With its glorious mountains, idyllic villages and spectacular ancient monasteries, Armenia is a place of rare beauty. But this landlocked country in the Caucasus remains something of an “enigma”, said Tim Moore in the Financial Times, receiving far fewer visitors than, for instance, neighbouring Georgia.
It is “geographically Asian” but “geopolitically European”, and tends to surprise newcomers with a sense of “pervasive otherness” – for example in its unique alphabet, which consists of 38 curly letters. The first country to make Christianity its state religion (in AD301), it has endured much “tragedy and suffering” at the hands of imperial powers, most famously in the genocide of 1915-17, when roughly a million Armenians were murdered by the Ottoman Turks.
I explored the northern province of Lori with The Slow Cyclist, which specialises in e-bike tours of “remote” places. From Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, we drove to Gyumri, the country’s second city, where many tsarist-era townhouses have been restored in recent years. From there, we crossed into Lori, a region of “steep slopes and deep gorges”, with peaks rising to 3,196 metres. Our sturdy off-road e-bikes proved equal to the territory, carrying us nimbly between villages where, in late September, the pomegranate and apricot trees were “laden” with fruit and the front yards “ablaze” with roses and marigolds. Our nights were spent in pleasant lodgings, and each day we’d arrive at lunchtime at some orchard or dell to find another feast of fabulous local food laid out for us under the trees on tables decked in crisp white linen.
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We ate one of these lunches beside the 7th-century monastery of Hnevank – a sublime ruin with a soaring steeple in a vast canyon ringed with cliffs. Yet more “dumbfounding” was the monastery of Bardzrakash, perched halfway up the side of a gorge, the intricate carvings on its walls still “sharp and clear” almost 800 years after its abandonment during the Mongol invasion.
