Armenia: The captivating European country that’s still off-radar
Fashion Director Anna Murphy finds a spine-tingling connection with Armenia and its ancient churches, abiding traditions — and brandy loved by Churchill
The pink-stoned Armenian capital of YerevanIt’s golden hour in the mountain town of Dilijan in Armenia. I have wandered into the steep back streets, which are lined with traditional houses, all wooden fretwork balconies and walls of multi-pane glass, the softening sunshine turning the latter into a more benign variety of disco ball.
Most of these places look picturesquely ramshackle, like something from a fairy tale or Miss Havisham’s house. A good number of them may — or may not, it can be difficult to tell — be uninhabited. Like Georgia, from which I have just arrived, the country has been suffering from population decline since declaring independence from Russia in 1991, many young people leaving to work abroad.
The residence I find myself lingering in front of admiringly, however, a pale pink doll’s house of a place, is definitely lived in. The building is only just keeping it together but the front garden is immaculately tended, a ravishment of peonies. After a couple of minutes an old man appears from nowhere with a bunch of his flowers and thrusts them into my hand. His wife, I then see, is watching and smiling from a window.
He doesn’t speak English. I don’t, needless to say, speak Armenian. Thanks to the vagaries of geopolitics we are from different worlds — different eras, almost. His clothes look as ancient as he does; as his house does. Ditto the car parked nearby, a so-called Zap, short for Zaporozhets, a Russian creation which famously, another Armenian later tells me, has a hatch in the floor next to the driver to enable them to fish on a frozen lake without leaving the car. (He also tells me the Zap is execrable. “Everyone knows the transmission goes after 10,000km, the engine after 30,000.”)
It’s my first evening in Armenia, the third country stop on a two-week tour of the Caucasus that started in Azerbaijan, moved on to Georgia and will end here. It’s been fascinating, this zigzagging between the outer reaches of Asia and Europe respectively, where the influences of the west, of Russia and of the east, are felt slightly differently depending on where you are and who you are talking to. Even our accommodation has fed into the cross-referencing, with Georgia and Armenia consistently offering contemporary boutique hotel experiences, and Azerbaijan a couple of places all too familiar to anyone who travelled during the days of the Soviet Union. Armenia and Azerbaijan share borders with Iran, but despite the hostilities between that country and Israel, there is no Foreign Office advice against traveling to either (though do keep an eye on it).
Anna exploring Noravank, a 13th-century monasteryI have been moving most days for a week and a half so by this point, to be blunt, I am knackered. I have had to force myself to foray out from my hotel. Thank heavens I did. Because here it is, rearing its head unexpectedly, as it tends to do: one of the reasons that I travel. Connection. Otherness turned into oneness. Something — or, as is most often the case, someone — who may be alien to you but reaches out to you. That nameless man and his flowers like miniature ballgowns are spine-tingling stuff.
I would say the same of Armenia more generally. This is a remarkable country, from the beauteous, ever-shifting mountainous landscape that can take you, during the course of a few hours’ drive, from Switzerland to Arizona by way of Scotland, to the simple yet delicious food.
What isn’t a mountain seems to be a vegetable patch or an orchard, and the fruit — a rainbow of different cherries, black and white mulberries, apricots, peaches, strawberries — is particularly noteworthy. Every meal comes accompanied by a plate piled with fresh herbs and there’s a whole world of different dairy products going on. Ask the difference between one yoghurty-looking thing and another (and another!) at breakfast, and you will find yourself there for some time as your interlocutor does their best to explain.
And then, of course, there is the reason the country is famous: its churches, or, to be more precise, its multi-building monastery complexes. I had been blown away by the churches and monasteries of Georgia in the preceding days, which also have towers topped with roofs like witches’ hats. But this is something else.
Yet, even so, Armenia. There’s something about its churches that puts them, for me, in another league altogether. They aren’t about murals but stone carvings, Armenian Christians traditionally believing the razzle-dazzle of paintings to be a distraction from the serious business of prayer. Stone crosses known as khachkars cover the walls inside and out, some intricately carved and integral to the original designs, others seemingly scratched in later, often in rows, like a spiritual take on tally counting.
The necromancy is in part to do with the scale, I think, the juxtapositioning of their petite floorplans with a vertiginous verticality. Somehow you feel as if you are always looking up. Then there’s their positioning in (for which read on top of) the landscape, as if decorations on a cake. They seem to have been not so much built as seeded, such is the connection they hold with their environment. It’s almost as if, miraculously, they have sprouted up of their own accord.
The 13th-century Noravank, situated at the top of a narrow gorge, is the same red-yellow as the cliffs, and especially breathtaking. But then again so is the grey — and thus more northern European-seeming — Tatev monastery, another cliff-clinger that you access by way of the world’s longest nonstop double-track cable car, a spectacular albeit somewhat hair-raising ride.
The world’s longest nonstop cable car leads to Tatev monasteryALAMYAllow me just one more monastery before I move on: Geghard, which, because it is so close to the charming, pink-stoned capital of Yerevan, was the only one we went to that was mobbed. Built into the mountain, part-church, part-cave, it had another wonderful stone carving, of a pair of chained-up lions on a lead and an eagle with a lamb in its claws. (Answers on a postcard if anyone can discern a lesson for me in that one.)
It’s also where we were lucky enough to bear witness to an impromptu performance of Armenian folk songs by four local singers, their chiaroscuro vocals — if you will allow me to get all synaesthetic for a moment, soaring up into the furthest crannies of the ceiling. The Armenians are rightly proud of their musical traditions, though they talk more about their brandy. The first thing I was told after I had crossed the border from Georgia is that “Winston Churchill loved Armenian brandy”.
Anna Murphy was a guest of Wild Frontiers (
wildfrontierstravel.com), which has 15 days’ all-inclusive from £3,995pp on an Across the Caucasus group tour to Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. A tailormade private trip is from £4,790pp. Fly to Baku and back from Yerevan. For FCO travel advice see gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice.
