The Vernissage, the local artisans market.
The National History Museum
A 5000 year old shoe!
A very well laid out museum.
A wooden chariot that survived the ravages of time.
An excellent guide and a beautiful ancient door.
Books in the Matenadaran's Manuscript Collection.
Definitely one of a kind.
An early map of the world as they knew it.
Armenian Genocide Memoria
Our guide in the Genocide Museum at Tsitsernakaberd.
The Memorial and eternal flame.
Jordan and the group.
Traditional musicians and dancers.
Jordan with his new t-shirt and bag.
Wednesday, May 21. Jordan’s birthday
Today we toured three museums in one day. Museums are not really my thing and we’ve seen a few this trip that were pretty basic, but, today’s were all excellent and very interesting and or depressing. But first we visited Vernissage, the local arts and crafts market. There were lots of interesting souvenir type things to buy but I don’t need stuff or have a place to put it, so I just. Then we started our museum tour. First up was The National History Museum where we had an excellent female guide who gave us a succinct one hour tour of the history of Armenia from the bronze age up to the Middle Ages. The museum was beautiful, well laid out and had an abundance of important relics, which was impressive because previous empires had plundered them, and the Russians had stolen many artifacts to put in their own museums. The museum was built on Republic Square which was built in the 1940s in a traditional Armenian architectural style. In Yerevan, most buildings comprise a pink shade of "tuff" stone quarried locally. This is the most prominent feature of Yerevan's otherwise utilitarian Soviet architecture and is unique to Armenia. Next up was the Matenadaran's Manuscript Collection, which is a museum and institute dedicated to the collection, protection, restoration and study of written and printed documents, ancient maps, texts and books from Armenia, as well as Transcaucasia, Asia Minor and many Middle Eastern and European countries. The archives preserve over 100,000 documents of the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries: various deeds, decrees, treaties and letters, which contain vast material on the political and socio-economic history of Armenia and neighbouring countries. The museum made me think of two things: the music industry and car industry talk about limited editions and when looking at these ancient documents it was obvious that many of them were one offs or very limited in number because they were handwritten before the invention of paper or the printing press. And although some were written on animal skins, others were composed on early examples of paper, which was invented in China and was traded along the Silk Roads to other parts of the world. Most were written by monks when the general public was largely illiterate. Then we had lunch at an city square where John and I ate our snacks and basked in the warm sunshine while people watched. The Armenian Genocide Memorial and Museum at Tsitsernakaberd ("Swallow Castle"), was next up. The memorial sits on the site of an Iron Age fortress, all above-ground traces of which seem to have disappeared. The museum's testimony to the 1915 destruction of the Armenian communities of Eastern Anatolia is moving, and the monument itself is austere but powerful. The spire symbolizes the Eastern and Western branches of the Armenian people. There we had another excellent museum guide who related to us the unbelievable, horrific and depressing history of the genocide committed by the Muslim Ottoman Empire (the Turks) against the Christian Armenians. This was a well documented effort by them to eradicate the Armenians. The Muslim Ottomans, the dominant group deemed Armenians and other Christians and Jews to be ‘infidels’ thus relegating them to an inferior status. In total millions of Armenians were massacred, displaced or relocated. All of this happened from the 1890’s through the First World War and which helped to hide the events from the world. There were death marches into the Syrian desert and forced conversion to Islam for many women and children. It is yet another horrible example of man’s inhumanity to man based on religious intolerance. Many countried including Turkey refuse to acknowledge the genocide to this day. Canada has and also accepted several hundred orphans who were housed on a farm near Georgetown. Joe Biden was the first American president to acknowlege the genocide. Many countries will not because of political or economic ties to Turkey. In scope and brutality it was not dissimilar to the Nazis treatment of the Jews. There was an illuminating quote by Adolf Hitler who said when justifying the Holocaust: who remembers the Armenians? We were all saddened by the presentation and were reflective as we walked around the Memorial and its eternal flame that overlooks Yerevan. After that we were taken back to the hotel for a rest (which John, Jordan and I used to make use of the pool) before reconvening for dinner at a local restaurant to celebrate both our last dinner together and Jordan’s 34th birthday. The restaurant gave Jordan a bottle of wine. Sherril and Pauline had bought an Armenian t-shirt and a really nice bag (to replace his blue Walmart bag that the group thought was tacky) on behalf of the group. Jordan was tickled and we had a good dinner with cake while we were entertained by a small band of local musicians, dancers and singers. Most of us got up and danced for one number before we called it a night and headed back to the hotel.