers, but Armenia’s economy has otherwise been pretty consistently healthy, spurred by its general pursuit of liberal foreign investment policies. It runs amazingly favourable programs for skilled immigration and Digital Nomadery, presumably to offset the considerable brain drain produced by the ongoing exodus of young professional talent; in spite of the outflux, the population has been in net growth since 2012. The matter of the diaspora is a curious one for Armenia, given so much of its economy still relies on investment and support from Armenians abroad (this is its most typically Central Asian characteristic). A huge influx of Russian citizens, many of them highly educated and some inimical to the Putin regime, has resulted in a spike in industry-specific productivity and property speculation in the capital Yerevan and should ostensibly act as both an economic and political ballast as the motherland looks to stand up without diaspora support, and as a tricky balancing act will have to be performed with the affections of Russia however Armenia plans to shift its alignments.

At street level, Armenian politics are pretty good. The country does not do domestic bloodshed over political matters — the Velvet Revolution arguably deserves far more scholarship than has been generally accorded to it, the conduct of all concerned being rather extraordinary in its civility and restraint, comparable not only to the Czech revolution after which it was named but to Britain’s 1688 revolution. Street crime seemed conspicuously low; I’m not sure it’s paralytic-salaryman-safely-asleep-on-a-park-bench-all-night-unmolested low, but of everywhere I’ve been outside of East Asia it is probably the place where a salaryman would be happiest taking that chance (interestingly I understand that Azerbaijan is comparable in this regard).

The corruption index tells an interesting story. There is a high reported rate of customs corruption — anecdotally I would vouch for this; no other interaction with public officials in Armenia felt like it quite had the same potential for hostility as the border checks — but longer-standing issues in judicial, military, and procurement corruption are being tackled with at least declarative commitment since the Velvet Revolution. Having said that onlookers have noted that “reforms have been patchy and have had no serious impact” and the excruciating centralisation of the Armenian state structure (more on that shortly) makes me wonder how effectively, or at least how quickly, anti-corruption measures are likely to be implemented.

Armenian human capital is, I think, probably well-undersized by any official measure. It is something of a prejudicial statement (though a positive one) formed of various more or less contingent signals and vibes, but the Armenians I’ve met generally strike me as conspicuously intelligent, by broad measures (level of education, profession etc.) as well as behavioural ones (linguistic command, social command, conscientiousness, openness, seriousness, breadth of interest, clarity of purpose, engagement with culture, freedom from fanaticism). This would befit a culture that has historically put such pointed emphasis on high-cultivation and education, and one which still, even as teachers fall to neglected-class status in developed economies worldwide, pays its teachers well, having developed a tailored curriculum — the splendidly titled Araratian Baccalaureate — specifically to help students gain an educational minimum of parity with international learning standards.

Armenian military capacity has suffered owing to about a decade of ongoing conflict between the government and the officer class, with plenty of turnover and poor retention among the latter. This has hampered the country’s preparedness for war, a considerable potential issue given the constant ambient likelihood of it. Having said this, and meaning to suggest no trivialisation of the issue, it presently seems relatively unlikely that Baku would see further incursions into Armenian territory as in its interests in the immediate future, while Russia remains tied up in Ukraine and is presumably anticipating having to devote some future productive capacity to China in the instance that it mobilises over Taiwan. Whether my estimations are correct or not, it would be germane to presume that there is probably a slimming but viable window for Western interests to flood Armenia with asset capital investments as a means of insurance. Cultivating it as a midway Eurasian financial centre, knowledge-economic-hub, and export-oriented industrial centre, useful to Russian commerce as well Western interests, could make destabilisation through military adventurism on any part seem like too much of a waste of money to both with. This might be a worthwhile idea given the value of the human capital, geopolitical balancing factors and, if we care about such things, intense cultural riches as might otherwise be at risk. The scope for the nation’s Singhalisation is extremely ripe — it has the Singaporean hardiness and human capital average, along with far greater landmass and more defensible borders. What it ostensibly lacks are amenable governance structures and figures of comparably visionary and resolute leadership as Singapore had in the 20th century. Speaking of which…

While Armenia’s culture remains profoundly vitalised (as I’ll explore further in the travelogue section), it has suffered a lowering level of human capital going into politics, which I expect is partly a function of the centuries it has spent as a vassal state (with no need of a strong lineage of independent governance), and partly a function of the fact that most of its elite talent leaves at the first opportunity and the diaspora cannot by law return to take political office in Armenia unless they renounce whatever dual citizenships they have.

The executive structure of Armenia is weird. The president is notionally the highest office holder in the land, who theoretically should be able to wield the executive under a parliamentary structure that would be familiar to most Westerners. The reality is that the Armenian state structure lives in a state of constant veto paralysis, guaranteed by constitutional reforms in the 2010s that ceded more power to the prime minister. Former president Armen Sarkissian put it best upon his resignation in 2022, which was spurred by his complete legal inability to play any executive role in the 44-day war with Azerbaijan in which Nagorno-Karabakh was lost:

[Armenians live] in a peculiar reality where the President cannot influence issues related to war and peace. In a reality where he cannot veto those bills that he considers inappropriate for the state and people. In a reality where the President's capabilities are not perceived as an advantage for the state but are viewed as a threat to various political groups. In a reality where the President cannot use a crucial part of his potential to solve systemic domestic and foreign policy issues. In a reality where the world appears to be a zone of constant turbulence and the President does not have the constitutional tools to help his country. In a reality where the head of state and sometimes even his family become targets for attacks by various political groups… I thought it thoroughly and decided to resign as the President of the Republic of Armenia after almost four years of active work. This step of mine is entirely non-emotional and comes from a certain logic. In the current challenging period for the state and the nation, the President does not have the necessary tools to influence the fundamental processes in domestic and foreign policy.

