Journey to Armenia

By Mike Gerrard

‘This is Little Paradise,’ said the young man in the market, ‘Little Paradise, best in Armenia.’ He stood in front of his stall, his grey pullover bulging like the bags of fruit behind him, as if he’d stuffed a watermelon up his jumper. He was obviously a man who enjoyed his food and was determined I was going to enjoy some of it too.

‘This lavash,’ he said, showing me what looked like two little pieces of linoleum. ‘This made from apricot, sweet. This made from plum, sour. Try, try.’ He tore a piece from each and I chewed. The plum lino was indeed sharp and tart, but the apricot was sweet and tasty. Hanging from the stall behind him were necklaces of dried fruit: apricots, plums, figs. They looked like rows of beads from the abacuses that many stallholders were using to tot up their customers’ bills on. My Little Paradise man wanted me to try one of everything: British visitors are still a novelty in Armenia.

 ‘Suju,’ the man said, twisting off a piece of something that looked like a skinny dark sausage with nuts in. ‘Made from flour, fruit juice, nuts.’ I tasted that too, and delicious it was, though not half as delicious as the next nibble he thrust in my hand. It was a dried apricot, in which was a little nest of nuts and honey. There are said to be a hundred varieties of apricot grown in Armenia, and in fact the Latin name for the fruit is prunus armeniaca. I swallowed my Armenian prune, and followed it with a fig and then a peach, both also holding a clutch of nuts and honey. ‘Remember, Little Paradise, best in Armenia,’ said my chubby cheery friend, sending me off with a free fistful of fruit.

If Armenia is a poor country – and it is, very poor – you wouldn’t know it from the cavernous covered market in its capital, Yerevan. Sunlight streams through the side windows beneath the vast arched roof, making it look like a cross between an aircraft hanger and a Victorian railway station. Near the door, one stall is selling the plastic carrier bags that we discard every day. Small ones cost 50 drams (about 6p) and large ones twice the price.

Elsewhere, though, the market stalls are full to overflowing. You can smell the cheese stalls several yards away, and opposite them are the bread stalls, the owners proudly showing me the round Armenian loaves the size of hubcaps. One corner is given over to a dozen or so potato stalls. In the fruit section a man is polishing rich red apples and piling them into a pyramid.

 

There are radishes as big as cricket balls. There are pineapples, pomegranates, pears, huge oranges, nobbly lemons I can hardly get my hand round. A lady picks a strawberry for me from a plump pile of them and it tastes divine. The spice stalls are explosions of colour, with rows of red washing-up bowls each filled with a different hue: saffron, red chili powder, orange turmeric, yellows, whites, blacks, spices I’ve never seen before with no clue given by the swirling Armenian script.

Not many clues either in the swirling shapes of some of the works in the nearby Museum of Modern Art, though it’s rather comforting to know that meaningless art criticism is the same the whole world over: ‘The artist’s works are characterised by sharp and dynamic sounding, by the inner excitement, by torn and disconnected components,’ says one biographical notice, and ‘Albert Hagopian avoids any lucidity,’ another points out, rather unnecessarily.

 

But there are plenty of good works too, with the kind of powerful sculptures you might expect from a former Soviet Republic, and the detailed drawings of Rudolf Khachatrian. This British-based Armenian uses an original technique of brown sepia on ‘levcas’, a special chalked panel used in Russian icon painting.

Icons are on display in the museums at Echmiadzin, 20kms to the west of Yerevan. This small town was the Armenian capital until 340AD, and it was here in 301AD that the Armenian King, Tiradates III, made Armenia the first country in the world to adopt Christianity as a state religion.

The Orthodox Cathedral at Echmiadzin (the name means ‘The Descendants of the Only Begotten’) is the focal point for Armenian Christians, still emerging from beneath the cloak of the Soviet anti-religious stance. Here is the home of the head of the church, the Patriarch, and a room in the museum is crammed with gifts presented to the Patriarch over the years, by everyone from Presidents and Prime Ministers, to Armenian football teams and Amazonian tribesmen. The chief of one tribe honoured the Patriarch by giving him the shrunken head of his deceased wife. The successful Yerevan soccer team also made a sacrifice, it seems, when they were Soviet champions. ‘The Yerevan team,’ our guide somberly informs us, ‘presented their balls to the Patriarch.’

In another museum inside the cathedral are some rather older objects, if they are to be believed: a piece of the True Cross, the head of the lance which pierced Christ’s side (sold by the Roman soldier to an Armenian), and a piece of wood from the top of Mount Ararat and said to have come from Noah’s Ark.

Mount Ararat is the country’s great symbol. It stands imposingly on the horizon, thrusting up on its own from a flat plain to a snow-capped height of 5165m, almost 17,000ft. Stand and stare at this mountain, as bold as a child’s drawing, and you too would say that if the world were ever flooded, this is where Noah’s Ark would have landed when the waters began to recede. Ararat is on Armenia’s bank notes and stamps, on cigarette packets and brandy bottles, on the walls of plush restaurants and of back-street kebab-sellers alike. It’s probably imprinted on the heart of every Armenian, and the tragedy is that it is not in Armenia. After the end of World War II, Stalin – perhaps as an act of spite through his adult hatred of his Georgian-Armenian peasant background – gave Ararat to Turkey, turning western Armenia into eastern Turkey.

To understand what a dreadful gesture that was, you need to go back to the early years of the 20th century, when the so-called Young Turks began a genocide that was only exceeded by the Nazis. Not content to drive Armenians out of Turkey, they began systematically killing them until an estimated one to two million Armenians were dead, a horror that no Turkish government has ever admitted even happened, let alone been prepared to apologise for. And then Stalin gave Mount Ararat to Turkey.

Another of Armenia’s religious shrines is just a hundred metres or so from the Turkish border, the monastery of Khor Virap, which dates back to the 10th century. As we walked to the top of a mound to get a view down onto the small church and the buildings around it, some young boys from the nearby village joined us. ‘Turkey,’ one said, pointing to the fence that ran through the fields below us, with the occasional threatening watchtower. ‘At night,’ he says, ‘we hear gunfire.’ The Turks, he claims, fire on anything that moves near the border, which is used as an escape route by Turks and Kurds hoping to avoid Turkish military service. What would the guards do if we walked down towards the border now? ‘Shoot us,’ the boys say matter-of-factly.

The Armenian border is still guarded by the Russians, despite Armenia’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. It seems a strange arrangement, though not to our Armenian guide. ‘Why not?’ he says. ‘It saves us money.’ The Armenians, throughout history, have been dealers and traders and sharp operators.

Khor Virap is almost literally in the shadow of Mount Ararat, the peak that is a daily reminder of Armenia’s tormented past, and never more so than every April 24th when the whole country stops and remembers the worst year of atrocities, in 1915. The focus is the Genocide Memorial on a hill in Tsitsernakaberd Park which overlooks Yerevan. The Armenians planted 1.5 million trees in the park in memory of all the people who are thought to have lost their lives. The country’s present population is only just over 3 million.

At the Memorial an eternal flame burns in the centre of a circle of inward-leaning pillars. A few flowers still lingered from the previous week’s memorials. An elderly man looked into the flame for a while. A family came, three generations, and paid their respects. A young boy of about ten, smartly dressed and alone, walked up to the eternal flame and bowed his head. Armenia’s future. As I stood respectfully and watched, in sombre mood, a butterfly flew through the pillars, avoided the flame, and flew out again into the sunlight.