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“It’s a gift,” said our taxi driver.
“Of course.”
“This is Armenia.”
It was not as if he did not need the rate. Like almost all Ereván taxis, his windshield had a great laugh of his center, a product of the many unfinished roads in the residential areas of the capital. But he was inflexible, although he had collected us from Lumen 1936An elegant coffee in the city center where Daimlers and Mercedes are mixed with buses and ladas of the Soviet era.
He had wanted to know why we were here. We weren’t sure what to say. None of us really spoke the languages of the other anyway. To tell the truth, we had originally been planning a road trip through Georgia. At the last moment we decided that it was nonsense not to visit one of the other countries in the Caucasus as well. Maybe because we were starring a little the misty year of our eldest son, trying to do something relevant for his policy and economy title. In any case, we had changed a coin and decided to spend a couple of days in Armenia before crossing the border.
This is a country in the UP, after all. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian, Russian and Highly Educated Belarusians have fled to Armenia since 2022. Their technology and services industries are booming and the construction is everywhere. New bright hotels and great bars and restaurants abound in the center of Ereván. In fact, we have just been in our taxi with a couple of JCB in the chaotic road system to reach our destination: the impressive and humiliating Armenian Genocide Museum Institute that overlooks the city.
Maybe it was because we had asked to bring us that he was renouncing his rate? Great Britain refuses to use the term “genocide” for 1.5 million Armenian deaths systematically caused by Ottomans during the last years of their empire. The majority of visitors in the country come from the vast diaspora caused by it, but, as British tourists, we had found rare enough as simple human interest for all: passport officials, waiters and now, obviously, our taxi driver. Previously, in the open rubber food market, observing the city sink in the city that is being done, a woman had given us lush peaches like welcome.
But this is a land of generosity: the oldest Christian nation on earth and a cradle of civilization. From our hotel room you could see the peak of Mount Ararat, where Noah’s ark stopped. He Silk Road Hotel In itself, it is named after the old East-West commercial route that informs much of the diversity of the region. The easternmost temple of Greco -Roman antiquity was close to Garni. The day before, we had seen the wheel of popular dancers dressed traditionally on their remains, restored by the Soviets in the early 1970 Khachkar The commemorative stones date back to the 5th century d. C. The presence of the Mongols lasted more than 100 years, joining the hititas, Persians, Greeks, Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian and communist Tsaries among those who have left patent, tragic and other legacies.
It is this dizzying mixture, the superposition of stories and cultures, empires and atrocities, which makes the place so rich. If popular dances and costumes, socks and knit routes, were purely pointed to visitors, did not seem free of charge. Or he never felt “tourist.” Everything happened, as if he had done it anyway.
Cultural elisions continue today. One morning, we stop in the amazing beauty of the Geghard monastery, founded in the fourth century, in the chapels of the cave carved in the hard black rock of its mountain and, later, that same afternoon, under a scrap spider in the Plaza Charles Aznavour in the Shade de Deco de Yerevan de Yerevan de Yerevan’s de Yerevan’s. Moscow cinema. Most Soviet statues have now been eliminated, replaced by things with “new” confidence, often celebrating Armenian artists and poets. The waterfall, a complex of waterfalls, galleries and stairs that lead to a park built to celebrate Stalin’s triumph over fascism, has been assumed as a museum for modernist furniture and art, home of the idiosyncratic collections of his financial savior, Gerard Cafesijan.
At night, everything is illuminated with an eye for beauty, just like the rest of the city. Whole families come in the summer to go to the streets in the streets, and the air comes alive with a youthful and little threatening buzzing. In the Plaza de la República, La Voz de Aznavour, the “Frenchman Frank Sinatra” of Armenia, can be heard singing about his light source light shows.
There is a similar atmosphere in the other cities that we visit in our way to Georgia. Gyumri, still recovering from the devastation of the 1988 earthquake that took the lives of more than 25,000 people, definitely remains a cultural center. His historical district survived mainly and is in renewal; The cobbled streets lined with low buildings of Art-Nouveau could almost almost be confused with the 19th century France, a reminder that this was once the position of advanced Tsarist Alexandropol. In Dilijan, we walk along the mountain forest slopes of what is known locally as the Switzerland of Armenia. Wild dogs walk around the city, as they do in many places, but when they accompanied us home in a restaurant at night, they never felt threatening.
Only once we felt something that approached hostility. In the coffee now housed in the modernist structure that was the complex of the Union of Writers of Sevan, where once Soviet writers, as well as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, recovered and we seek inspiration, we seem to have been more massive for four delicious ice lemonas with ice hair. The owner met our inarticulated gestural consultations with a stony, hard and impenetrable face, until suddenly he noticed the number of years in the ticket, and his expression melted. His posterior blonders and apologies made us wish us that we had just paid. Because, as with so many more we had seen, the whole building needs investment and restoration. And yet, as behind the broken windshield of our taxi, here was a sharp charm and a big big heart.