“Armenian soul knows no defeat”

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“Nowadays, to climb Mount Ararat” – “OUR mountain,” she didn’t need to say; it’s on the Armenian national emblem – “we have to drive through Georgia and ask Turkey for permission!” Anna sat down, the acid in her words almost palpable around the tour bus. The border with Turkey has remained closed for over a hundred years. Earlier she’d pointed to the current border, a barbed-wire lined road below us, the no-man’s land beyond farmed by Armenians with special permission. “You see those houses over there? They’re in Turkey. They belong to Kurds. They used to belong to Armenian people. Until the genocide. Then the Turkish government gave them to the Kurds.”

The genocide is understandably an open wound here, the more painful because of the international community’s failure comprehensively to recognise the extermination and deportation through death marches across the desert, forced labour and conscription to the Eastern Front without weapons – the actual and effective killing – of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by the dying Ottoman Empire and its successor governments as genocide. In particular, Turkey refuses to do so. At least the Holocaust has that recognition.

But Armenia hankers after more than that, I concluded after ten days in the country. Perhaps a legacy of the centuries it has spent under the control of others, Persian, Arab, Byzantine, Mongol, Turk and Russian, it looks back to the time when it was an empire itself. At its full extent, the Armenian empire stretched, albeit briefly, from the Caspian to the Mediterranean, from close to the old Georgian capital of Mtskheta to the south of Tyre in modern-day Lebanon. But its final and most long-running manifestation under the Arsacid dynasty (approximately 12-428 AD), Mets Hayq (literally, the Great Armenian Motherland), included territory that is now in southeastern Turkey, northern Syria, northwestern Iran, southern Georgia, and southern and western Azerbaijan. Even when Anna took us to Lake Sevan, a high-altitude lake that covers 10% of modern-day Armenia, she referred to “it being one the three great lakes of the Armenian Highland”, though “now Lake Van is in Turkey and Lake Urmia is in Iran” as if the latter two are somehow simply out on loan.

And it wasn’t just Anna (or, to be accurate, both Annas – our Armenia-wide tour guide and my day-trip-near-Yerevan guide shared a name) giving me this impression. The National Democratic Alliance’s ongoing anti-government protest in Yerevan’s Freedom Square shows a version of the country that has never, in fact, existed. After a little research (the History Museum of Armenia having been no help at all), I realised that the NDA is using the outline of “Wilsonian Armenia”, the borders proposed by Woodrow Wilson’s State Department in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres of August 1920. But, in the maelstrom of disintegrating empires and scrambles for power, the treaty was never ratified. Less than five months’ later, an eruption of hostilities between Turkey and Armenia ended in a second treaty, the Treaty of Alexandropol, which required Armenia to renounce the earlier terms. But the day before Armenia had purported to sign the treaty, the Armenian government had transferred power to Soviet Russia so the signature was not valid. Soon, however, Soviet Russia was forced to agree similar terms with Turkey in the Treaties of Moscow and of Kars. Yet it is the Treaty of Sèvres/Wilsonian version which the NDA is holding out as the country’s true borders. This is what it thinks “the Russian-Turkish puppet government”, to quote its publicity, should be reclaiming.

The more common version is the generously delineated piece of land contiguous with Armenia’s internationally recognised southeastern border displayed on fridge magnets and other tourist tat. This is Artsakh, what the West erroneously calls “Nagorno-Karabakh”. The Stalin-created Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast had voted for independence from Azerbaijan in 1989, its population being then approximately 75% Armenian. This, not surprisingly, triggered a war between the separatists supported by Armenia, and the USSR-supported Azerbaijan. After the fall of the USSR, Turkey stepped in to aid its long-term ally. The line of control put in place in 1994 at the end of that war would form the borders of the republic of Artsakh until 2020, and included not only Karabakh but also other regions of Azerbaijan and the Lachin Corridor, the skinny stretch of land between Karabakh and the Armenian border. Artsakh may have been ostensibly independent during this period, but it was heavily dependent upon and integrated with the Motherland.

Now, since the 24-hour strike by Azerbaijan in September, Artsakh has emptied of Armenians, approximately 105,000 pouring across the border in a couple of weeks. It’s thought that only a handful remain: those who physically could not leave. The official government position is that this issue is spent: Artsakh is no more. Azerbaijan doesn’t take anything as a given, however, and it’s adopting a belt’n’braces approach, destroying the area’s ancient monasteries and repurposing its churches as mosques. Rumour has it that they’re even sending photos of the desecration to the Armenian government.

Relations between the two will not be settled for a good time to come. A team of a hundred UN observers has been patrolling the Armenian/Azerbaijani border since Armenia lodged complaints about its neighbour’s behaviour several years’ ago – and this goes further than the Artsakh/Karabakh conflict. The Azerbaijanis have taken control of a road in the south of Armenia in order to try and establish a land connection with its own exclave of Nakhchivan which is sandwiched between Armenia and Iran. They’re not helping their case by seeking to levy customs duties on passing traffic and interrupting lucrative trade routes.

I found it hard to escape the agonies of the recent conflict and the dull ache of historic atrocities. I saw graffitied portraits on the side of two high-rise blocks of flats near where I was staying, and asked Anna who they were. I’d assumed one to be a footballer from his garb, and the other perhaps a musician or writer. No, she texted back in answer to my question, they’re “killed soldiers”. “If they are on a given building it means they lived there.”

Commemoration, yes, but living the past every single day? On the wall of the hilltop Victory Park is a militaristic graffito, and I asked her to explain its motto. “Armenian soul knows no defeat,” she told me. But, she went on, this wasn’t just any old military picture; this was a copy of a photograph from the 2020 war that had gone viral at the time. The soldier, Albert, aged only 20, had become the face of the war for Armenia. Then he was killed. After the war, Anna told me, some grieving mothers became pregnant again, even though many were in their late 40s. There was even a government campaign to encourage this “re-population”. And some boy-babies were given their brother’s name.

“Albert’s mom got a new Albert now.”

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