ARMENIA. The first few days

Armenia. There was no particular reason for me to visit this country, but also not a particular reason not to. Armenians are not known for many things, I was only able to come up with the genocide, first country to be Christian (301 A.D.) and a number of people of Armenian descent (Kasparov, Cher, Kardashians, Kevorkian (dr death), Egoyam, Aznavour..), but none of them born here….

After a very long trip, I made it to the eighth floor of a large Soviet style block; concrete, rust, nothing repainted, the hallway faintly smelly, but my host assures me from the Soviet times means 'new'. The apartment itself is very tidy and clean. People from three generations occupy the three bedrooms (but three are on holiday). The three daughters are all over 25 with a good education and a professional job but moving out happens once you are married and then often into the household of the husband’s parents. Despite of equal rights, for women, marriage is still the main goal and a big worry is still "what might the neighbours say?" when it comes to the women. So no males are hosted in this household.

I can see the outlines of Mount Ararat from the window. Not any mountain, as this is where Noah landed with his arc after the flood. Armenians consider it 'theirs', even though it is in Turkey. In fact, Armenians claim they are directly descendants of Noah; his grandson Japheth was the grandfather of Hayk (who went to Babylon and fought against Nimrod according to the mythology) and the Armenian name for Armenia is " Hayastan".

My first day in Yerevan is fully packed; genocide museum (too much reading, they can learn a few things from Holocaust museums), a visit to the Ararat factory (their famous brandy-recommended) with tasting and a three hours guided tour through the city. During the tour it becomes obvious that there is a lot of history (occupation by the Persians, Ottomans, the Soviets, introduction of Christianity etc) but not a crazy amount to see. It is a fairly modern city with little architectural aesthetical design.  

The highpoint is the fountain show at night, when the public fountains jump high and low, backlit with coloured lights and music (bit like fireworks, but calmer).

Day two is spent outside the city, where I meet my 'friends' for the day on the bus, a Russian, a Spaniard and two French. We visit a temple (a copy of a Roman one) and an Armenian church in the mountains which makes for picturesque photos.

Even though the population is small, barely 3 million (and about less than double that amount in the diaspora), they very much have their own language. It is not related to any other language and has its own alphabet. I am incapable of making out anything and stick to my learnt words, such as "hello", "thank you", "I don't eat meat"... Obviously everybody speaks Russian as a second language-not that that helps me in any way. Tourists are not an unknown phenomenon, but there does not seem any desire to rip me off (taxi drivers need a little negotiating, but give in fairly quickly), and overall I feel safe and plenty of old ladies trying to help me. Transportation happens mostly in ramshackle minivans which sit 12 (and stand a lot more in the evening). They have official routes and numbers, but this is not indicated, so you need to know. A fare costs less than a whopping 20 cents. Food has been good so far, with grandma cooking me lovely meat free meals (smoked aubergine, rice stuffed peppers) and the fruit is wonderfully sweet and juicy.

The Armenian Genocide:

I don't have the time to give a proper researched account of the Armenian Genocide, but I do think it is important to have an awareness, so in case you are interested, I copied this from a website, which reflects on what the museum represented:

https://www.history.com/topics/armenian-genocide

The Armenian people have made their home in the Caucasus region of Eurasia for some 3,000 years. For some of that time, the kingdom of Armenia was an independent entity: At the beginning of the 4th century A.D. it became the first nation in the world to make Christianity its official religion.

But for the most part, control of the region shifted from one empire to another. During the 15th century, Armenia was absorbed into the mighty Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman rulers, like most of their subjects, were Muslim. They permitted religious minorities like the Armenians to maintain some autonomy, but they also subjected Armenians, who they viewed as “infidels,” to unequal and unjust treatment.

Christians had to pay higher taxes than Muslims, for example, and they had very few political and legal rights.

In spite of these obstacles, the Armenian community thrived under Ottoman rule. They tended to be better educated and wealthier than their Turkish neighbors, who in turn grew to resent their success.

This resentment was compounded by suspicions that the Christian Armenians would be more loyal to Christian governments (that of the Russians, for example, who shared an unstable border with Turkey) than they were to the Ottoman caliphate.

These suspicions grew more acute as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. At the end of the 19th century, the despotic Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II – obsessed with loyalty above all, and infuriated by the nascent Armenian campaign to win basic civil rights – declared that he would solve the “Armenian question” once and for all.

Between 1894 and 1896, this took the form of a state-sanctioned pogrom.

In response to large scale protests by Armenians, Turkish military officials, soldiers and ordinary men sacked Armenian villages and cities and massacred their citizens. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were murdered

In 1908, a new government came to power in Turkey. A group of reformers who called themselves the “Young Turks” overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid and established a more modern constitutional government.

At first, the Armenians were hopeful that they would have an equal place in this new state, but they soon learned that what the nationalistic Young Turks wanted most of all was to “Turkify” the empire. According to this way of thinking, non-Turks – and especially Christian non-Turks – were a grave threat to the new state.

On April 24, 1915, the Armenian genocide began. That day, the Turkish government arrested and executed several hundred Armenian intellectuals.

After that, ordinary Armenians were turned out of their homes and sent on death marches through the Mesopotamian desert without food or water.

Frequently, the marchers were stripped naked and forced to walk under the scorching sun until they dropped dead. People who stopped to rest were shot.

At the same time, the Young Turks created a “Special Organization,” which in turn organized “killing squads” or “butcher battalions” to carry out, as one officer put it, “the liquidation of the Christian elements.”

These killing squads were often made up of murderers and other ex-convicts. They drowned people in rivers, threw them off cliffs, crucified them and burned them alive. In short order, the Turkish countryside was littered with Armenian corpses.

Records show that during this “Turkification” campaign, government squads also kidnapped children, converted them to Islam and gave them to Turkish families. In some places, they raped women and forced them to join Turkish “harems” or serve as slaves. Muslim families moved into the homes of deported Armenians and seized their property.

Though reports vary, most sources agree that there were about 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the time of the massacre. In 1922, when the genocide was over, there were just 388,000 Armenians remaining in the Ottoman empire.

After the Ottomans surrendered in 1918, the leaders of the Young Turks fled to Germany, which promised not to prosecute them for the genocide. (However, a group of Armenian nationalists devised a plan, known as Operation Nemesis, to track down and assassinate the leaders of the genocide.)

Ever since then, the Turkish government has denied that a genocide took place. The Armenians were an enemy force, they argue, and their slaughter was a necessary war measure.