Eating a meal of fresh fish, drinking local wine and apricot brandy, and looking across Lake Sevan after attempting and failing to climb a high staircase up a mountainside to reach an ancient church was one of the happiest moments of my first and only visit so far to Armenia in 2019.
Fascinated by the world’s first Christian nation (AD 301) since my teens, the music, culture, food, and, of course, the religion were what captivated me. It was also the peculiar and centuries-long suffering of the people, culminating in the world’s first declared genocide against the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Orthodox populations, perpetrated by Turkey between 1915 and 1917.
With a diaspora in almost every country in the world, this little Christian nation has, somewhat like the Jews, been destined to experience the pain of exile, persecution, and being at the mercy of greater powers and global forces, almost since its conversion to Christianity.
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