Three Weeks In Yerevan

I’ve been in Yerevan for about three weeks and the hold-ups con­tinue. My friends here like to joke that by the time I finally get this deep-winter sleep­ing bag and pedal south towards Iran, it’ll be spring and I won’t need it any more!

That may turn out to be the case, but in the mean­time it’s still well below freez­ing by day and by night, and I’ve heard reports that tem­per­at­ures in the deserts of not-too-far-away Turk­menistan are still approach­ing minus thirty — even the nearby Ira­nian city of Mash­had is cur­rently exper­i­en­cing night­time lows of minus twenty-five, accord­ing to an Aus­trian cyc­list. I’ll cer­tainly feel much hap­pier with this new sleep­ing bag whilst cyc­ling towards the Tibetan plat­eau, where the alti­tude will have more effect on tem­per­at­ures than the time of year.

It’s not a good idea to pro­ject too far ahead with this kind of travel, as it’s a recipe for dis­ap­point­ment when — by the nature of bike travel — events have a habit of tak­ing their own unpre­dict­able course, but I feel a strong urge to get back on the road and really make some pro­gress east­wards. With only 1,500km of dis­tance between the Ira­nian and Chinese bor­ders, the incom­pre­hens­ible idea of cyc­ling from Eng­land to China is edging its way towards becom­ing a real, attain­able accomplishment.

City life is so blind­ing and replete with facil­it­ies, com­mod­it­ies, employ­ment and enter­tain­ment; it’s little won­der I hear people say­ing that you’d be hard pressed to find a passer-by here who had even ven­tured as far as Gyumri, the second-largest city in Armenia, a half-hour jour­ney away by car or mashrutka (minibus). By the way, these little Transit vans zip­ping around the city are an adven­ture in them­selves. I recently boarded one, head­ing for the centre of town, and after squeez­ing myself in amongst bemused-looking black-leather-jacket-clad men and full-length-fur-coat-clad women who seemed to con­sider my unruly, uncut hair and increas­ingly strag­gly beard a sus­pi­cious nov­elty, I real­ised I had flagged down the wrong one. After a moment of annoy­ance, I decided to let things take their course and stayed put, look­ing out of the win­dow as the bus headed fur­ther and fur­ther into sub­ur­bia, passing street-sellers warm­ing them­selves by the flames of their empty card­board boxes, 20-storey Soviet tower blocks with wonky stair­cases and even wonkier elev­at­ors, and invin­cible fringes of dirty ice and snow impinging errat­ic­ally upon the road.

I found out later that grow­ing a beard as an Armenian is a tra­di­tional indic­a­tion that one is in mourn­ing, which would explain the afore­men­tioned reac­tion, but a few of the younger gen­er­a­tion have decided to grow them as an expres­sion of free­dom and chan­ging times. With count­less build­ing devel­op­ments hav­ing sprung up over the last 5 years and helped by cash injec­tions from abroad, Yerevan is in the pro­cess of trans­form­a­tion from a quiet, Soviet-styled state cap­ital to an increas­ingly Western-looking cul­tural centre, where museums depict­ing the long and troubled his­tory of the Armenian people, utterly ancient mon­as­ter­ies (some of which still host reli­gious ser­vices) and road­side mar­kets stand side by side with jazz clubs, fashion-designer shop-fronts and 24-hour super­mar­kets. The Ver­n­is­sage week­end bazaar, where vendors sell mech­an­ical parts salvaged from dumped machinery, stray pup­pies are sold as pets (to save you hav­ing to catch your own), and you can eat a hearty plate­ful of deli­cious dolma (cabbage-leaves stuffed with spiced rice and ground meat) for the equi­val­ent of about 12 Eng­lish pen­nies, is a two minute walk from the Porsche show­room.


