There is a space larger than and, in fact, containing the Republic of Armenia called the “Armenian Highlands,” and from this we can draw two instructive conclusions: the historical territory of Armenia was more extensive than the current one, and, more relevantly for climate, almost all Armenian land is quite elevated. Armenia’s largest body of water, Lake Sevan (so big that together with its basin it takes up about one-sixth of Armenia’s territory and so economically important that it accounts for about 90% of Armenia’s fish caught annually), is as a direct result of this generally great elevation one of the highest-altitude lakes in Eurasia. If you go on one of the hikes Armenians love to engage in themselves, you will be struck by how many flowers there are and the brilliance and variety of their colors. If you venture higher still, you may notice much of the greenery disappearing and your environs getting considerably rockier; inadvertently, you could shift from “hiking” to “mountain climbing.” Try to watch your step and appreciate the scenery at once!

If you are at all near an Armenian village on a hike, you will likely encounter a shepherd and his flock grazing. Armenians are famed for their hospitality, so you should not be one bit surprised to receive an invitation from that shepherd to his village. The homes in the village are built of locally sourced materials, superficially humble but upliftingly suffused with the affection that could make any house feel like “home.” In that village, you will see livestock roaming fairly freely at times, being herded effectively at others. Many of those animals will be sheep, which are at the center of a new development in rural Armenia: a “Sheep Shearing Festival” bringing together the best at their craft from various rural localities in the country for a grand gathering– to which visitors from urban Armenia and even other nations are cordially invited.

In these high villages, in other rural areas, and on larger-scale farms integrating industrial techniques, you will note Armenia’s purposeful management of agriculture. Grains, fruits, and vegetables are all cultivated responsibly. Armenia’s fragrant national fruit, the apricot (by no coincidence whatsoever, classified under the Latinized scientific name Prunus armeniaca, “Armenian plum”), is so widespread that it takes little effort to locate it in the wild, and it is perfectly safe to pluck the fruit right off the branch and put it right in the mouth. Armenians would be loath, however, to put wild grapes right in their mouths, no matter how appetizing they may look, because doing so prior to priestly intervention would violate their long-held late summer tradition “Grape Blessing Day.” On this occasion, a priest blesses grapes and thereby makes them fair game for both direct consumption and use in viticulture. Armenians are likewise known for producing– and consuming– pomegranates, but please rest assured that Armenia is otherwise not such a “seedy” place.

Armenia is far from being the most water-rich country on Earth, but it is reasonably rich in water resources when considering how little precipitation it gets per annum. It has numerous rivers, including the mighty Hrazdan flowing through Yerevan. The main indicator of its relative water wealth is the superabundance of pulpulaks, public water fountains often fed by mountain springs. The overwhelming majority of foreign visitors to Armenia should be accustomed to seeing fewer public water fountains in the streets and having to turn them on to use them. Water arcs continually from pulpulaks, so people just have to get in front of them and start drinking. It takes just a little bit of practice to master how to hold a bottle so that you can fill it up with the arcing water. Most Armenians have become experts at this.

When you look for a contemporary famous person of Armenian descent, Serj Tankian separates himself from the pack because he is just so loud– in a good way! Heavy metal is not everyone’s cup of tea and it has fallen in popularity since the 80s and 90s, but Serj Tankian’s System of a Down has endured into the present from its 1994 founding in what was then a much more crowded field for heavy metal bands. Tankian shows virtuosity at multitasking in the many hats he wears for his band, being its lead vocalist, primary lyricist, keyboardist, and occasional rhythm guitarist. Because Tankian is the group’s lead vocalist, it is justifiable to call him the face of System of a Down, and he makes no effort to hide or deny that his face is Armenian. The Levant has long hosted a large Armenian community, with their members generally being labeled “Syrian Armenians,” and Tankian hails from a Beiruti family of them. As proof of how much he has done to advance Armenia and how long he has been at it, it was already over a decade ago that he was awarded a medal by the Armenian Prime Minister for raising awareness of the Armenian Genocide. That is one topic more people of all ethnicities should try to be “louder” about, in ways all their own if heavy metal does not float their boats.

