Exploring Armenia with an old friend, I find hospitality and history | Canada Voices

In an ideal world, the word for “thanks” in every language would be short and easy, something one can toss off at a moment’s notice – Tak! Grazie! Asante! No such luck in Armenia, where people are constantly doing things for you that warrant thanks, but where shnorhakalutyun doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.

The way around it, said my friend, was to just say merci. It was a holdover from when the crusading French found a strong ally in medieval Armenia, the world’s first Christian country. He was full of such history lessons, having variously lived and worked here for nearly 60 years.

The French connection is still strong – the European Political Community was in town during my visit, and the streets were clean, the pink tuff-stone façades were scrubbed, and the lampposts hung with the tricolours of France and Armenia – but my friend had championed the country long before the present optimistic political fraternizing made it a darling of European trading partners wanting inroads to the Caucasus. For the first time in its post-Soviet history, he told me, he felt the country was investing in itself. “Armenia is an ancient bud,” he said, “finally opening its petals.”

Maybe it was the faultless weather, or the pots of roses and strawberries for sale on every street corner, or the kohl-eyed, dark-haired women that sauntered past our café, but I couldn’t argue with him. It was a beautiful spring day in the capital, Yerevan, the light filtering through the trees, leaving a basket-work print of sun and shadow across the table.

We had spent four days stalking the city, visiting bookshops, the opera and the house-museums of celebrated Armenian artists: the painter Martiros Saryan, the writer Avetik Isahakyan and the composer Aram Khachaturian. Now, we were plotting our next steps. I moved the map when the waiter brought wine and dried apricots – merci! – but he lingered and, putting a long finger on the northern Tavush Province, explained the region was his homeland.

While I sometimes found breaching the shy front the Armenians present to be a challenge, there occasionally came a moment that set off a chain reaction of hospitality. The waiter disappeared a moment, then returned with news his friends would meet us in Ijevan. There it was; it would be an insult to refuse, but who in their right mind would?

The next morning, we travelled north by taxi (a cheap way to get around the country), up from the flat plains upon which Yerevan lies and into the southern ranges of the Caucasus, where snow still covered the higher peaks and occasional squalls of sleet continued to occlude the sky. The small cities and towns beyond the capital remain austere, and Ijevan still retained the roughness of the days when it was an overnight way station for traders passing between Iran and Russia.

Our contact, a young woman, Vanuhi Stepanyan Rubeni, came from the nearby mountain village of Gandzaqar, where her ancestors had arrived in 1703. “My family still lives in the house they built,” she said, all of us sitting in the very building. “Armenians are always happy to see guests. We start with a cup of coffee and soon everything is on the table.” We sat and talked about her life – a university education in Yerevan in diplomatic communications, her work as a tour guide at the local brandy factory – while her father turned fatty slabs of pork on the barbecue, winked at us and made enigmatic declarations such as, “in Canada, they work the fields!”

The chain reaction continued, and Vanuhi arranged for us to stay in the mountains above Ijevan, at the Apaga Resort. There, I borrowed one of their horses for hire – my friend begged off, citing his age – and trotted into the hills. Up and up I went, over a muddy track past plots of vineyards and vegetables and then across a meadow packed tightly with yellow cowslip and dandelion.

Deep in the valley, Ijevan was a smudge of clay and tin that slowly dissipated behind a blizzard of snow. I rode back to Apaga, and in anticipation of my sodden return, my friend had commanded from the restaurant – merci! – a feast: plates of barbecued fish and chicken, sheaves of fresh herbs and a heap of thin lavash bread, looking like a ream of paper on the table.

We stayed longer in the warm hospitality of the north, moving to the nearby mountain town of Dilijan, visiting the boxy monasteries by day and sitting near the fireplace in our room at the Dilijani Tun hotel by night.

Armenia is a wine country, and on our final evening in Dilijan, we visited a local wine cellar. In a room whiffy with risen dust, our hostess, Anna Baghdasaryan, small and hard-eyed with a flinty smile, proffered her collection of homemade wine, unmarked bottles of varying gold and ruby. She introduced them with cool aplomb: “This is a white,” she said, filling our glasses from one bottle. And from another, “This is a red.”

“The first Armenian to make wine was Noah,” she went on, meaning Noah of the Ark, who, the story goes, ran aground on Mount Ararat, and as his first act, planted grapevines on the mountain. Another kind of evidence came from the country’s south, at an archeological site called Areni-1 cave complex, where traces of grape fermentation were discovered in 4,000-year-old clay pots.

Good Armenian wine can be had (Decant Wine Bar in Yerevan has the country’s widest selection, and its passionate sommeliers arrange wine tours), but, because of the machinations of Soviet-era production, it was for a long time designated a country of spirits: brandy and vodka. “Local interest in wine is growing,” Baghdasaryan said, “but Armenians think 45-per-cent alcohol is low.”

Given that, she made what sounded like a spurious claim, that “Armenian people do not get drunk! They can drink and drink, but because the quality of the wine is very high, they’re never drunk.” As the night wore on, we put that theory to the test, and discovered with near 100-per-cent certainty that it is false.

In the morning, we sought out a grand breakfast of eggs, sausage and thick Armenian coffee. After I slung the cup back, the waitress took it up and peered into the clotted grounds. She was, she said, reading my fortune. Good things, I hoped? Yes, yes, she assured me, very good.

I looked at her blearily, my memory failing. “Shnorak…shnor…”

And then I remembered: Just say merci.

If you go

Yerevan is best reached with Turkish Airlines or Lufthansa. Spring and autumn are the most comfortable seasons for travel; summers can be intensely hot.

The Alexander, a Marriott hotel, and the Grand Hotel Yerevan, part of the Small Luxury Hotels of the World, offer Yerevan’s most luxurious accommodation; the Red Bridge Hotel, near the Noy Brandy Factory, is a more modest alternative (starting at $105 a night) with a large breakfast and a free shuttle to the city centre.

Yerevan is compact and walkable, with a café culture that stretches late into the evening. Public transportation outside the city is limited; shared vans known as marshrutkas remain the cheapest way to get around, though hiring a driver through the taxi-apps Yandex Go and GG is inexpensive and advisable for visiting remote monasteries and mountain regions. Another app, HikeArmenia, offers excellent advice on treks across the country and provides contact information for freelance guides and a list of local accommodations.

English is increasingly common among younger Armenians, especially in Yerevan, but Russian remains the conventional second language. Cash remains essential outside major centres, though card payments are becoming more common.