Thinking back to our holiday in the Caucasus

I have been wondering, thinking more or less non-stop, and dreaming as well, how to round up our extraordinary fortnight beyond the Black Sea and on the boundary between Europe and Asia.  We went knowing so little, and we have found out so much about these extraordinary small countries in the mountainous triangle between the Russian, Turkish and Iranian great powers.

We visited Armenia and Georgia, for only a week each, and could hardly have contemplated visiting Azerbaijan which is the third of the trio because its relations with Armenia are so poor.  Indeed, on a trip north and wesst around Armenia we were advised to avoid the road near the western border in case of snipers.  Since our return we have reflected as much on the shared history of the countries we visited as on the differences which struck us most forcibly during our visit.

It was only as we started to read good guidebooks (we'd especially recommend the Bradt Guide to Armenia by Deirdre Holding, and the Georgia companion by Tim Burford (Bradt also) is not bad either), and then discovered a wonderful history and contemporary survey The Caucasus: an introduction by Thomas de Waal, that we began to understand the interwoven complexities of this fascinating area.

The Genocide Memorial in Yerevan

Armenia, our first port of call and now a landlocked country of only 3+ million people, was perhaps historically the most significant, having for centuries stretched from the eastern Mediterranean through Turkey across almost the whole of the area now divided between Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan.  Its current identity is marked by loss - loss of territory to the Turks (who now claim the sacred Mount Ararat once the centre of the Armenian highlands from which the ethnic group originates), loss of people to the awful genocide of the early 20th century, and loss of stability in the face of war (still smouldering with Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorny Karabach) and of natural disaster in the shape of earthquakes, since the area is on a geological fault line.   One town, Spitak, the size of Lunel was almost destroyed in 1988 and most of its inhabitants killed.  The damage was still all too evident, with temporary homes in containers and railway carriages, as we travelled through the area.

Our second week in Georgia was primarily to meet again our friends Leo and Marika, whom we'd hosted in Wirksworth in the early 2000s.  We added organised tours to fill our time during the week when they had to work.  We had a quaint but comfortable hotel in the old town of Tblisi, whence we could walk around the centre and visit museums and churches, and even attend a marionette show in the charming puppet theatre (in Georgian but with English surtitles, a very entertaining folk tale that ended up with the principal characters in Paris!).

Pirosmani's Doctor on a donkey

Karen Hakobyan's instruments

Highlights of our visit included artistic visits to the beautiful small museum in Yerevan dedicated to the well-known film director Sergei Parjanov - we loved it and went back to take in more detail before leaving Armenia - and the beautiful small gallery of the artist Niko Pirosmani in Signagi.  We also met Karen Hakobyan, a maker of traditional musical instruments including the duduk, in Yerevan - a real inspiration, and I have an alto shvi, a traditional fipple flute, as a lasting memento.  The instruments are made of stained apricot wood, the traditional material.

The separate identities of the two countries were really only crystallised under Tsarist and particularly Soviet influence, one effect of which was to precipitate huge population shifts to create 3 ethnically distinct countries (it would have been diffficult if not impossible to visit Azerbaijan even if we had had time).  I read that at one time in the 19th century almost no ethnic Armenians lived in present-day Armenia, huge numbers residing in what is now Iran and many also living in Georgia (our Armenian driver Ashot, for example, was brought up in Tblisi).

But communist rule (and particularly the longs shadows of Stalin and Beria) served to sow distrust between ethnic groups which separated like oil and water.  Armenia now has a population 98% ethnically Armenian, and although Tblisi has a more cosmopolitan feel (with a mosque where Shia and Sunni worship together and Christian churches of all the various traditions), there is a feeling of bravado and of Georgian national pride as strong in its way as the Armenian one.

The distrust, and the story of the south Caucasus, revolves round ethnic and cultural minorities, not only in Nagorny Kharabakh where de facto Armenian control has left a seemingly permanent impasse between the opposed positions of Azerbaijan and Armenia that have resisted repeated international conferences all over the world and which makes any reconciliation between Armenia and Turkey even more difficult than the genocide left it, but in the north of Georgia where two autonomous regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia,, have been set up with Russian support.  The history of these two areas is long and complicated, but it has left most Georgians with a deep distrust of Russia and a strong preference for territorial integrity.  This in turn means they support Azerbaijan in claiming back Nagorny Kharabakh which sets Georgia at odds with Armenia, although luckily the antipathy is not extgreme so you can still travel as we did from one to the other, and Armenian commerce has access to the Black sea through the southern province of Georgia where there is still a high Armenian population that has resisted ethnic cleansing.

Traditional bread-making in Garni, Armenia

Two final things for now.  First food and drink.  We had excellent food throughout, with lots of fresh fruits, vegetables and salads particularly in Armenia and some lovely soups in Georgia as well as the ubiquitous and stomach-lining khachapuri, variations on warm flat bread filled with cheese, one delicious variant of which has an egg lightly poached on top.  The Armenian wine industry is less developed than the Georgian but both use indigenous grape varieities to good effect, particulalry the red Areni (centred round a village of that name in the south) in Armenia and some good dry whites in Georgia.  But Georgia also prides itself on good sweet red and white wines made from late-picked grapes.  And then there is Armenian brandy, reputedly Churchill's favourite tipple, and the ubiquitous vodka which testifies to the strength of the Soviet influence.

Drink at the Botanic Gardens, Tblisi

Roadside food stall in Tblisi old town

Wine tasting at Château Mukhrani west of Tblisi

Second, Stalin.  An odd note to finish on, maybe, and our Georgian friends doubted if we really needed to visit the museum in Gori which he himself established.  The little town still retains his statue in hte centre, and his childhoold house is preserved under a kind of huge bus shelter.  He adopted the last Tsar's railway carriage to get around, more or less without modification.  But we were helped by a suitably irreverent English-speaking guide, himself a native of Gori.  Above all this was a reminder (in a world where Brexit and Trump remind us how near the surface divisive extremism can be) that the fragile free countries we visited are there partly as a result of Stalin who, for better or worse, permitted the development of separate states with separate identities, and partly despite the cruel bloodshed that has surrounded them throughout their history and virtually until the present.

View over Tblisi to the mountains north-west of the city

Perhaps the most powerful influences that have shaped them and allowed them to survive and develop, though, are the mountains - the High Caucasus to the north which so hampered easy Russian access to the southern countries, the mountains between Turkey and Armenia which while sacred to the latter are also a brake on easy passage, and the mountains within the countries which have allowed separatist enclaves to survive.  It also makes for lovely scenery for us tourists, even if there is a risk of the early snow we ran into twice in our fortnight.

The larger Mount Ararat with Khor Virap monastery in the foreground

Mount Ararat from the 7th century circular cathedral of Zvartnots south of Yerevan