Prior to his actual departure, Sarkissian had threatened repeatedly to resign the presidency if the constitution was not amended to give him reasonable powers of action, at least in wartime. Just as I find it unsurprising that Armenia is, to my knowledge, possibly the first nation ever to elect a software engineer to ‘highest office’ — almost all the Armenians I know are SWEs, all of them brilliant — I find it unsurprising that a guy like Sarkissian tired of having to work in a system like this. From the intel I can find he seems like a pretty live operator — a successful entrepreneur, a former physicist, by far his country’s biggest diplomatic asset with a long history as an ambassador, through which he counts King Charles as a personal friend. During his tenure he brokered very bold feats of bridge-building with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and the resignation note above is as clear and emphatic a piece of leave-bound communication as you typically get from politicians nowadays. Armenia rather needed to keep people of this profile in these positions of high office.

By chasing out able high-initiative candidates for the sake of satisfying a complex and immobile executive, Armenia have had to live with the alternative. Nikol Pashinyan, Prime Minister before, during, and after Sarkissian’s presidency — and in Armenia, PMs do have the ability to manage war — has been described as the traitor of Artsakh. This, I would imagine, would strike different Armenians in different ways in the country’s increasingly polarised climate. Though he walks on what looks to be increasingly unsteady ground, Pashinyan remains the architect of the Velvet Revolution and he was still at least enough-liked among Armenians to have been re-elected since the defeat to Azerbaijan (though with a c.50% vote share vs. 70% in 2019).

Still, even given his skill as a grassroots organiser, he seems to be a more questionable standard of operator than Sarkissian. As part of a general attempt to push Armenia West, he has tried awkwardly to distance the country from Iran; and while one would understandably not wish to have to rely on Russia to guarantee one’s sovereignty, it seems Pashinyan has irritated the Russians enough for them to have considered backing recent attempts to oust him. He undoubtedly deserves a share of responsibility for Armenia’s disastrous defeat to Azerbaijan in 2020, which Armenians look upon as an extremely ominous development, for where the Armenians themselves had assuredly retaken Artsakh from the Azeris after the collapse of the wall, the Azeris trounced them with little difficulty this time around. Consensus is that the Armenians have invested very poorly in outdated military infrastructure that was and remains unable to cope with Azeri technology and methods, which the latter have primarily purchased and derived from the Israelis, whose alignment against Armenia still strikes me as fairly astonishing for reasons I’ll explore later (even if, given Israel’s own growing isolation and reliance on Azeri oil, it is still somewhat understandable among the zahirian horror of the current Middle Eastern geopolitical climate).

So Armenia presently finds itself isolated — locked into captive alliances, faced with fanatical local enemies, and nothing yet to unite them with the new European allies they dream of courting except for similarly paralysed state capacity. Theoretically, there should be a tremendous animus among European live players to cultivate and secure Armenia — it is an oasis of high-trust society and rich human capital with a Western-amenable value set in precisely the region where those commonalities and assets are few and may yet grow fewer. It has a critical long-standing friendship with the region’s most intractable party (Iran) that could feasibly be leveraged. Of course, ‘European live players’ is presently a contradiction in terms, but as much as Britain’s own inability to leverage the potential of its ex-EU status is disappointing by itself, it’s also disappointing that we aren’t able to take on high-upside moonshot feats of foreign policy development like this. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

You may now exhale. The analytical portion of this article is done. Now, I’ll tell you a little bit about my own experience in the City of the Sun and its environs.

If you are encomium-resistant, beware — the prose is about to purple.

An Armenian Travelogue

7th-century monastery of Khor Virap monastery in the shadow of Mount Ararat. If Noah did indeed land there, I do not blame him.

My lady and I travelled to Armenia for the wedding of a good friend. We travelled via Turkey, for visa-derived reasons. I would have many recollections to offer on Turkey were this article not already long enough, so I will restrain myself to the single observation that Balkan memes, already just about as funny a thing as exists on this Earth, seem to intensify in their comic power the closer you are to the Balkans when perusing them. After all, Turkey is between one set of Balkans and another. The ones to the east were our destination.

Unless you’re flying north, almost all flights into Yerevan arrive between midnight and 2.am, just as almost all departing flights leave between 3.am and 6.am. Rubbing your eyes as you enter the terminal building — festooned, for whatever reason, with pictures of Argentina’s victorious World Cup team — it is impossible not to notice how Armenia has totally wasted its perfect-halfway-point-between-Europe-and-South-Asia-status by not making its airport a transfer hub. All such benefits now of course go to air traffic hubs in the Gulf. Armenia is, in fact, really — almost weirdly — hard to get to. Go west of the Hellespont and the only cities that offer direct flights are cities like Paris which have huge Armenian diaspora presence. You can fly direct from Dubai to more than 70 cities in Europe, but some people we encountered on this trip had five-legged-journeys behind and ahead of them to get to Armenia from Western Europe and back again.

