Armenia - The Land Before Time

Once a grand empire, Armenia’s attractions are steeped in history and traditions, discovers Srinath Perur.

- Srinath Perur

They say the first tourist in Armenia was Noah. A deluge of the sort you might find in a Mumbai monsoon had wiped out life on earth, and the only survivors, human and animal, were on Noah’s zoo-boat, which came to rest on mountains known as Ararat. That Ararat, the Armenians are sure, is the gently sloping, twin-peaked, snow-topped mountain that forms the stately backdrop to their low-rise capital city Yerevan, and is the geographical totem around which the nation pulls together.

Except, except—what the tourist guides call “Biblical Mount Ararat” is not even in Armenia anymore. It’s some forty kilometres across the border in neighbouring Turkey, a constant reminder that the Armenia that was once a grand empire stretching from the Caspian to the Mediterranean is now whittled down to a tiny land-locked country in the Caucasus. When this group of a half-dozen junketing journalists lands in Yerevan to experience its tourist prospects, Ararat isn’t visible because the day isn’t clear enough, and when guides continue to wave in the direction of nothing at all for the next couple of days, the more investigative-minded among us begin to wonder if some elaborate geological conspiracy is afoot.