It is a testament to how special a person must be if he or she can be referred to by a mononym– a one-word name– and immediately be known practically everywhere in the world. That continues to be the case for the Armenian-American Cher, who, though at this point she is decades past her heyday, is still an icon. She burst onto the scene over 50 years ago as the fresh-faced wife of Sonny Bono, part of a pop and entertainment duo, but she “believed in life after love” enough that after breaking up with him she went on to even greater success. She crossed over to acting, and her film Moonstruck is arguably the best romantic comedy of all time. To those of you who don’t agree: “Snap out of it!”

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, the Armenian-American Kim Kardashian (from the Los Angeles area where so many Armenians now reside) might have posted yet another picture to Instagram, and over one million people might have dropped everything else to see it, as if it were something special. For Kim Kardashian is a maven of turning perception into reality. Some people do not understand the appeal, shaking their heads at her as someone “famous for being famous” and lacking any discernible talent remotely commensurate with possessing a fraction of her wealth. If someone objects to this viewpoint on the grounds that Kim is, after all, “pretty,” it is appropriate to pay Armenia as a nation a compliment in saying that beauties in the league of Kim Kardashian and roughly resembling her are a dime a dozen in Armenia, though not one of them is nearly as heralded. How, then, did she become so notable? Kim’s genius lies in her marketing, leading so many admirers to an inflated opinion of her other qualities. She has built a veritable powerhouse brand around herself and much of her family. With the way the world is currently evolving, “influencers” on social media may soon become much more numerous and impactful, and Kim Kardashian may go down in history as the first of their kind.

Though architecture is the visual art for which Armenia is known best, the Armenians produced a stellar painter in Ivan Aivazovsky. He belonged to the Armenian community on Crimea under the Russian Empire, and he was baptized there under a name making his Armenian origins much more apparent, Hovhannes Aivazian. He must have spent hours staring at and sketching the waters right off the Black Sea peninsula where he grew up, since he developed into a supremely skilled “marine artist,” painting sea scenes of all sorts that, based on the time when they were produced and the strong emotion they evinced and evoked, fit neatly into the “Romantic” style. He won admiration for his artworks in the Russian Empire and in the West of which the Russian Empire was only occasionally acknowledged as a member. The case of Ivan Aivazovsky makes for an interesting comparison with that of Ivan Isakov, an ethnic Armenian who became Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union. Present-day Armenia is landlocked, and Armenians historically have not been closely tied to seafaring, but Aivazovsky and Isakov prove that Armenians who grow up near the sea and develop their talents in and around it can become recognized masters of the water.

Henrikh Mkhitaryan is an Armenian sportsman of the first order. As of this writing, he plays for Inter Milan, a highly successful and valuable Italian club famed for its “ultras,” diehard fans just as likely to boo one of their own team’s overpaid, underperforming players out of the stadium as they are to start a wild brawl with supporters of the other side. If Mkhitaryan has earned the approval of such fans, he must be pulling his weight! The other European clubs that have paid dearly for the services of this gifted footballer include Bundesliga’s Borussia Dortmund and the EPL’s Manchester United and Arsenal, so the list of teams he has played for looks rather like the list of the most valuable football clubs on Earth. Even Armenians will concede that the big paydays and plaudits for playing football at the club level are not to be found in Armenia, but in international play Henrikh Mkhitaryan has proudly represented his homeland. He currently stands as Armenia’s all-time top goalscorer in international matches. In 2022, he retired from the Armenian national team, which is understandable given his club commitments and that 33 officially counts as “old” in elite football circles. In 10 or 20 years, you could see him stalking the sidelines as the man in charge of Armenia’s national team, and if he proves to be as adroit a manager as a player the team could do something amazing.

