My Dearest Armenian Friends,
Some of you I have already met and I only know the names. But I would
like to thank you all for everything. I had a fantastic time in your
country. Please find my letter I have sent to all my friends regarding to
my trip to Armenia.Hope to meet you all later on. Shnorakal em


Parev (Hi in Armenian language) /
Merhaba (Hi in Turkish language) all friends,



Long time no hears, just decided to
let you know about my latest trip to Armenia. I took the advantage of
Ramadan Holiday in Turkey to
get to Armenia for 5 days.
Armenia is one of
the former USSR countries
that got its independence in the late 1980s when the Soviet
Union broke up. Yerevan, home to about a million people, is its
Capital city. There are now direct flights with Armavia (National
Armenian
Airlines) from Istanbul to Yerevan although the land
border is still closed. I went there with a good friend of mine who is
able to
speak almost excellent Russian which helped us a lot since 70 % of
population
speaks Russian too. We stayed in a lovely small family run place to a
very
reasonable price with the home made yummy breakfast included.
Armenian people are very
friendly and hospitable in general. Foreigners
here attract the people’s attention a lot since usually only Diaspora
visits the
country. You might imagine how surprising sounded my visit to them (not
Armenian
origin and plus a Turkish). The country offers excellent food and very
reasonable prices for almost everything. Almost all restaurants offer
live
music. On hearing I was a Turkish visiting they immediately start a
Turkish
song. Yerevan
has a subway built during the soviet era. It is very very deep;
entrance and
exit are through an escalator, the longest I have ever
seen.



We
usually took daily tours during the whole time we stayed there. The
tour company
was great. Here is where we have been: 1st day: Yerevan City (First
stop is a very nice
Manuscripts museum called Matenadaran. Antique and classic books and
manuscripts
are displayed and preserved here. The museum is on top of a small hill
at the
end of a major boulevard. From the building we have a very nice view of
the good
looking portions of the city. Next we went to see a monument called the
Cascades. It is a series of nice granite steps going up the hill with
fountains
at various levels. Some of the construction of the steps has been left
unfinished near the top. There are a lot of steps (several hundreds).
There is a
tower at the top, whose construction is complete. To the side of the
tower there
is an amusement park with several rides, and a huge war memorial. The
memorial
has a huge metal statue of Mother Armenia holding a very heavy sword
with both
hands.

2nd
day: Lake Sevan,
Sevanavank (Lake Sevan is a huge fresh water lake at a
height of 2000 meters above sea level. The shore line is partitioned
into
several areas that can be rented. We set out for a hike up a nearby
small hill
on which there is a very old church. From the top of the hill we had a
spectacular view of the whole Lake Sevan and the surrounding area)
Noraduz (The art of khachkar -cross-stone-
is the most original manifestation of Armenian medieval culture.
Noraduz which
is truly considered a forest of khachkars and open-air museum, displays
hundreds
of khachkars, the most stunning of which are the so called
"embroidered" ones
typical to the 13th-14th centuries),

3rd
day: Echmiadzin (This town has the
most famous and most holy Armenian Church. The head of the Armenian
Church, the
Catholicas, lives in a building adjacent to that church, and he has his
offices
there also. So, Echmiadzin is like the Vatican for the Armenian Church.
The
Catholicas are buried in the courtyard of this church, at the site of
this
church there was a temple of the old mythological (similar to Greek
mythology)
religion to which Armenians belonged before they were converted to
Christianity.
When Christianity reached Armenia in the 3rd century, they
converted that temple into the present church. Armenia
is the first country to accept Christianity as the state religion. The
Echmiadzin church is a fairly large and massive stone structure with
impressive
columns, domes, stone carvings of the Christian cross that is uniquely
Armenian
and several murals. Zvartnots
(This marvellous temple is to be considered one of the best medieval
architecture).

4th
day: Sanahin (The monastery of
Sanahin is on the right bank of Debed River. This architectural complex
consists
of several churches, seminary, and book depository). Haghpat (Situated
not far from Sanahin the
monastery of Haghpat has its significant place in history. Numerous
valuable
manuscripts and miniature paintings have been produced in the
scriptorium of
Haghpat for many centuries) and Odzun.

5th
day: Garni (Garni, site of a
pre-Christian temple built around 3rd century BC, somewhat in the style
of the
Greek Acropolis in Athens. The temple is set in the midst of a
valley with mountain ranges all around it, and offered very beautiful
scenery.)
, Geghard (a Christian church of
which construction started between the 10th to 12th centuries AD. This
church is
carved out of a single mountain peak; i.e., it is a monolithic
structure
chiselled and carved out of a single huge piece of stone. When we
arrived at
this church, a service was going on with beautifully dressed choir
singers
singing Christian religious songs in Armenian. After this we went to
see some of
the other chambers in this church. In one, the echo effects of sound
are very
interesting. In this chamber, at the top of the dome, there is a one
and a half
feet circular opening to the outside through which a bright ray of
sunshine
entered the chamber. Inside this chamber in a corner there is a pool of
water in
which people were dropping coins. This is a wishing well. On several
trees
outside this church we saw thousands of cloth handkerchiefs tied to the
branches. This is another type of wishing-mechanism popular here.
People tie a
handkerchief on these trees hoping that their wishes would be granted
by doing
so.) By the way one can easily say the infinity sign has a huge impact
on every
single church. I was really impressed by the symbol and I might have a
tattoo of
it. See the picture yourself and decide whether its good or
not.



As you could easily see it was one
of the busiest holidays I had. If you like religious tourism or
trekking-mountaineering Armenia is the place to
go.



In conversations with Armenians, the
question of the Armenian genocide invariably comes up.
In Yerevan there is a memorial monument which I
gave a visit. Most people do realize that they need to have some
relations with
their neighbour Turkey. No one has actually asked me
anything regarding to that. But one can easily feel their pain when
this is the
subject. Its like two good old friends broke their relations and meet
each other
after so many years and they start to get on well immediately but you
could
still feel that there is some hesitation and control in their
relation.



On our way back to Istanbul we missed the
plane because of a misunderstanding. We either had to wait for 3 days
for
another flight or pass the Georgian border immediately and drive to
Tbilisi, take the first available flight to Istanbul. We took the
second option since there was a next day early (05 am) flight to
Istanbul from Tbilisi. Since we had spent almost all money we
had, we had to use ATM to pay for our driver to Tbilisi and the flight
to Turkey. So this
holiday has coasted us a small fortune in terms of what we paid for
transportation for a country so close but so far…


* eto pis'mo moego znakomogo iz Turcii, nedavno pobyvavshego v Armenii