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“It is a gift,” said our taxi driver.
“Of course.”
“This is Armenia.”
It wasn’t as if he didn’t need the fare. Like nearly all Yerevan cabs, his windscreen had a large crack up its centre – a product of the many unfinished roads in the residential areas of the capital. But he was adamant, even though he’d picked us up from Lumen 1936, a stylish café in the centre of town where Daimlers and Mercedes mix with Soviet-era buses and Ladas.
He’d wanted to know why we were here. We weren’t sure what to say. None of us really spoke each other’s languages anyway. Truth be told, we’d originally been planning a road trip around Georgia. At the last moment we decided it was silly not to visit one of the other countries in the Caucasus as well. Perhaps because we were crashing our eldest son’s gap year a bit, trying to do something relevant to his politics and economics degree. In any event, we’d flipped a coin and decided to spend a couple of days in Armenia before crossing the border.
This is a country on the up, after all. Tens of thousands of highly educated Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusians have fled to Armenia since 2022. Its tech and service industries are booming and construction is everywhere. Shiny new hotels and cool bars and restaurants abound in Yerevan’s centre. Indeed, we’d just been jousting in our cab with a pair of JCBs on the chaotic road system to get to our destination: the stunning, humbling Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute that overlooks the city.
Perhaps it was because we’d asked to be brought here that he was waiving his fee? Britain refuses to use the term “genocide” for the 1.5 million Armenian deaths systematically wrought by the Ottomans during the last years of their empire. Most visitors to the country come from the vast diaspora caused by it but, as British tourists, we’d found ourselves still rare enough to be of simple human interest to everyone: passport officials, waiters and now, evidently, our taxi driver. Earlier, at the GUM open food market, watching the city’s lavash bread being made, one woman had given us vast lush peaches as a welcome.
But this is a land of generosity: the oldest Christian nation on earth and a cradle of civilisation. From our hotel room you could see the peak of Mount Ararat, where Noah’s ark came to rest. The Silk Road Hotel itself is named after the ancient east-west trade route that informs so much of the region’s diversity. The easternmost temple of Greco-Roman antiquity stood nearby at Garni. The day before, we’d watched traditionally dressed folk dancers wheel about its remains, restored by the Soviets in the early 1970s. Later, after we’d bought a pair of socks she’d knitted, an old lady led us on a tour though the cemetery at Noratus, where more than 1,000 khachkar memorial stones date back as far as the fifth century AD. The Mongols’ presence here lasted more than 100 years, joining the Hittites, Persians, Greeks, Byzantines, Ottomans, Russian Tsars and communists among those who have left lasting legacies, tragic and otherwise.
It is this dizzying mix, the overlapping of histories and cultures, empires and atrocities, that makes the place so rich. If the dances and folk costumes, the knitted socks and tours, were purely aimed at visitors, it didn’t seem gratuitously so. Or never felt “touristy”. It all just kind of happened, as if it would have anyway.
The cultural elisions continue today. One morning, we stood in the jaw-dropping beauty of the Geghard monastery, founded in the fourth century, in cave chapels carved out of the hard black rock of its mountain, and, later that same afternoon, beneath a scrap-metal spider in Charles Aznavour Square in the art-deco shade of Yerevan’s Moscow Cinema. Most Soviet statuary has now been removed, replaced with things confidently “new”, often celebrating Armenia’s artists and poets. The Cascade – a complex of waterfalls, galleries and stairways leading up to a park built to celebrate Stalin’s triumph over fascism – has been taken over as a museum to modernist furniture and art, home to the idiosyncratic collections of its financial saviour, Gerard Cafesijan.
At night, it is all lit up with an eye for beauty, as is the rest of the city. Whole families turn out in the summer to promenade in the streets, and the air comes alive with a youthful, unthreatening hum. In Republic Square, the voice of Aznavour, Armenia’s “French Frank Sinatra”, can be heard crooning above its water fountain light shows.
There’s a similar atmosphere in the other towns we visited on our way up to Georgia. Gyumri – still recovering from the devastation of the 1988 earthquake that took the lives of more than 25,000 people – defiantly remains a cultural hub. Its historic district mostly survived and is undergoing renovation; the cobblestoned streets lined with low art-nouveau buildings could almost be mistaken for 19th-century France, a reminder that this was once the Tsarist outpost Alexandropol. In Dilijan, we walked the mountain forest tracks of what is known locally as Armenia’s Switzerland. Wild dogs walk through the town, as they do in many places, but as they accompanied us home from a restaurant at night, they never felt threatening.
Only once did we feel anything approaching unfriendliness. In the café now housed in the modernist structure that was the Sevan Writers’ Union Resort – where once Soviet writers, as well as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, recuperated and sought inspiration – we appeared to have been massively overcharged for four delicious ice-cold tarragon lemonades. The owner met our inarticulate gestural queries with a stony face, hard and impenetrable, until suddenly he noticed the number of noughts on the ticket, and his expression melted. His subsequent blushes and abject apologies made us wish we’d just paid it. Because, as with so much else we’d seen, the whole building needs investment and restoration. And yet, as behind our taxi’s cracked windscreen, here was a gruff charm and a big, big heart.