Over­look­ing the city (when not obscured by air pol­lu­tion or low cloud) stands Mount Ararat, dwarf­ing the rest of the sky­line at more than five thou­sand metres in alti­tude. It’s not only a sym­bol of Armenian eth­nic and reli­gious iden­tity, with streets, build­ings, cognac brands and a town named after the moun­tain, but also a con­stant reminder of the effects of the increasingly-widely-recognised gen­o­cide of the early 20th cen­tury, dur­ing which estim­ates of over a mil­lion eth­nic Armeni­ans lost their lives by order of one par­tic­u­larly ideal­istic (and short-lived) Ottoman-Turkish lead­er­ship, and count­less fam­il­ies were sep­ar­ated and for­cibly re-settled. This has led to today’s situ­ation where three mil­lion Armeni­ans live in present-day Armenia and a fur­ther seven mil­lion are scattered across the globe, either as fully-fledged com­munit­ies or as indi­vidu­als and their des­cend­ants who star­ted new lives in new coun­tries. I was told that Prin­cess Diana was one sixty-fourth Armenian. Los Angeles-based rock band Sys­tem Of A Down are Armenian. The singer Cher is (you’ve guessed it) Armenian. (Unfor­tu­nately — if you’re a cynic like me, at any rate — an Armenian also inven­ted the television.)

But the slopes of Mount Ararat now stand on the far side of the long-closed Turkish-Armenian bor­der, sur­roun­ded by towns that were once part of West­ern Armenia under the Otto­man Empire, now Turk­ish by name and pop­u­la­tion, although a large num­ber of Armeni­ans chose to change their lan­guage, fam­ily name and reli­gion in order to stay where they felt they belonged. In North-Eastern Tur­key, the eth­nic inter­ming­ling was quite notice­able. I’m pretty sure that the para­medic, who took me to get my face sewn up after a nasty crash near the Geor­gian bor­der, was Armenian.

I’ve also met a huge num­ber of people here who are partly or fully Armenian by eth­ni­city, hav­ing come to Armenia seek­ing their roots, from Eng­land, Lebanon, Canada, Dubai, Iran, Aus­tralia, and the USA, amongst oth­ers. A local Armenian girl explained that this romantic idea has in real­ity led to some dif­fer­ences in opin­ion as to in which dir­ec­tion Armenia should be devel­op­ing, as those incom­ing Dia­sporan Armeni­ans unavoid­ably bring with them dis­tinctly un-Armenian ideas and world-views, com­ing as they do from entirely dif­fer­ent social and cul­tural back­grounds, whether they share the same blood or not. But West­ern­ers (for the most part) have already learnt of the con­sequences of eco­nomic growth without due con­sid­er­a­tion for the envir­on­ment, so per­haps learn­ing to listen is the key. Organ­iz­a­tions such as WWF can make a dif­fer­ence, as shown by the suc­cess­ful lob­by­ing of the Armenian gov­ern­ment to change its plans to build a new high­way through a nature reserve in the south of the coun­try, but it’s also up to those in the driv­ing seat of pro­gress to take these con­sid­er­a­tions seriously.

As a trav­el­ler, I’m exposed to all of the opin­ions that people from town, vil­lage or city, nat­ive or oth­er­wise, care to throw at me. This means I have to sit down some­times and con­sider why a bee-keeper in a vil­lage in Armenia can brand the entire nation that lies just over his west­ern hori­zon ‘bad’, because of what he knows of events that occurred nearly a hun­dred years ago. I’m still only get­ting going with this jour­ney, and I’m loathe to try and for­mu­late my own opin­ions on the con­flict­ing his­tor­ies of two neigh­bour­ing coun­tries, because it’s not really any of my busi­ness. I’m firmly in agree­ment with the sen­ti­ment that a little know­ledge can be dangerous.

What I am being forced to do on this jour­ney is to col­lect com­mon threads that, when tied together, start to explain why humans think and act the way they do and why the world is the way it is, and as the jour­ney pro­gresses, I sup­pose that more and more threads will be added.

Thanks for read­ing. You might also like these recent articles:

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