To start the day I woke up rather groggily to make my way to Hyur travel agency not far from where I'm staying. My exquisite hosts continue to outdo themselves with my lodging by finding then in turn booking a tour of two of Armenia's most beautiful sites of antiquity. Garni and Greghard.
The tour bus left at 10 o'clock and it wasn't too long of bumbling down Armenian roadways out of the city of Yerevan that we stopped to soak in the views of the Ararat Plain. Miles and miles unfolded before me and I was quite anxious to begin taking the pictures I wanted to. I made my way to the cusp of the plateau only to realize I had forgotten my memory card for my camera back in Yerevan. But soon we were back on the road to Garni and I was too absorbed in the history our tour guide was relaying to kick myself too much. When we arrived at Garni, we toured the grounds and our guide explained every little piece of its history to us. Garni was originally an ancient fortification that was believed to be impregnable, and given its placement, I could see that to be the case. It is sitting almost on a peninsula jetting out into an incredibly steep valley below. An enormous wall separates the grounds from the rest of the world. Right as you entered the site you are greeted by a large slab of rock propped up. The inscription on the rock was in ancient Roman and told of a gift from the Emperor Nero to the people of Armenia. He was repaying a debt he felt the Roman Empire owed them, a debt of some 1,000,000+ gold coins from Rome's treasury. We walked on to the large temple at Garni, the only remaining Pagan temple in Armenia. Somehow, this ancient, beautifully decorated temple had survived close to two thousand years. It has remained standing through countless attacks from enemies, the creation of Armenia as the first Christian state, Soviet rise and fall and earthquakes that crumbled the structures around it. I was blown away by the beauty of Garni nestled in its quiet fortitude standing on her rock in the valley. But I had no idea what I was in store for.
From Garni our bus set out for Geghard, a beautiful church carved into the rock of hill in the 4th century CE. From the outside of Geghard all you can see is a wall and a beautiful valley with a river flowing below you. But if you look closely at the rock face as you walk up to the monastery, you can see the beauty truly begin to unfold. Nestled away and almost hidden from view are little rooms carved into the wall of the canyon. Windows and elaborate, interlacing designs weathered by time adorn the walls. As you walk through the main gate of the enclosure a beautiful church stands before you. I say church and it is a church in stature, but in it's presence it feels more like a cathedral. Half of it is built standing out from the rocks and the other half of the church is carved out of the rock. There are a number of various cambers to the church. In one a skylight casts rays of sun through the light dust of a beautifully carved round room. It would be easy to think this room is just that until you hear someone sing in it. I was lucky enough to hear a group of girls singing old Armenian songs to the small crowd gathered in the room. I cannot do it justice, the acoustics of the room transformed these four teenage girls from America on vacation into a choir of angels that I believe heaven would struggle to match. The sound filled the room, your ears, your soul. It lifted you up to the point you were almost accidentally standing on your tiptoes. I could only part with the room when the singing stopped. In another chamber a spring from the rock empties itself into a small pool, people travel from all over to visit this spring for its spiritual significance and a line formed to only stick your hand out and take a sip from it. Everyone was so quite and peaceful. Waiting their turn to taste this pure water. The silence was only broken by the steady stream, flowing down to the pool, along a small channel that ran the length of the chamber and darting back underground. One of the final rooms was the actual church. Candles lined three of the four walls and their lights flickered and danced along the columns, in and out of the carvings only scattering to the darkness where light could not bend to keep up.
After leaving Geghart (which was quite a chore in itself) we made our way to a small orchard. Apricots and cherry trees littered the grounds while women worked to bake a special native bread called Lavash. The bread is much like pita bread except it is cooked along the walls of an oven dug into the ground. Dough is laid out on these things quite similar to pillows then pushed with the most graceful force alongside the walls of the oven. I enjoyed a lunch of lavash wrapped around goat cheese and various fresh spices still on the stems. After our meal I wandered the orchard sampling some of the fruit. I must have eaten all the cherries off of one of the trees they were so delicious and juicy. You could pull on the fruit and there would be a little pop of their deep red juice as it separated from the stem. They tasted so fantastic I didn't even want to spit the pits out.
Once I returned to the city I took a GG (the equivalent of an Uber) out to the AYB School where my host Sylvia works. She showed me the elementary school and then took me up the street to the facility where the middle and high schools are located. Astounding cannot even begin to describe how it was. The design of the buildings was quite nice. A modern look nestled just outside some of the oldest buildings in Yerevan. But that wasn't what sold it for me. Walking up there was a tube that snaked from the outside wall of the third floor down to the second. It was a slide. And this wasn't even the only slide students can use to get to one floor from another. There was another indoors. If I was a staff member there I'm not sure I'd be on time to my own class if I had unlimited access to slides that take you between floors. This isn't even where the magic stopped though. Every classroom is as close to state of the art as you can get. A beautiful theatre that at the top opened into the art studio, a robotics lab where students never use kits to build what's in their head, a fabrication lab where students work to create planes, 3D models and even award winning sumo wrestling robots. It is truly as Sylvia described it "The Google of schools". The vision of the school was something I believe a great many school systems couldn't have even if they were looking through the Hubble telescope.
The last building I visited today was home to the headquarters of The Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU). It is a five-story structure with a roof terrace right in downtown Yerevan. The first three floors all are designed on the outside to mimic the design of old government buildings. Beautiful and colonial in a dark grey stone. But the top two floors spring to life out of the grey with two floors of almost pure glass. Once inside any trace of the old architecture is lost and it gives way to an incredibly open space with so much natural light and air if it wasn't for the hazy blue steps next to the reception desk you think you'd walked right back outside. Every floor had seemed to be the model of what an office could be. Open doors and walls of glass, everyone was accessible and it seemed eager to be so as well. To top the day off I got to sit on a screening of an old 70's spy movie, The Serpent. French, British, American and Russian spies all struggle to uncover the truth. It seemed like there would be no resolution, spare for one Armenian lab technician who found his way to the truth just in time.