Thus, having checked out of our Istanbul hotel — the ‘Sultan’s Apartments’ — on the morning of our departure, we found ourselves with a single very long day in advance of our flight, one mostly spent sat on a sea wall surrounded by furlongs of cigarette butts and discarded picnickery, absorbing that comely northern Mediterranean breeze and looking at the ships off at anchor, Asia on one shoulder and Europe on the other. My lady was awaiting word of the outcome of a job interview process – for her own peace of mind I yearned of course that she be successful, but the company in question were so circumspect and its product so appallingly reviewed I worried for her reputation should she become associated to them. Anticipating her wholly undeserved disappointment should good news not be forthcoming, and worried how such an outcome might mingle with the possibility that my job too was at the time in some jeopardy, I found myself experiencing some rather dicey chest pains. Being a man, I of course adjudged this to be nothing worth the disruption of the next leg of our voyage. After a short flight and a short delay on the tarmac we found ourselves on a short drive through the hard-falling rain, rain which laughed like a wealthy man when he is amiably drunk, to Yerevan. The cab driver ensured our entrance was sounded to music that was pure Radio Vladivostok. I drowsily noted the conspicuous ranks of expressively-fronted strip joints and petrol stations that looked like they’d been built by the concept designer of the Jetsons lining our route in.

As we took the 15 minute ride from the airport to the city centre, I checked in with my godson and my ‘sister’ (she’s not really my sister). They were both fairly astonished to find out I was in Armenia. Just hanging out in Armenia. On the basis of these reactions, and later ones, I have to adjudge that people see Armenia as the most unlikely holiday destination in the world. They know nothing about it — to the west or the east of the Black Sea? Ex-Commie or not ex-Commie? Majority Christian, majority Jewish, majority Muslim? I didn’t blame them. I knew no better.

Our hotelier was asleep on a pull-out bed beneath the stairs when we arrived. He was a well-built, grey-haired Russian whose piercing, wolfish blue eyes harboured a countenance that I could easily imagine presiding contentedly enough over a clandestine execution in snowy woods. He was abundantly ex-military looking, usually wearing Black Sea leisurewear in bright tie-dyes that made them look like fatigues fashioned for close-range-combat during an acid trip. A most interesting man. The firing squad in him could be found not in his grimace but in the sheepishness of his grin, and the way his gaze would suddenly turn, as though to look at you with steely contempt or with warm ironical humour didn’t mean anything to him at all. All the times we passed through reception, whatever hour of day, whatever day of the week, he was there. He did not move. He could be found in the bed or at the desk.

The next morning, we awoke for our first sight of this unglimpsed city whose names itself means ‘first sight’. Yerevan, a place for which I had no shorthand, a land of the total unknown. Neither my lady nor I had any conception at all of what we would find in it. For my part, while I had studied the region’s ancient history, I had studiously avoided learning anything about its present beyond what its currency is called. I thought it was a unique opportunity to go into an unknown region a complete virgin to it.

Our first exposure to Yerevan in daylight was Lusinants Avenue. All rolling incline, a carpet of tarmac without pavement, ramshackle structures, and things that looked like shops but which you could not for the life of you figure out what they must sell — household chemicals? Pawned goods? A few reedy plants? — next to low-rise flats where old men played dominoes in the high morning heat. The street had about it the same roughness and copiousness as the inside of an engine with all the components exposed. We walked past some general stores, past a body shop, and to the other side of a huge curtain of Soviet-era social housing, towards a shopping centre where we hoped to find an ATM, as we’d been instructed that it would be helpful to pay our hotel bill in cash. The housing was as formidable as Soviet housing tends to look, but the edge of sullied elegance laid upon it by its dune-caramel shading gave me pause.

The shopping centre was modern with a typical American-style double-floor-plan, mainly distinguished by its mid-concourse book stands that overflowed with new and second-hand books. For brunch, a burger with delicious ‘village fried potatoes’ that were as well-hollowed and crisp-bottomed as a fine canoe. Served the dish, I was presented a smaller tea plate with black balled plastic on it. It looked like I’d been served a scrunched bin bag, and I briefly wondered if I was expected to sack my own food waste. The ball turned out on inspection to be latex gloves for eating the burger without getting my hands dirty. I thought this an odd and delightful gesture of civility. Little did I know that it would be thoroughly representative, the first pleasingly bewildering surprise of a city that would prove a Gringotts’ vault of them.

For even if I were to double the length of this account from its likely extent, to try and reassemble my every impression of the place, I doubt very much that I could do honour to the effect that Armenia’s first city, ‘the first sight’, the city of the sun and of the lion, had on me. It simultaneously exalts me that I should have visited a place that has exerted such an effect, mystifies me the extent to which I am simultaneously able and unable to account for that effect, and grieves me that however diligent my record the essence of my experience can only be lost to whatever my own walled consciousness is empowered to retrieve. That, I suppose, is the essence and the tragedy of travel writing.

