Across the Border to Armenia

Another day, another country. Across the border to Armenia this morning.  I thought the three countries might be quite similar given their location and shared history.  Oh hell, no.  Crossing the border was like travelling into another planet.  You've never seen potholes or crazy overtaking until you've climbed up the hairpin bends of an Armenian highway.  

Here the monasteries are no longer in use, lost during Soviet occupation and economic collapse.  Haghpat sits high above the river valley, mostly intact but water-damaged and grassy.  Look across the valley and you'd believe you were in the Swiss Alps.  A thousand years old and the Chapel still has the most astoundingly perfect acoustics, sending a solo voice resonating around the arches into a harmony.  I'll spare you the video of me singing, but I'm now on a dozen Chinese videos...

Further down the road, the modern ruins of once industrial towns line the river.  Copper mines, chemical works, what was planned and constructed by the soviet regime failed to survive a devastating earthquake in 1988 and the economic earthquake of independence four years later.   Towns that once had a quarter of a million residents now have less than a hundred thousand, scraping a living from agriculture. There are three million Armenians in the country, a third of them in the Yerevan capital, and eight million in the wider world, economic and political refugees. 

Up on the roof of the world, in croft like villages at 7000 feet, are communities of incoming refugees.  The Yazidi people were victims of genocide a decade ago, under the rule of  Islamic State, murdered, abducted, enslaved.  Here around forty thousand have found a new home, picking crops by hand and tending sheep, welcomed by a country with its own years of horror.