The captivating European country that's still off-radar

Times

a day ago

It's golden hour in the mountain town of Dilijan in Armenia. I have wandered into the steep back streets, which are lined with traditional houses, all wooden fretwork balconies and walls of multi-pane glass, the softening sunshine turning the latter into a more benign variety of disco ball.
Most of these places look picturesquely ramshackle, like something from a fairy tale or Miss Havisham's house. A good number of them may — or may not, it can be difficult to tell — be uninhabited. Like Georgia, from which I have just arrived, the country has been suffering from population decline since declaring independence from Russia in 1991, many young people leaving to work abroad.
The residence I find myself lingering in front of admiringly, however, a pale pink doll's house of a place, is definitely lived in. The building is only just keeping it together but the front garden is immaculately tended, a ravishment of peonies. After a couple of minutes an old man appears from nowhere with a bunch of his flowers and thrusts them into my hand. His wife, I then see, is watching and smiling from a window.
He doesn't speak English. I don't, needless to say, speak Armenian. Thanks to the vagaries of geopolitics we are from different worlds — different eras, almost. His clothes look as ancient as he does; as his house does. Ditto the car parked nearby, a so-called Zap, short for Zaporozhets, a Russian creation which famously, another Armenian later tells me, has a hatch in the floor next to the driver to enable them to fish on a frozen lake without leaving the car. (He also tells me the Zap is execrable. 'Everyone knows the transmission goes after 10,000km, the engine after 30,000.')
It's my first evening in Armenia, the third country stop on a two-week tour of the Caucasus that started in Azerbaijan, moved on to Georgia and will end here. It's been fascinating, this zigzagging between the outer reaches of Asia and Europe respectively, where the influences of the west, of Russia and of the east, are felt slightly differently depending on where you are and who you are talking to. Even our accommodation has fed into the cross-referencing, with Georgia and Armenia consistently offering contemporary boutique hotel experiences, and Azerbaijan a couple of places all too familiar to anyone who travelled during the days of the Soviet Union. Armenia and Azerbaijan share borders with Iran, but despite the hostilities between that country and Israel, there is no Foreign Office advice against travelling to either (though do keep an eye on it).
I have been moving most days for a week and a half so by this point, to be blunt, I am knackered. I have had to force myself to foray out from my hotel. Thank heavens I did. Because here it is, rearing its head unexpectedly, as it tends to do: one of the reasons that I travel. Connection. Otherness turned into oneness. Something — or, as is most often the case, someone — who may be alien to you but reaches out to you. That nameless man and his flowers like miniature ballgowns are spine-tingling stuff.
I would say the same of Armenia more generally. This is a remarkable country, from the beauteous, ever-shifting mountainous landscape that can take you, during the course of a few hours' drive, from Switzerland to Arizona by way of Scotland, to the simple yet delicious food.
What isn't a mountain seems to be a vegetable patch or an orchard, and the fruit — a rainbow of different cherries, black and white mulberries, apricots, peaches, strawberries — is particularly noteworthy. Every meal comes accompanied by a plate piled with fresh herbs and there's a whole world of different dairy products going on. Ask the difference between one yoghurty-looking thing and another (and another!) at breakfast, and you will find yourself there for some time as your interlocutor does their best to explain.
And then, of course, there is the reason the country is famous: its churches, or, to be more precise, its multi-building monastery complexes. I had been blown away by the churches and monasteries of Georgia in the preceding days, which also have towers topped with roofs like witches' hats. But this is something else.
Many of the Georgian interiors still bear magical traces of the rich frescoes that the Russians set out to whitewash away. I loved the seraphims peeping out from behind their six wings at Nekresi, a complex that dates back to as early as the 6th century, making it one of the oldest in the country.
Another artwork that stood out there for me, as fashion director of The Times, was a stone carving that covered an exterior wall of Ananuri, a 17th-century castle complex in a stunning location on rocks above a reservoir. It showed two angels, one barefoot, the other wearing not just shoes but heels. The message, our guide told us, was that everyone is welcome in heaven. The Angel Wears Prada? With a shoe collection such as mine, I am very much here for that.
As for the walk up through wildflower meadows and pine forests to the 14th-century Gergeti Trinity Church, perched on a 2,170m peak, with its mural of a wide-eyed Jesus who looks to be on the hippy trail, and the snow-covered 5,054m Mount Kazbek towering above — that was one of the highlights of the entire trip.