Yet, from the time spent I peering into the bowl of the Hrazdan national sports stadium, past the Ararat distillery, across Victory Bridge, and into the city proper — for this was our path into town — I can best begin to summarise my feeling by saying that Yerevan established itself, stone by proud, harried paving stone, as the most radiant place I have ever visited, and I would go undaunted to the extent of calling it my favourite among all cities. If this surprises you, I assured you it surprised me. I am utterly astonished that it is here of all places in the world that I found the most perfect civility I have ever seen. Allow me to explain what I mean by this.

What I mean is that this is the kind of city in which the collaborating hands of the local authorities and the still-more-powerful local metropolitan spirit have seen fit to establish a supermarket behind a sublime, gilded facade fit for a minor Sassanian palace-front. Walking past it, we thought it must be a mosque, but no, enter it and the finest produce and profane comestibles that money can buy are there for purchase.

For reference, the entrance to my local supermarket in London looks like this:

…while the entrance to the Yerevan supermarket in question looks like this:

Just so, Yerevan is the kind of city where proprietors and town planners think that it is not good enough to simply install a fine coffee shop at the entrance to a park, but that said coffee shop should be sunk under the shade of sprawling sails, misted and greened like a rainforest floor, and whose entrance ought to be marked out with a traditional Caucasian coffee pot the size of an artillery unit.

It is the kind of city where proprietors of a phone shop see fit to string up their square-boxed wares on ribbons and wires outside so that they look like St George’s bunting, simply because it is fit to make their place beautiful. It is the kind of place where at a bakery you are invited to consider which croissant you will buy by inspecting 24-inch-long blow-ups of each variety on sale, which blow-ups are entirely edible but which of course the establishment does not sell to be eaten because “we do not keep coffee cups big enough for them to be dipped in, and dipping them would anyway be impractical”. It is the kind of place where a concourse full of lethal little coin-activated kiddies’ cars is laid out right before the National Opera, so that the young ones can get the most optimal fill of high-cultural osmosis as they play, entirely innocent of the subliminal cultivation that is being worked on them.

It is also a place where almost every park is alive with the wares of artists for sale — real artists, good artists…

…and where absent of anything else to do on a long winter’s night they make lions of tires…

…and yet I am reluctant really to include this kind of thing as an exhibit in favour of the point I’m trying to make, because to have art that is conceived as art exhibit certain luminous qualities is to be expected, or at least hoped for, in the kind of hang-dog manner of the frequently disappointed art lover. It is rather the case that Yerevan has in its bones, in the usually drab fundamentals of what make a city a city, the same intimation of far-off brightness as good art must necessarily have. Like its language, like its history of religious self-determination, Armenia is the dream of every high-agency person, because every step you take down its streets, or through the annals of its history, you find evidence of someone having noticed something worth doing — be it hopelessly small, like enamelling a staircase, or hopelessly large, like foreswearing paganism — and then just done it. Its every surface, cup-brim, locus, and boundary overflows with this sense of innocent possibility and profound ambition.

The cake shops, for example. My lady has of late found a calling for building superb edible sculptures made of icing; we’re talking crazy, figurative, rococo sculpture-lookng cake, a handsome prototype of which I’d been given on my most recent birthday. Before our departure, she had been scouring the web for inspiration, assembling pictures of extraordinary sculptural cakes into a self-directed study guide for turning cake decoration into high art. As we were walking past what ought to have been a dead-enough parade of shops, smacking our heads at how crystal-pure and haunted-cold the water we’d just tasted from a splendid wrought iron fountain had been (for Yerevan is full of them and they are very proud of their water), my lady let out a yelp.

Right there in Yerevan, right before us, was a cake-shop specialising in figurative cake sculpture. In its window stood a couple of the exact works my lady had gathered up off Pinterest, and which had proved so inspiring to her ambition just days before. An uncanny coincidence, given how few people work in that style anywhere at all, and most of them are in South-East Asia or America. I could only let my eyes roll about with delighted coincidence and tease her over the prospect of moving to Yerevan to serve her apprenticeship.

But that was just it. In Yerevan, almost everything is beautiful. Everything functional called to new and higher life by care and craft. Every through-put crevice which might have led to a dark dead-end in another city resolved here in a leafy hollow which, as some kind local or other would tell us, led to a bar made up in glowing pinewood and cascades of ivy, or an artists’ colony, or the home of a former prime minister which made you think that Armenia was in the business of electing either hermits or the most modest and cultivated people in the world. It took us forever to get anywhere because every five steps we had to stop and feast our eyes on something.

The overall experience of ambling around Yerevan is similar to that produced by Paris, but fastidiously spruce and sand-shaded where Paris is blackened with delightful soots and stooped under its grand reputation. The buildings, all made from great slabs of stone, have that certain Soviet patina (though I note it is also Florentine) of the casual fortress, built as if to withstand great blows from artillery. Many things that are not prisons or castle strongholds look like they could be if so called upon. As fortresses tend to do, they also look as though they’d be as effective keeping things in as keeping them out. Florists abound and the young women of Yerevan all generally seem to be connoisseurs of the floral arts. The topiary can be extravagant.

