Saying goodbye to Yerevan

My last three days in Yerevan were meant to be spent preparing for another three months of work in Krasnoyarsk. I had a decent amount of admin, packing, and planning to do. The first half of my time in Siberia had flown by, and I wanted to go into the second half with a game plan. But I didn’t, of course. I never do.

As I got out my laptop and prepared for an admin backlog, my German friend Heiko (disappointingly he doesn’t actually spell his name Haiku) was going out to re-visit a history museum, and he asked if I wanted to join. Heiko is something of a specialist in Armenian history, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity, so I gratefully closed my laptop and we headed out to the museum. It was built on the site of an old fortress. A very old fortress. A fortress that was built in 780 BC. It was called Arin Berd, or Erebuni, and Yerevan was named after it. The fortress was built to protect the northern border of the Urartian kingdom, which pre-dated the arrival of both the Romans and Christianity in Armenia. As well as the seriously cool cuneiform inscriptions that could be found on the bricks of the excavated fortress itself, the museum housed an amazing range of artefacts that dated back to the early days of the fortress. There were potter’s wheels, arrowheads, huge ceramic pots, and even some remains of food – grains, grape seeds, and charred bread. When you put them all together you could really picture people living in this fortress thousands of years ago. The coolest exhibit was probably a collection of huge stone pipes which were presumably used to bring water to the fortress from the village of Garni, where I’d been just the other day. Garni was a long way away. They must have carved a lot of stone pipes. And fitted them all together. Seemed like a really impressive technological achievement to me.

Cuneiform inscription on the fort

The view of Yerevan from Erebuni fort

Later that day, I went to a concert by the Israeli jazz bassist Avishai Cohen. The concert hall was enormous, perched on top of a hill, and looked like it had just landed from the future. The Armenian State Symphony Orchestra accompanied Avishai’s band, and together they made a really fun upbeat sound. The audience loved him – he got four encores!

Concert hall from the future

The next day, enthused by my last visit to a monastery, I headed for the famous Khor Vidab. This one is nestled at the foot of Mount Ararat, the mountain which almost all Armenian exports use for their branding, and which, ironically, is no longer in Armenia.

But that was far from all the irony that the day had to offer. I was one of four people getting off the bus at the closest stop to Khor Vidab. There were also two Australians (yet another pair of semi-permanent travellers – these two had spent years exploring a sizeable chunk of Europe) and a Filipino who had only ever left the Philippines three times. We began our little pilgrimage together. It was a forty-five minute walk along a dusty highway. Nowhere near as pretty as the walk to Geghard. But we knew that, any minute now, the beautiful snow-capped Mount Ararat was going to rear up on the horizon  and it would be well worth all the dust in our socks and the cars inexplicably honking at us or rolling down their windows and touting for trade as taxi drivers. So we waited. And waited. And waited. And eventually we got to the monastery, halfway up a little mound that decidedly wasn’t a mountain. And there, in the near distance, was… nothing. Not a thing.

It turns out that when the visibility is awful – really dreadful – you can’t see Mount Ararat at all. And this was one of those days. So we had to just imagine the majestic peak looming over us, and content ourselves with the monastery complex and its four walls. To rub it in, the gift shop was full of cards depicting the monastery with a mountain soaring above it in the near distance.

The monastery itself was pretty cool though, luckily. It had a great backstory about Gregory the Illuminator being kept in a pit (which you can still see) for a couple of years with poisonous snakes and insects. He was released when the king converted the country to Christianity. If that’s true, then this monastery was one of the most important places in modern Armenia. Still not as cool as Geghard though.

Saint Gregory the Illuminator's hole in the ground

The magnificent view of Mount Ararat

Close but no Ararat

Then the four of us went to get Georgian food. The Australian couple told me that it was a travesty that I’d never tried khinkali (Georgian broth-filled dumplings), so we went to a place that served them. It was just a shed in a park. It had a little tent/room next to it, which we sat in. There was one tea light on our table for light and warmth. And two old TVs – one balanced on top of the other – in the corner of the tent for some reason. The waitress came in and asked what we wanted. We asked for six khinkali each. She sighed. ‘We’ve only got twelve at the moment, but if you pay me now I can go out and get some more.’ So we paid her

…

Forty minutes later, she was back. ‘Sorry, I need another thousand drams!’

…

Forty-five minutes later, the food arrived.

And it was actually worth the wait. Those things are amazing. You bite through the dumpling and then suck out the broth and then eat the rest of the dumpling with the meat inside it. It’s like a food challenge. A super tasty food challenge.

On my final day, I gave up on trying to get any work done. I packed my bag, left the hostel with a heavy heart, and headed out into the city. I decided to spend my last morning in Yerevan at the Genocide Museum, seeing as I hadn't been there yet. The museum was excellent and horrifying. There was a weird disjunction between how friendly and smiley the staff were and how terrible the events being described were. It was a very thorough museum, and it gave you an idea of how important the genocide is for all Armenians. It was definitely worth visiting.

The flights back were blissfully uneventful. Also the plane food was really good! I was gobsmacked to find goose liver in a box of plane food on a budget airline. Also ‘mushroom and sour cream’ flavoured crisps. That was when I realised I was back in Russia.

Actually it's technically 'chanterelle and smetana'