We arrived at around 5 am. The airport is being renovated, so what i saw first was a very modern coloured glass structure. But leaving the building, through some construction place, you can find some examples of this soviet architecture.
Our pick up was a crunky old white lada.As a former country of the URSS thay hardly speak english, as we arrived very late we wanted to have some small breakfast later than the closing hour. When we were heading to the elevator, a short guy with three ¨girls¨. Funny!10.00 am we woke up shower and had a small breakfast. First stop: Khor Virap.
It´s a monastery built in the place where Saint Gregory the Illuminator was kept in a pit for 12 years. He was the responsible for the conversion of Armenia to the christianism in 301, making it the first nation to adopt this religion. On the way there we saw an old movie theatre from the soviet times and a lot of very funny gas station, a bit pop style. People en Yerevan drive worse than in Buenos Aires and the roads are pritty destroyed. As a mountain aerea, the land tend to move in some places. Bumping and jumping the landscape is amazing anyway and the view of the Ararat or even other mounts nearby is breathtaking.
Inside the monastery there is a church, a small building where thay cooked the lavash, the place where Saint Gregory was kept captive and some building I guess are for the use of the church. Fortunately we could attend to a service. The church is very small and has two chambers communicated through a big arch. In the first there are two tables where the believers light thin yellow candles, there were a couple of men taking the short ones and the rests with the bare hands, and one of them had a great moustache, bigger than Dali´s. In hte other chamber the action took place, a small but fabulous sounding choir sang almost all the way while the priest, the altar boy and another man where in a stage performing different parts of the ceremony. There was a curtain closing and opening every time. The three wore shiny embroidered gowns.
Out again in the fresh air a crowd of teenagers, dressed up like for a party, black and white only but everything shiny, very shiny, very synthetic fabrics. All of them wore a rosette bow in their chests made from flowers, laces and ribbons. The girls wore lots of make up and high hairstyles. They are the kids who finished High School, this celebration is named ´The last drink´ but apparently they don´t drink but they just eat a lot and after that they dance...Looking at the Ararat I asked where the border was, and the answer was pointing just at the foot of the small mountain the monastery is, ¨that´s a dead zone¨.
Out again in the fresh air a crowd of teenagers, dressed up like for a party, black and white only but everything shiny, very shiny, very synthetic fabrics. All of them wore a rosette bow in their chests made from flowers, laces and ribbons. The girls wore lots of make up and high hairstyles. They are the kids who finished High School, this celebration is named ´The last drink´ but apparently they don´t drink but they just eat a lot and after that they dance...Looking at the Ararat I asked where the border was, and the answer was pointing just at the foot of the small mountain the monastery is, ¨that´s a dead zone¨.
Behind the dead zone there was the Arax river and the Ararat mount, two sacred sites. In 1915 the Armenian people were separated between western Armenia belonged to the Ottoman Empire while Eastern belonged to the Russian Empire. With the I World War the turks used the liability of the armenians to ally with their brothers in the Russian Empire as an excuse to do an ethnic cleansing, 1.5 million people is suppoused to be killed or have left to starve in the dessert. Armenia was a country again in 1918 but the Ararat and the Arax river remain in the hands of the turks.
I have to confess that even being an atheist, it´s easy to understand the religious feeling the Ararat produces. I´m sorry for the photos but it´s the best I could do. Going down a little there was a kind of balcony with a roof, a sink and a strange metal table. There were some dots in the floor, ¨that´s blood, they do sacrifices here¨. If thay have something to be grateful for they do ¨Matagh¨, there are 2 ways to do it. One is by sacrificing the animal, previous blessing from the priest, and after dead the animal is given to 6 families as food. The second is by putting some salt in the mouth of a bird and free it. We visit some of the other peaks nearby, there are some beautiful wild flowers and lots of different colours of stones.
It was already lunch time so we head for the city again, on the sides of the road, they were selling cherrys, but instead of putting them to a bag they tied them up with a thread to a thicker one. The Armenian are a bread eater people. They have they sacred bread ¨lavash¨wich is a very thin bread baked in the walls of a toneer dug in the floor. They eat everything putting it into the bread and rolling it. Thay also have avery nice selection of herbs they eat straight from the branch, tarragon, purple basil, parsley, dill, and some others I don´t know the name. The food was quite nice, simple but tasty.
Then we visited the arch in honour to Yeghishe Charents an armenian poet, who was executed by the Stalin regime. This arch frames one of the most beautiful sights of the Ararat. Being a Sunday there was a school trip. Abunch of colorful kids who stand in order and started to sing the national song with such a strong spirit that some of the armenians
with us started to sing as well. On the way back, it started to rain with sun. The biggest, strongest and most beautiful rainbow I´ve ever seen. Heartbraking, that beautiful it was.
A couple of days later I learn that it was in the Ararat where Noah landed after the flood. He made a sacrifice to ask God not to flood the Earth again and He set a rainbow as a sign of the commitment.
