Armenian Genocide Museum, Yerevan

A BITTERSWEET RETURN When I first visited Yerevan twenty-three years ago as an impressionable Armenian American teenager, much of the experience passed me by. As upper middle class kids we were guilty of creating a little bubble around ourselves characterised by surf T-shirts, sunglasses, Levi jeans and Sony Walkman’s. We strolled around the ancient churches, temples and monasteries with a detached and uninvolved air, much more concerned with getting our hands on illicit booze, dodging chaperones and sneaking out to nightclubs than we were about absorbing the culture and history of our ... more

Although they can be very jovial indeed when it comes to a party, the Armenians are by and large a fairly melancholy people. There are two main reasons behind this melancholy. The first is that their sacred Mount Ararat, the mountain that symbolises so much of the nation's history, now lies in Turkey and they can only see its magnificent snow-capped peak from behind a closed border. The fact that the border is closed brings me to the second reason for the pervading sadness of Armenians: the tense relationship with Turkey is due to a massive event that few people are aware of. In 1915 over one ... more