My father, exhilarated at the prospect of an adventure behind the former Iron Curtain, told me to be on the lookout for Trabants, which were in reasonably plentiful supply. Cars don’t tend to fare too well under Armenia’s rather livewire traffic culture, but there was one converted old beast we saw that seemed to signal the eccentric Armenian spirit’s victory over decades of Soviet austerity.

The people go about their business with spry energy, purpose, and undistracted dignity, a pointed contrast to the languor of Istanbul. The young folks are not loud or crude. Indeed insofar as the Armenians do not strive to make their conversation heard, and insofar as Slavs are the whispering people, Armenians are the most perfect Slavs imaginable.

The buildings of the civil service are stern-fronted and grand in threshold, imperious in their demands of those who would enter within to serve, sentinels of a state that at least strives to appear to be in serious working order. The city is lousy with parks cut in great oblong loaves and trains of happy mothers and happy children can be seen everywhere, making the place seem wholesomely familial. On Mesrop Mashtots Avenue there lays a series of underpasses cut underneath one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares. In almost any city of my acquaintance, the spot would likely be a place which most people would politely and studiously avoid, where only those fallen on hard times would go in the absence of any other choice. It would be damp and its smell would keep you walking quickly if what was visible to you there did not. Here, the space was clear, and its dark passages were at any given time of day or night full of the clacking of bootheels and the raising of handset lights as people and families and spry old folks managed cheerfully in its unlit thoroughfare.

While graffiti and murals give occasional feature to its walls, the city is spruce, clean, and tended-to with care. Not infrequently did we see people washing and tidying their premises at the end of a day’s work. I find, walking in London certainly but in other cities too, that I am sometimes bugged by the feeling that I am walking through an area where something awful has happened or will happen. This is self-preservational superstition for the most part, and yet the instinct abides and I have seen it serve me well. But not once do I recall having such a feeling on the streets of Yerevan, even where I positively expected I should have to. The spirits of urban degradation are not there and there is little gloom to feast them on. Folks down on their luck were amazingly few, and those I saw I fancied their chances at making at full recovery from their circumstances. Though poverty is a present spectre in Armenia, especially since the arrival of th refugees from Artsakh, Yerevan appears not to have an underclass. Spurred by the expectations London cultures its citizens to have of it, we would round a corner in some leafy hollow, or go out onto the terrace slopes down to the Hrzdan river, and would expect to see shopping trolleys or bottles or other random rubbish laying cached in the green and despoiling the scene. But they were not there. It was clear. If it is clear, it is because these people love their city.

The food in Yerevan is simply astonishing, easily an equal to India and Italy, the two other places in my acquaintance where edibles of elite quality will just fall out of holes in the walls and appear in the mouths of drainpipes. I found myself in a mire of uneasy feeling on our first night, tempered all the while by my pining for a mist-made-absent Ararat, which at that point I still had not seen, and for the incomparable brandy of the Caucasian twilight (which is so whiskey-coloured I began to think it must be brewn in that distillery near our hotel). Having failed to find a signposted Punjabi restaurant on a local estate, we chanced into what turned out to be a local society spot, a place to see and be seen, called Ktoor. There I had an iman biyaldi, an Ottoman stuffed aubergine dish, dusted atop a pide perhaps 3/4 of a metre long, that was so pure, so cool, so round and full and sweet I almost wept with gratitude. I washed it down with apple juice so fresh I can only presume Eve herself had been enlisted to press it.

A day later I had barbecued lamb - I generally avoid lamb, but I am an easy hypocrite of the palate on holiday - that was so rich I had to stop eating it for a moment just to lean on my elbows and keep the soprano’s rhapsody rising within me from escaping. That was my breakfast. I had to repeat the same exercises of restraint a few hours later when I tasted the traditional Armenian fried curd pancakes with sour cream, which just to write of it twists and spikes my tongue with futile remembrance and the spiteful absence of what I’ve already eaten and long to eat again. Then another day there was a brunch of chicken breast with hummus and raspberry sauce — raspberry sauce — with green salad. And then there was the cocktail made of lavender. And the spaghetti made from vanilla gelato. I am not partial to seafood but even the whitefish, served after yoghurt soup, we had at a lakeside fishery was absolutely terrific. Even now, the artistry and the daring and the craft of it all summons a fine, rounded warmth to my chest, keepsake of a memory that is not merely intellectually pleasurable but whose physical delight is kept within me, and whose vapours I hope will linger for a very long time.

Then there are the dazzling men’s clothes available for a relative pittance all about in fine little independent boutiques. There is the fact that you are never more than stumbling distance from a fresh fruit stand or a juice kiosk (and I had to muzzle myself in the markets to avoid the temptation to eat the stuff straight off the stalls). There are the streetlamps which brought out the Gene Kelly (and the Antoni Gaudi) in me, and the high-rise architecture, which for all its formidable countenance has the hearty self-assertion and elegant eccentricity of the Armenian alphabet itself. My lady all the more even than me was electrified at almost every step, and for my part I have never fallen so completely in love with a place so quickly from an almost totally dry start.

