leftover country

 

I got enamoured with Armenia on my way there.

My hotel in Tbilisi called me a cab right after breakfast to bring me to my pre-booked transport for Yerevan. It was a white van parked at the back of a church not far from a bus terminal. The passengers stood around as our driver in army-styled jumper and baseball cap collected our fares, assigned seats and arranged luggages into the back boot of the vehicle.

There I met Varo who was returning home with his girlfriend after a holiday. He was smoking and squinting at the sun when I stood next to him for a cigarette before we set out.

It was a pretty pristine and perfect day for a journey that was to partly involve traversing the Lesser Caucasus Mountains. The sun shone through blue autumnal skies causing the rugged volcanic landscape to present its pale palette of orange, red and yellow.

At the border I was asked to fill up a form, answer a few questions, directed to different lanes to apply and pay for my Armenian visa on arrival. As I watched the queues get shorter I imagined myself being turned back to Georgia, left stranded or worse still locked up in a mountain cell and deported for having visited enemy country Azerbaijan.

As it turned out the immigration officers in oversized soviet peak caps spoke little English but were cordial, relaxed and unfussy.

I got my visa, walked quickly into Armenia and was elated to see Varo waiting for me. He had stayed behind to lead me back to our van parked some meters away beyond a row of minivans, buses and cars.

In the van we chatted about Armenia’s tourist attractions with Tsovinar, a  skinny smiling girl with black boyish hair. She worked as a hiking guide and enthusiastically pointed out Lake Sevan to me from our car window. Tsovinar and I were the last persons to be dropped off when we finally arrived near the city centre. Knowing that I arrived with no local currency, she gave me when we parted company a one thousand Armenian Drams (RM10) note for a taxi to my hotel.

At a Yerevan metro station late that afternoon I turned to a young woman behind me for help in buying a train ticket. Shoghakat was a lecturer at the American University. She offered to pay for my ride, walked me to her favourite restaurant and then decided to skip her evening ballet class to join me for my first meal in Armenia.

These acts of kindness and countless others I encountered convinced me that Armenia is truly a very special country. I began to understand what Shoghakat meant when she told me: ‘ that Armenia still exists is proof that God exists’. It is a country that in every sense, the world very nearly lost.

Present day Armenia is a small shrunken country of three million people located in the uplands and mountains east of Turkey and north of Iran.

You could almost place Armenia in Europe . The people speak an isolated  branch of Indo-European language, pray in thousand-year old churches, and produce award winning cognac, ballet and opera music. The capital city Yerevan is a proud and pensive post-soviet city of pink brick buildings, bust plaques and chess-played park benches.

Armenia is a beautiful and antique land with a recorded history going back over 3,500 years. It is also the world’s first Christian country. It looks western on the outside, but Armenia’s deep soul belongs not in Europe but further east. Anyone who cares to delve into the country’s real roots will discover that Hayastan ( the name Armenia calls itself ) is a true blue Middle East nation. As a political and cultural entity,  Armenia was once upon a time ten times bigger than its present size and exerted influences far beyond its borders.

Conquered by Byzantium, Arabs and later divided up between the Persians and Turks, Armenia had by the 16th century lost most of its power and freedom. As an indigenous nation of the Near East, Armenia at the beginning of the 20th century nearly went the way of Parthia, Hittite and Assyria, vanquished and vanished forever from our wall map of the world. Of this sad period after the First World War, Churchill was to write: ‘history will search in vain for the word “Armenia”‘.

By convention and its very name, the Middle East is a place of crossings and collisions . The area is the birth place of not just some of the world’s great civilisations, monotheistic beliefs and writing scripts but is also the spawning ground for much of its absolutism, intolerance and religious violence.

In a region that continues to witness unspeakable and horrible mass murders for gold, girls, and (sadly) God, the extirpation by Turkey of its Armenian and other christian subjects by deportation and killing 101 years ago is a crime with no accused but merely broad charges. It is a subject that ignites anger and brings back excruciating memories of the more than one million men, mothers and children hacked to pieces by swords or left to starve and sear to death in the Syrian sands.

I have no wish to offend any country’s preferred version of history, but to attempt to tell the story of modern day Armenia without mentioning the Genocide is like explaining wine by just talking about the bottles but not the grapes.

Photographs and text copyright Kerk Boon Leng 2017