Andre Agassi is another accomplished athlete of Armenian heritage (his father was one of the many Armenians born in Iran). He was an electrifying tennis player for almost all of the 90s and into the 2000s. He ascended to the world No. 1 rank in the sport, won eight major championships, and even won an Olympic gold medal in men’s tennis for the United States. His play and personality combined to make him a magnet for endorsement deals; he partnered with Nike for almost 20 years. It must be admitted that scores of men fantasize about being sports heroes and possessing oodles of money as means to the end of marrying a supermodel, and Agassi achieved that, too, tying the knot with Brooke Shields. Away from all the daydreams, adversity, as they say, is what introduces a man to himself, and it was Agassi’s response to adversity which perhaps makes him most noteworthy. After reaching a No. 1 ranking in 1995, personal problems and uninspired play saw him sink to No. 141 (i.e., beyond the point of total obscurity) just two years later. Around this same time, critics mocked him for his trademark long hair falling out altogether, which rendered him bald. He rose again to No. 1 in the world in 1999 and was a regular winner for a few years thereafter, until the undefeated Father Time forced him into retirement.

Charles Aznavour was an ethnic Armenian born in France about a decade after the Armenian Genocide. France even before the genocide was an attractive destination for Armenians in search of a refresh for their lives, with Armenians generally finding “liberté, égalité, fraternité” to be more than just an empty motto in France, and Aznavour acquired fame and fortune in this setting, being claimed by France as enthusiastically– and as rightly– as by Armenia. His sales speak for themselves: Aznavour had over 60 records go gold or platinum in his illustrious career. He was sometimes spoken of as “France’s Frank Sinatra,” but that might not be the best appellation outside the realm of music, since Aznavour was even more noted for humanitarianism than “Old Blue Eyes.” Aznavour did his part to contain World War II’s tragic analogue to World War I’s Armenian Genocide, since he sheltered Jewish people from Nazi occupiers and French collaborators, and much later in life he sprang into action to aid in the wake of Armenia’s devastating 1988 earthquake. The people he touched through his music and deeds could be found worldwide, as evidenced by his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the fact his final performance took place in Osaka, Japan just months before his 2018 passing.

One of the running themes on this list is that many of the most famous Armenians were not born in politically Armenian territory, and that theme continues with Aram Khachaturian. He was born and raised next to Armenia in a land that actually has an Armenian-majority region, Georgia. He showed musical talent from a young age, and he received formal training in the composing and conducting of classical music. His work is structurally superior in a way that transcends borders, politics, and such, so he was able to stay in the good graces of Soviet authorities for almost the entirety of his career, in an era when censorship and even purges were commonplace. Armenia’s “national anthem” when it was a “Soviet socialist republic” was composed by Khachaturian, but when Armenia was again fully independent it opted to replace this hymn with an anthem that would have been too nationalistic to pass muster with apparatchiks. Khachaturian deserves respect for skillfully navigating an environment in which being an artist was dangerous and for glorifying Armenia within the strict limits imposed.

While Gyumri itself was once named after V.I. Lenin (in Soviet times, it was called “Leninakan”), Yerevan used to have “Lenin Square” as its heart. The square remains at Yerevan’s center, but it has been renamed “Republic Square,” with its gigantic statue of the mastermind behind the USSR having long ago been torn down. Much impressive Soviet architecture continues to rim the square, but it is truly the presence of throngs of Armenians in the here and now that brings the place to life. The square can seem boring early in the morning when just about no one is around, but its vibrancy increases exponentially as the day progresses and climaxes at 9 PM, at which time its fountains begin “singing.” Water sprays approximately in tune with the music and in tandem with lights. It jumps impressively into the air and, sometimes by design, sometimes due to the vagaries of the wind, can end up wetting spectators who stand too close. And, since it is no exaggeration to state that Republic Square is the very center of the very center of Armenia, it should come as no surprise that it lies in close proximity to many establishments at which people can wet their whistles or whet their appetites.