Pursuant of this we began thinking about the viability of moving to Yerevan, at least on a trial basis. In truth I was so besotted with the place, it was such an unspoiled paradise of early impression, that I found I did not wish to learn anything about it. I didn’t want to come to know anything that might spoil this ecstatic prejudice I’d formed of it. However, some things were readily apparent. Firstly, it is a nation full of resilient and capable people who have had to conjure their rise in the world surrounded by blanket hostility and bereft of natural resources (which it appears may have been good for its prospects of avoiding such fates of tinpot petrocracy as have befallen the other Central Asian ex-Soviet properties). Their birth rate is relatively good. Civic honesty and propriety are high — almost certainly a function of its ethnic homogeneity, which is conspicuous — without seeming stentorian or puritanical, for the Armenians love to stay out all of a moody and elegant night on the terraces and gladly begin their working days no earlier than noon. There is an ecumenical metropolitan professional class, whose sophistication and intelligence have formed the basis of the diaspora’s success, which might reasonably be tapped into. Fresh food is incredibly cheap, local culture is vital, and I expect that with the exception of where the Russian expats play their games of portfolio good properties would be reasonable. People here look like they can comfortably afford to live near where they work, a distinction I have never noticed before except to note how Londoners look like the opposite by comparison. The standard of finish to public buildings suggests both a tradition of competent craftsmanship and a diligent civil service.

After a day or two on our own, my lady and I were united with the rest of the touring wedding party, primarily composed of friends of the bride’s from back in Portugal. They were a generally lovely and most interesting bunch, with whom I had some fascinating conversations, particularly with those who live in London. Amazingly, many of them have never met an English Londoner; they never encounter one in their daily lives. I was a fascinating exotic specimen to them and was plied endearingly for my feelings about my city. It was most analgesic to hear of their optimism about the UK relative to the then-days-old Starmer parliament, and in light of our discussions of the difficult days that await us ahead I was proud to hear too of their belief in the UK’s historical triumphs over adversity and its abiding gentleness and tolerance by which they put great stock. I was moreover pleasurably disoriented to be told that, in the face of the corruption endemic to their homeland (where I have also hungrily and recently entertained thoughts of moving), Britain is a paradise of honour and integrity by comparison.

We took off with them on our first day to Lake Sevan, visiting a stunning hilltop monastery in whose walls mother sparrows sheltered their fledglings and on whose covering bluffs straw-hatted men displayed their art while an araber with a handkerchief emblazoned with the national flag led about his horse.

Then off to a smaller spring in the woods, and then a lakeside restaurant for dinner and to toast the bride’s mother’s birthday.

Then the wedding day. We dolled up as is only proper, then to the groom’s mother and father’s house. His father, quite an old man, with a face of that limitless earnestness that becomes honesty by mere force of habit, a tanned face of distinction and which bore the strains of a full life lightly, the clear eyes of a professor. His mother, perhaps ten years younger, the more resembling the groom, and as palpably enthused by life as he is. Their home accorded with eerie precision to how I imagined it would be – a stone-washed white building of three-stories on the shores of the Armenian countryside, just off the side of the northern highway alongside which many unclaimed plains lands run, built carefully and, it sounds like, personally by the groom’s father one brick at a time over 20 years, walled and surrounded by groves of every imaginable fruit and nut tree. In for canapes and a cognac with which we toasted the newlyweds, though it was my first alcohol, I think, of the year. It was a small affair, though more of the groom’s friends and family could be seen here than had joined us previously, not least his lovely little niece, who reminded me of no one so much as Giulia, my student and my little mountain flower who clung to me from the moment I came to teach her class in Napoli many years ago, and who I’ve wondered after no less than every week since (she must be almost 16 now). Much music that sounded somewhat dervishian to me, and the Armenian wedding customs dispensed with, many of them mirroring those of India (especially the theft of the bride’s shoes). The bride looked terrific in her dress, though, as we saw when in train of other bridal parties up at Saghmosavank, she had chosen a far more traditional outfit than most Armenian brides typically opt for.

But Saghmosavank, to which we adjourned next, was breathtaking. In pictures, its plain face and tower, as stout and as humble as a country granary worker, sit with striking modesty on the side of what looks a fine gorge. In person, the gorge is revealed to be nothing much less than the Grand Canyon writ in green crayon, a huge, swooping, engulfing chine that howls down to the run of a little river and stretches out into the distance to Ararat. Simply looking at it one longs to be a blackbird or an eagle or something whose wing could do it honour.

Under the sun, it is as lush and idyllic as such a wound in the Earth, and as so austere a fixture on its shoulder, is apt to seem; when it clouds over, as it did on this day, the landscape takes on a fearsome and blasted effect, and the monastery makes a sanctum of itself, as infinitely remote as the cluster of a great person’s thoughts, and so too as apt to provide every dimension of shelter as a weary traveller may require. We took inside and the marriage was consecrated in the Armenian Apostolic Style. The novice alongside the primate had almost as much spiritual gravitas as the man himself. Some kind of divine tonic swilled in his fine baritone voice as he led the chants to bless the union. It was only when he walked past me outside of the monastery, divested of his great red cloak and cruciform, that I noticed he must only have been 15 years old.

