Category Archives: Armenia

photo essay: monasteries and manuscripts, echoes from the world’s first christian country

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Before Rome. Before even Constantinople. The first one to officially adopt Christianity was Armenia. Saint Gregory the Illuminator had miraculously healed King Tiridates III who had lost his mind. In gratitude, the King declared Armenia a ‘Christian’ country. It was the year 301.

A century later, in 405, the brand-new State religion introduced a brand-new script to spread ‘God’s word.’ Mesrop Mashtots, a cleric-cum-linguist, was assigned the task of creating an alphabet that would encompass the phonetic expanse of the Armenian language, a standalone member of the Indo-European language family. Over time, the scope of this script increased to document Armenian philosophy, science, and the arts.

Monasteries, as centres of faith and learning, soon cropped up across the Kingdom in breathtaking settings. Perched over canyons, atop sheer cliffs, and in verdant valleys. In the medieval era, there were tens of thousands of these. As Armenia’s realm shrunk, these reduced to a mere few thousand with four of them now UNESCO-listed.

Known as the Armenian Apostolic Church, Armenian Christianity is based on the teachings of the two early Apostles, Thaddeus and Bartholomew. What is more remarkable is that the Armenians resolutely stuck to the original version of their faith for the next 1,700 years, amidst the whirlpool of conversions, genocide, and wars that swept through the region.

Welcome to my photo essay on the most spectacular monasteries of the lot that have survived to date—each with something that sets it apart. Sometimes it is its story, sometimes its location, and sometimes its incredible art. I have punctuated these photos with those of my favourite Armenian manuscripts in Yerevan’s Matenadaran.

Wishing you happy travels, always. ❤️ Continue reading →

the 5 untold treasures of gyumri, city of 22,000 orphans

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“Armenia, aah she is a prisoner of geography!” My guide Arpi exclaims as she narrates the country’s tumultuous history in a voice that any actor would envy. A professor in linguists, guiding is her second job.

We are on the way to Gyumri, Armenia’s second largest city in the country’s north-west, close to Turkey’s border. Built of local black and orange tuff [a volcanic porous rock], the city is known by various other names: cultural capital, city of arts and crafts, to name a few. But the most evocative is “city of orphans.” 22,000 orphans took refuge in Gyumri during the Armenian Genocide of 1915 – 1923, piecing together a new life in 170 orphanages across the city.

Founded as Kumayri in the 8th Century by the Urartians—the same kingdom which also established Erebuni, Yerevan’s ancestor—it has been renamed numerous times since 1837. Alexandropol on the orders of Russian Tsar Nicholas I after his wife, Leninakan in honour of Lenin, back to Kumayri on independence, and Gyumri in 1992.

A bustling industrial hub during the Soviet era [1922 – 1990], it came crashing down, literally, on 7 December, 1988 in a 6.8 magnitude earthquake. Everything turned to dust, except for Nicholas I’s Alexandropol in the Kumayri historic district. The area is a rare remnant of low-rise Armenian urban architecture in its original setting.

Tell your travel plans to an Armenian, and the first question that pops out is “Are you going to Gyumri?” Not many non-Armenians go up this far north, and if you are doing so, you will be instantly rewarded with an appreciative nod—transforming you from a flighty tourist to a traveller with gravitas.

Though its outskirts are all brand new, because of the earthquake’s devastation, the city holds its memories close to its bosom. The pain and hesitant optimism of its thousands of orphans; the filmmakers, authors, and actors who call Gyumri home; and the craftsmen who churned out masterpieces, and continue to do so, from seemingly insipid raw material.

All these and more whisper out of the black and orange tuff intrinsic to Gyumri. Here are five of Gyumri’s most magical treasures. Do not be surprised if you bookmark a few more of your own should you visit it. ❤ Continue reading →

from a 5,500-year-old shoe to genocide to fountains: 72 hours in yerevan

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As the plane got ready to land in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, I looked through the window and was met with a snow-capped Mt. Ararat reaching out to the skies. Armenia’s most beloved national symbol and site of the proverbial Noah’s Ark, Mt. Ararat became part of Turkey in 1921. Yet for Armenians, seeing the mountain looming over their capital city is a sign of good tidings. Just like it has been for the past two millennia.

In a strange twist of fate, the very geopolitics that gave Mt. Ararat away, also created Modern Yerevan. One of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, Yerevan’s current avatar is a product of the Soviet Union. 2,800 years ago, it used to go by the name Erebuni.

