Dilapidated minivans called marshrutkas are the preferred mode of travel in the Caucuses. They are cheap and fast and will take you across town, across the country, even across international borders. The downside is that they can get crowded. To make matters worse, Armenians have a strange fear of drafts, believing that a single gust virtually guarantees pneumonia. As a result, all of the windows are closed tight in a marshrutka, which makes it like a rolling sauna. This morning I took a marshrutka an hour out of town to Echmiadzin, the "Vatican" of the Armenian Apostolic Faith. Founded in 303 CE by Gregory the Illuminator, the Church celebrated its 1700-year birthday a few years ago, making it older than the Coptic churches, the Orthodox churches, and certainly older than Roman Catholicism. The theological differences between
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