Then finally on to the reception at a strange little banquet hall modelled after a medieval castle, surrounded again on great wings of unused land. While the grub was not quite on a par with the rest of what we had sampled in Armenia, it was delicious even still, and there was little time to eat anyway for we were no sooner seated than in the thick of toasts from the groom’s brother in law, playing the part of the best man, which in the Armenian tradition calls him to sanction the honour-by-toasting of every class and sub-class and sub-sub-class of guest as might be present, separated by degree relation, providence, distance travelled, and so on. Even the venue staff got their own toast. Between the toasts and the fillings of food we were entreated to a flamenco dance by the bride, then by a performance by a four piece of Armenian folk musicians, arranged of a flute and a cahon with a balalaika on each flank, the balalaikas played by statuesque women who, in their diaphonous black-cherry dresses, looked like a cross between sentries on the Star Ship Enterprise and Achamaenid priestesses. I do not know what tradition exactly the work came from but the sound was hearth-warm and deep as what is obscured in time.

And then came time to dance. There was much linked-arm in-the-round dancing as per the steppe tradition which Armenia inherited somewhere back in the mists, but otherwise once the DJ lined up the stylus there were no holds barred, and I am not sure my form has ever been so good, from feverish Harlemisms to the workings of the snake to a little bit of more Caucasian footwork highly appropriate for the occasion. Much lovely stepping in time with my lady, the making of a troupe with the other Portuguese fellows who could dance Latin styles just as well, even one of those great Central Asian competitive dance-offs with the godfather of the groom, who I gather is a local politician.

Both bride and groom made stirring speeches. Lightning forked above us in rainless air as the night wore on, and only after the thunder and the lightning did the rain come, so that we danced with its quenching on us; then we danced while we ate cake; then we danced to keep the cognac from settling; and then it was over and back into town to dance the fountains of Republic Square, down the thrumming avenue named after Pushkin, and eventually into an all-night pub where we played Jenga until it was 3am and we were fit to pronounce ourselves spent. It was here, under the companions’ tutelage, that I learned of the typical landscape of the Portuguese night out — where more time is spent stood on curbs, smoking, and considering where to go, than is spent at any given destination as might be decided on — just as on the ride to the monastery I had come to understand, by the patient education of our wards, how ribald Portuguese folk song lyrics are. I shall never look at a bacalao the same way again (not that I ever intended to anyway).

It was on our final day in Yerevan that we made the excursion to the genocide museum, whose obeliskian monuments and great shelled and templish main structure we could see illuminated, as if by the light of inextinguishable tragedy itself, from the roof terrace of our hotel. Found up on one of Yerevan’s fearsome hills, with a view over this city which itself is nothing if not a galleria of majestic points-to-view, it was impeccably kept, and walking towards the nest of flame in which the primary memorial is housed, one of our new friends and I were enveloped in eager conversation, evaluating incidence of nepotism in different countries’ management cultures and lamenting the global torpor of total fertility rates as we walked, which rates civilisation itself seems to oppress as if by design.

The conversation was eager, and yet the instant I set foot within the nest where the flame of remembrance is housed, the exchange dried and I was suddenly engulfed by the enormity of what these surroundings signified. I was completely overwhelmed with waves of grief and sympathy and a strange abstract sense of doom as I imagined all of those wonderful, vibrant faces into which I had looked since we had arrived in this country; I pictured the delight of the children, the vigour and tranquility of the land. I imagined more than half all those who I had walked among simply vanishing as I passed them by, vanishing into a denial made of the tyranny of evil men, a denial like the denial of time itself. This, I realised, was what it means to come to terms with the hatred of which humanity is capable at its most extreme and systematic. As I considered the mildness, the pride, the intelligence, the artistic verve and the civility of the Armenians, the uncompromising nerve and vision which has been definitive of them — defying precedent in the adoption of Christianity, the adoption of cosmopolitan norms among Asiatic tyranny, the refusal of Ottoman assimilation, the utter originality of their language and script, the uniqueness and fecundity of their symbolic imagination, their diaspora-craft, their refusal to let these things be killed by the slaughter of their people, their defiance of mortal indifference itself and the obscurity which has become naturally theirs — and the unique path they have beat among universal hostility, what they have suffered fell upon me. As it fell upon me, for just a moment — for nothing more than a moment was earned — I felt like I was myself nothing less than a pure-blooded Yerevanian of twenty generations’ vintage.

Inside and immersed in the details of the genocide, I found that you could swap out the word ‘Armenian’ from the accounts and replace it with the word ‘Jew’ and find that the account of the Ottoman atrocities suddenly became faithful accounts of Nazi ones. You may try doing this with the account I wrote of the genocide above, and the effect will be roughly the same. This was not at all to my surprise, that the qualities of Armenians and the qualities of Jews map onto one another – in both their respective contexts they were sui generis minorities, peculiarly eccentric, obstinately individual, who drew profound advantage from their intense commitment to education and the life of the mind and tended to hold positions of mercantile influence in society, acting as jewellers and merchants and bankers, earning a weight of prosperity well out of proportion to their size and which embarrassed the Ottoman commitment to depriving them, as heathens, of as many civil rights as they might reasonably miss. Just as the outrageous talent, prosperity, and patina of being touched with culture plunged the Igbo into the ill graces of their neighbours, just as the Jews gave offence by the intensity of their communal bonds and the robustness of their success [2], the Armenians wounded the vanity of the Ottomans, and it was this that occasioned their persecutions.

