{"id":18436,"date":"2026-01-13T08:58:32","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T08:58:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/enamonotfp.com\/?p=18436"},"modified":"2026-01-14T09:47:52","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T09:47:52","slug":"taxidi-dromou-armenia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/taxidi-dromou-armenia\/","title":{"rendered":"Road Trip (Armenia)"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, from Tbilisi to Dilijan in Armenia \u2014 an adventure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The national highway, a provincial road with no dividers, something like the old Athens\u2013Patras road. On this road, to the left and right, kiosks selling fruit, carrots, detergents (endless detergents \u2014 Tide, Omo, Persil \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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 \u2014 all of it inside a lush green landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then a moment that only roads can give you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t turn back. I was looking for somewhere to stop but couldn\u2019t see what was on my right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t even get out of the car.\n\nAnd suddenly a truck passed and stopped in front of me. The driver \u2014 a huge man \u2014 got out and walked toward me, a ghostly figure in the fog at the edge of the road. I was frightened.\n\nHe asked me in fluent Armenian if I had a problem. I answered that I couldn\u2019t see, in that international language of hand gestures.\n\u201cI will go in front and you follow me,\u201d he said in the same language. \u201cWatch my lights and let\u2019s go.\u201d\n\nHe led me all the way to the village I was heading to and only left after making sure I took the right turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A stranger \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chandeliers belong to Europe.\nHere they light their homes humbly with 20-watt bulbs, like Greek villages before tourism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Armenia feels like two countries.\nIts cities and villages \u2014 and Yerevan, not all of it, just two or three kilometers at most around the center \u2014 are another country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Northern and central Armenia (I didn\u2019t go south, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Public roads \u2014 or rather, the village roads \u2014 are where the villages gather and sell their goods: carrot juice and fruit, life vests and whatever else one can imagine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In the center of Yerevan there is a modern city with a huge beautifully lit square, government buildings all around it, its market \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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On Saturday night the fountains dance in front of the art gallery to the rhythm of classical music \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Up to the border with Georgia I did not see a single green leaf.\n160 kilometers of bare mountains, with villages that make you wonder why they exist in such a hostile place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The people I met were all kind and eager to help. There is something about this people \u2014 a natural goodness that perhaps comes from their wounds. And they are many.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the Genocide Museum, on a hill in Yerevan \u2014 a museum with free entry by choice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A moving, simple, austere, clean museum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

As a young boy, a refugee from Asia Minor in Piraeus, he decided to sneak onto a ship bound for Marseille. He got on \u2014 but how do you get off in Marseille, where they checked everyone disembarking?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On that journey there was a mission of orphaned children \u2014 Armenian remnants \u2014 escorted by an Armenian priest, taking them to an orphanage in France.\n\nAs the priest lined them up, my father slipped into the line. The officer counted them, counted again \u2014 there was one extra. He asked them something in Armenian. They answered. My father answered too. And so he passed the control. \u201cThe priest,\u201d my father used to say, \u201cunderstood \u2014 but he knew we were burned by the same fire.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What could that word have been, I always wonder!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So from Tbilisi to Dilijan in Armenia an adventure. The national road, a provincial road with no crossings<\/p>","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":18286,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","post_format-post-format-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18436"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18446,"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18436\/revisions\/18446"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}