Lenin was not the only Soviet “big man” who was turned into a “huge man” in statue form to watch over Yerevan, since for over a decade there was a bronze of Stalin high in the hills. Stalin was condemned as a malignantly narcissistic butcher within just a few years of his death, so it was with Soviet state sanction that his statue was torn down and replaced with one more attuned to the specific location: Mother Armenia. With sword in hand, never diverting her gaze from the sprawling Yerevan below, she is simultaneously the personification of Armenia and its guardian. It is only appropriate that she is located within Victory Park, a recreational and educational area commemorating the Soviet Union’s victory in a fight for its life during World War II. Hitler recommended nothing better than servitude for the Slavs, and it is hard to imagine that he had anything more honorific than that in mind for Armenians, so it was only right that the Armenians joined with their “comrades” from the other constituent republics of the USSR and helped beat back what was for them yet another existential threat.

Not far from where Mother Armenia stands (guard), pedestrians visiting Yerevan for the first time may be highly impressed at the art museum in the ritzy “Cascade” neighborhood, since it also stretches high into the sky in an artistically bold display, in a form much like a pyramid. It has hundreds of steps on the outside and gardens on strategically placed levels. If one prefers to travel upward on the inside, he can see various artworks while ascending through a series of escalators. All the way at the top, whether one chooses to climb up using the inside or the outside of the structure, there is a magnificent view of Yerevan, a command center from which one may feel like a lieutenant to Mother Armenia.

In various places in and around Yerevan, on some days much better than others because of weather changes, you can look up and see what has been the most enduring symbol of Armenia: Mount Ararat. This endures today as a symbol of Armenia despite the fact that, by just a handful of miles, it is outside Armenia’s boundaries and within Turkey’s. In pagan times, Armenians imagined that their gods lived up there. In the Bible itself, the holy book of the religion Armenians would end up embracing to replace their paganism, Noah’s Ark is reported to have come to a rest atop Mount Ararat when the waters of the Deluge began to subside. Ararat has two peaks, “Greater Ararat” and “Little Ararat,” and it is to be wondered if any Armenians living centuries ago, when there were two distinct areas with heavy Armenian populations called “Greater Armenia” and “Lesser Armenia,” saw divine consonance between the nature of the mountain peaks and the nature of the Armenian states.

But if you just crane your neck a little bit more and in a slightly different direction you will spy yet another symbol of Yerevan betokening its “protected” status. Erebuni Fortress is in the hills around a residential area of Yerevan, and it is a holdover from the aforementioned pagan times, when Armenian statuary very much resembled that of the Babylonians. To gain access to the hill containing the fortress from the streets of Yerevan, one must pass through a museum containing all sorts of curiosities unearthed from the immediate vicinity. There is no controversy about items in the museum being “stolen” by “imperialists” and “colonizers”; many of the items may come from a time so remote that “Armenia” had not even come into existence yet, but the local inhabitants acknowledge the contents of the museum and the fortress to be as “Armenian” as they are, ultimately. Nor is there any mystery about how the name “Yerevan” came to be; by a series of minor phonological shifts occurring naturally over the course of centuries, “Erebuni” could easily transform into “Yerevan”– and that is exactly what it did.

Any visitor to Yerevan should be sure, firstly, to give his neck a break after looking up so much and, secondly, to venture far from Republic Square. Having done those two things, the visitor is unlikely to come away disappointed, as so many of Yerevan’s copious attractions lie on ground level and away from the very center of the city. It is all the easier to access what Yerevan has on ground level if you temporarily travel underground, since Yerevan has a subway system that was built under Soviet auspices and functions more than adequately in the present. At 100 drams for one ride, the subway is uber-cheap– in a way that Uber isn’t! The Armenian National Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet (just “Opera,” for short) is one building that visitors to Yerevan should be sure to check out, since it is a rounded structure with liveliness and beauty all around it on the outside and it does, naturally, sporadically host breathtaking performances on the inside. Matenadaran is another can’t-miss, a first-class research institution carrying and displaying some of the most ancient manuscripts in the world. Side streets which no commercial guidebook would cover in detail may be, alas, where you have the most fun and learn your most lasting lessons in Yerevan. After all, they hold plenty of local color and host plenty of human drama. They may very well shed the most light on what it means to be “Yerevantsi,” a person from Yerevan.

Yerevan beckons. Once you have answered its call and had your fill of its wonders for the time being, venture beyond the city limits and explore what else Armenia has on offer. Leaving might be the hardest part.