Those poor people. Why should such privations be visited upon anyone?

It might be noted that even in photos from the early 20^th century, in which most people from most places seem plain by modern standards, the Armenians still looked radiantly beautiful, as conspicuously as they still do today. It was curious among all this to think that the phoenix was born in Byblos and thus given its name from the region of Phoenicia, for though it took its name and colour from the dye-kneaders of that land, as per its superior resemblance to this country’s power of making itself at home in flames, and in its penchant for rising from its own ashes, the bird should more justly have been named the Armenix.

Sobered and electrified by what we had seen, it was also on this, our final day in Yerevan, not (as one might expect) our first, that we decided to take a guided tour around the city. We began in the Republic Square, took off to watch lavash being made, and went through the porticos of the National Museum. We visited the balcony on which the republic was proclaimed (now festooned with ‘To Let’ signs) and where the first prime minister took residence.

We passed by a retrospective dedicated to the great French-Armenian singer Charles Aznavour — to which we lost two of our party to a spin-class spontaneously occurring on the theatre’s forecourt — and we tripped through the Beer Academy, and wound our way up Pushkin and eventually found ourselves at the opera, in whose rear wings people live in little tenements. Lusine, our tour guide, was quite remarkable; flame haired and of the lightest brown eyes my lady and I remarked we’d ever seen. She must have been only 20 or 21, and told us she worked as a manager in a cafe by day while working as a tour guide by evening, in which capacity she’d been recruited after meeting her boss in a pub. There was an implacable steeliness and determination to her shortly to be put to some kind of test. For there was an additional unknown girl also on the tour, whom I figured a total humbug from the second I saw her (and who subsequently managed to freeload a meal off our group later on), who asked repeated awkward political questions about Armenia’s conflicts.

The precise expression of the questions made them insensitive ones to put before a host, particularly one who is dependent on tips from her tour parties for her pay. Lusine, put in a position where she would have to risk offending her guests and losing money through expression of her true feelings, or abominate herself by saying something other than what she really thought on such a personal issue, would not have shown herself to negative account had she avoided answering the questions altogether. But she was unabashed about discussing Armenia’s history of constant threat, the territorial and religious components of the persecutions they have suffered, and the brutality of the Azerbaijanis. She was as forthright in these things as she was in telling us about the balconies on which the republic was sworn in, the facade now obscure with ivy and lobelia of the first prime minister’s residence, the artist colonies, the significance of the hidden imagery of pomegranates and birds and suns (immersed in the architecture to evade the interpretative eyes of the Soviet politburo, who would have found them much too self-assertive) to the region’s history. As someone from a nation so coddled by the peace that reigns around it that our intellectual class debates whether or not we do in fact have a national cultural identity, I was incredibly impressed with her candour and stirred by her patriotism, and it underlined my abiding impression of the Armenians - that they are a people of profound self-knowledge, holders of a heritage they know proudly is entirely their own possession, will die without their guardianship of it, and which they wear thus with esteem and a desperate passion. This marks them utterly apart from my deculturated Brits.

It was a journey fit to exfoliate and decorate the spirit, but there had been one critical experience missing from it — to set eye on Ararat without mitigating haze hung in front of it. On our first day the mountain was not in evidence; given I’d been told that Ararat dominates the Yerevan skyline more boldly that Fuji does Tokyo’s, I came to the conclusion that they’d moved either the city or the mountain. Still the next day there was no sign of it, no matter how clear a view to the horizon I sought. Your lady asks if you can see it. You, squinting west from Victory Bridge, say that you can’t, you can’t see anything, just haze and a couple of clouds. Then suddenly something in the differentiation of distant sky asserts itself to you, a presence meets your eye that has not moved anywhere, and you realise, that is not a cloud, that’s a snowhead. Thus Ararat appeared to me out of the obscurity, all at once, though I had been looking at it all the time.

As I pointed out earlier, one of the things that gives Armenia is would-be hermit kingdom aspect is that almost all flights take off and land in the middle of the night. While our new friends were left in varying states of delay limbo in their multi-stage journeys home, by good luck our flight took off right on time into a dawn the colour of radiant rose-gold sand, the shade of the slow-running grains of God’s own hourglass, where in the pervasive morning haze but one thing could really be seen from our window - Mount Ararat, glimpsed clear in all its glory, for the first time on this journey. Its head was standing quizzically up above the clouds so it could watch us leave. It was impossible among this and everything else except to believe we were leaving a land of myth, a land that cannot possibly be real.

I hope it will never be proven so.

[1] And, as ongoing disputes show, cognac is not all cognac either.

[2] It was for this reason that I was stunned to understand that Israel maintains ties with the Azeris for the sake of selling them weapons that are subsequently used against no one but the Armenians. The two peoples are so similar in so many ways — indeed, one Yerevanian remarked to us on how often visitors to Armenia are stunned to find out that it is not a country of Jews after all — that the gesture seems like a person selling weapons for use against their long-lost-twin.