When Alexander Tamanian was assigned the task of drawing up Yerevan’s city-plan, he was first at a complete loss. He had no idea how he was going to convert the laid-back provincial town, previously under the Russian empire, into a cultural, political, and industrial centre befitting its new role as a Soviet Socialist Republic capital.

But creativity soon followed. Tamanian ingeniously combined neoclassical design, Armenian motifs, and local tuff stone in a graceful radial layout. Unfortunately, he also razed many of the earlier churches, mosques, and bazaars in the process so there is very little remaining from the pre-1920s in the city.

Off-the-beaten-path? True. Lacking in things to see and do? No ways.

Yerevan today is filled with museums, art galleries, roadside cafes, and buskers churning out fabulous music. Come nighttime, the city transforms into a riot of curated lighting, with fountains dancing to classics.

Here is a 3-day itinerary for Yerevan, a city swarming with intrepid travellers eager to explore its heady mix of Soviet and Armenian charms.

Have you been to Yerevan? What did you like most about it? Do share in the comments. I would love to read them. 🙂 Continue reading →

travel shorts: khachkars, markers of armenian christianity

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There are over 50,000 khachkars in Armenia. You will see them everywhere. At ancient monasteries and modern cathedrals, along the highways encircling the Armenian Highlands, in medieval cemeteries, inside every museum whether state-of-the-art or plain old-school, and next to frigid mountain lakes.

Indigenous to Armenia, the UNESCO-listed khachkar, literally meaning ‘cross-stone,’ is, yes, a stone with a cross. 🙂 But look closely, and you will soon notice each piece is unique in its details. No two are alike. Continue reading →

film in a frame: the eclectic world of sergey parajanov’s collages

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I Am 60 Years Old, 1984.

I Am 60 Years Old, 1984.

When one’s life pans out like a movie, can one’s art be far behind?

Described as a magician in the world of cinema, Sergey Parajanov’s movies stand out for their tableaux sheathed in visual poetry. There are no clearly defined narratives or dialogues in the four globally acclaimed films he made in his lifetime. Instead, in its place are near-static scenes lush with colour and symbolism which explore the stories within us rather than outside of us.

Born to Armenian parents in Tbilisi in 1924, Parajanov’s first love was a Tatar Muslim woman Nigyar Kerimova. Soon after their marriage in 1951 she was murdered by her brother for marrying a Christian and converting to Christian Orthodoxy. When 32, Parajanov fell in love with 17-year-old Ukrainian Svetlana Sherbatiuk. The marriage ended in divorce.

Unlucky in love, but lucky in life? It was not to be so with Parajanov. Fame merely brought him more misery. His refusal to conform to Soviet Union ideals and the Socialist Realism style led him to being imprisoned twice. The second time around, when released, it was on condition that he be forbidden from living in Moscow, Leningrad [St. Petersburg], Kiev or Yerevan, nor be allowed to make films. The ban lasted for 15 years.

Bereft of the freedom to create films, it was in the dark squalor and aching hunger of the gulag camps that he turned to making collages. He described his collages as ‘compressed films.’ The most poignant are his seemingly simple boxed dolls which hold lifetimes in their narratives, made from pieces of sack he would pick up whilst doing manual labour. Continue reading →

global travel shot: the pagan temple that became a christian country’s favourite

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When I walked into Garni Temple’s Cella one October morning there was a 2,000-year-old UNESCO-listed duduk performance taking place inside the stone confines to the unbridled joy of a rapt audience. Once the show was over, I somehow managed to get the temple all to myself for a few long moments.

Garni Temple is the only one of its kind in all of Armenia and [now defunct] Soviet Union. The fact that it still stands—a rare pagan Greco-Roman remnant in the world’s first Christian country despite wars, religious upmanship, atheism, and even an earthquake—is a miracle.

Two thousand years old, scholars differ on its exact purpose and age. Is it a temple to the Zoroastrian sun god Mihr built in 77 AD by the Romanized Armenian King Tiridates I or a Roman tomb of the 2nd Century? Either way, its soaring 24 basalt Ionic columns reaching out to a ceiling draped in reliefs of grapes and vine leaves, perched above nine 12-inch-high steps is an evocative magnificent otherworldly sight.

Seated on the stone floor by the empty altar, it was just me and the echoes of those who had passed through the sanctuary two millennia ago. And that remote yesterday from the distant annals of time, briefly became my today.

Welcome to my Armenia series, dear Reader. ❤