Yet, even so, Armenia. There's something about its churches that puts them, for me, in another league altogether. They aren't about murals but stone carvings, Armenian Christians traditionally believing the razzle-dazzle of paintings to be a distraction from the serious business of prayer. Stone crosses known as khachkars cover the walls inside and out, some intricately carved and integral to the original designs, others seemingly scratched in later, often in rows, like a spiritual take on tally counting.
The necromancy is in part to do with the scale, I think, the juxtapositioning of their petite floorplans with a vertiginous verticality. Somehow you feel as if you are always looking up. Then there's their positioning in (for which read on top of) the landscape, as if decorations on a cake. They seem to have been not so much built as seeded, such is the connection they hold with their environment. It's almost as if, miraculously, they have sprouted up of their own accord.
The 13th-century Noravank, situated at the top of a narrow gorge, is the same red-yellow as the cliffs, and especially breathtaking. But then again so is the grey — and thus more northern European-seeming — Tatev monastery, another cliff-clinger that you access by way of the world's longest nonstop double-track cable car, a spectacular albeit somewhat hair-raising ride.
Allow me just one more monastery before I move on: Geghard, which, because it is so close to the charming, pink-stoned capital of Yerevan, was the only one we went to that was mobbed. Built into the mountain, part-church, part-cave, it had another wonderful stone carving, of a pair of chained-up lions on a lead and an eagle with a lamb in its claws. (Answers on a postcard if anyone can discern a lesson for me in that one.)
It's also where we were lucky enough to bear witness to an impromptu performance of Armenian folk songs by four local singers, their chiaroscuro vocals — if you will allow me to get all synaesthetic for a moment, soaring up into the furthest crannies of the ceiling. The Armenians are rightly proud of their musical traditions, though they talk more about their brandy. The first thing I was told after I had crossed the border from Georgia is that 'Winston Churchill loved Armenian brandy'.
In Georgia, in contrast, it's all about wine, of course. My twentysomething guide told me that everyone still produces their own; that BYO has a very literal meaning when you go to any social gathering; and that his friendship group keeps tabs — in the nicest possible way — on whose is best. (His wine was in at number two, he proffered, after some consideration.) No wonder there are vines crammed into even the tiniest corners in the capital of Tbilisi.
• 15 of the best tours of Georgia
Azerbaijan, on the other hand, is a land of tea drinkers, not to mention of Muslims. (How I love the way a multi-country trip like this allows one endlessly to compare and contrast.) The Azerbaijanis make the British appear to be not that into their brew.
Everywhere we went there were samovars in the street being watched over as if they were small children, albeit ones that puffed away like steam engines. We would see people carrying home little bags of fresh rose petals that they had bought to add to their tea. Often they carried two colours — red and pink — in different bags. We were also introduced to the Azerbaijani take on 'tea and jam', a ritual in which you spoon a syrupy piece of fruit into your mouth, perhaps a medlar or a mulberry or two, and hold it there while you sip your tea. The results are, I can report, lip-smackingly good.
In the pretty city of Sheki, which has a world-class monument of its own in the form of its Khan's Palace, an Islamic masterpiece of intricate wall paintings and stained glass, I witnessed what was clearly an emergency. An entire family had brought their samovar to a metalworker's shop near the market. They encircled it anxiously, as if around a hospital bed, awaiting diagnosis. The collective relief when the man told them he could stop it leaking!
• Read more on Georgia
That market in Sheki was another highlight of our trip. The women were explosions of print, their dresses, aprons and headscarves clashing gloriously. Large numbers of both them and the men sported two or three gold teeth, a status symbol in the Soviet era.
The dried fruit and nut stalls were amazing. One man had six types of walnut and pumpkin seeds that were like nothing I had tasted before, plus at least a dozen different sultanas ranging from palest yellow to darkest black. Then there were the endless jars of pickled vegetables, some of them identifiable, some what might best be described as UFOs, or Unidentified Fermenting Objects. And the women peeling green walnuts so as to turn them into jam.
Some people were selling huge wonky spheres of hand-churned butter — yellow from cow's milk, white from water buffalo's — others great wheels of the local halva, designed to be eaten as you drink your (yup) tea. For which there were endless teapots, samovars, flasks and those curvaceous glasses whose shape, I was told, was originally inspired by the pear.
All this tea worship. It was almost enough to make an Englishwoman feel at home. Someone pass me the rose petals …Anna Murphy was a guest of Wild Frontiers (wildfrontierstravel.com), which has 15 days' all-inclusive from £3,995pp on an Across the Caucasus group tour to Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. A tailormade private trip is from £4,790pp. Fly to Baku and back from Yerevan. For FCO travel advice see gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice