Road Trip (Armenia)

So, from Tbilisi to Dilijan in Armenia — an adventure.

The national highway, a provincial road with no dividers, something like the old Athens–Patras road. On this road, to the left and right, kiosks selling fruit, carrots, detergents (endless detergents — Tide, Omo, Persil — a lot of Persil), cows, repair shops, tire shops, windshield replacements and again tire repair shops. I think I have never seen so many tire repair shops in my life.

A drive on asphalt that suddenly turned into dirt road, then again gray asphalt and mud. Roads from another era, without lights, without signs, with abandoned buildings, forgotten Soviet-era factories, rusted bridges — all of it inside a lush green landscape.

And then a moment that only roads can give you.

On the mountain above Dilijan I found myself inside a fog unlike any I had ever seen. The road was narrow, there were no lights, visibility almost zero. I couldn’t turn back. I was looking for somewhere to stop but couldn’t see what was on my right.

After ten kilometers of anxiety, I managed to pull over with my hazard lights onto a makeshift turnout, determined to stay there until the fog lifted. I couldn’t even get out of the car. And suddenly a truck passed and stopped in front of me. The driver — a huge man — got out and walked toward me, a ghostly figure in the fog at the edge of the road. I was frightened. He asked me in fluent Armenian if I had a problem. I answered that I couldn’t see, in that international language of hand gestures. “I will go in front and you follow me,” he said in the same language. “Watch my lights and let’s go.” He led me all the way to the village I was heading to and only left after making sure I took the right turn.

A stranger — an angel on his way home, most likely to that wreck of a house with the tin roof and the dim light, like all the houses I saw during the night.

Chandeliers belong to Europe. Here they light their homes humbly with 20-watt bulbs, like Greek villages before tourism.

Armenia feels like two countries. Its cities and villages — and Yerevan, not all of it, just two or three kilometers at most around the center — are another country.

Northern and central Armenia (I didn’t go south, it’s close to Nagorno-Karabakh and I chose to avoid it) is a bare land without greenery, a harsh place, with patched-up houses and people who bake in the sun or freeze in the snow.

Lake Sevan feels like a small oasis, with its churches: the Sevanavank monastery of the 4th century, the medieval cemetery in the town of Noratus, covering 7 hectares and looking otherworldly with its carved stones, each one different. These khachkars (cross-stones) have stood there since the 13th century. The monasteries have no icons. They have a narthex and then, elevated like an altar, a single image of the Virgin Mary. The Hayravank church also looks out over the lake, like the monastery.

Public roads — or rather, the village roads — are where the villages gather and sell their goods: carrot juice and fruit, life vests and whatever else one can imagine.

In the center of Yerevan there is a modern city with a huge beautifully lit square, government buildings all around it, its market — everything neat and orderly, so that you almost forget the poverty, the endless apartment blocks, the shacks, the inventive houses of poverty: a door from here, a window from there, unplastered, brick, concrete blocks and tin. A lot of tin for a bare land with merciless sun.

On Saturday night the fountains dance in front of the art gallery to the rhythm of classical music — a magical spectacle and at the same time something that feels like a lie, when two streets away people are searching through trash.The square was full of locals.

Up to the border with Georgia I did not see a single green leaf. 160 kilometers of bare mountains, with villages that make you wonder why they exist in such a hostile place.

The people I met were all kind and eager to help. There is something about this people — a natural goodness that perhaps comes from their wounds. And they are many.

At the Genocide Museum, on a hill in Yerevan — a museum with free entry by choice.

A moving, simple, austere, clean museum.

As I followed chronologically the suffering of this people from 1879, I reached 1922 and remembered a story my father used to tell me .

As a young boy, a refugee from Asia Minor in Piraeus, he decided to sneak onto a ship bound for Marseille. He got on — but how do you get off in Marseille, where they checked everyone disembarking?

On that journey there was a mission of orphaned children — Armenian remnants — escorted by an Armenian priest, taking them to an orphanage in France. As the priest lined them up, my father slipped into the line. The officer counted them, counted again — there was one extra. He asked them something in Armenian. They answered. My father answered too. And so he passed the control. “The priest,” my father used to say, “understood — but he knew we were burned by the same fire.”

What could that word have been, I always wonder!