I Came for Two Weeks.
I Stayed for Nine Months.

My name is Saifullo Yunusov. I grew up in Dushanbe — a city of wide Soviet boulevards, mulberry trees, and mountains that seem to breathe. Tajikistan gave me an instinct for landscape and a love of cultures that sit at the crossroads of ancient and modern. What it could not give me was Armenia. That I had to find for myself.

I first heard about Armenia from a professor at the Tajik National University, who described Yerevan as "the oldest new city on earth" — a place where Bronze Age fortresses and third-wave coffee shops occupy the same street. That single sentence lodged itself somewhere in my mind for two years before I finally bought a one-way ticket to Zvartnots in January 2023, with a vague plan to stay for a fortnight, write a few notes, and move on.

"Armenia does not reveal itself quickly. It asks for your time, your patience, and eventually your heart."

Within the first week, I was sitting in a farmhouse kitchen in the Debed Canyon, eating freshly baked lavash and listening to a woman in her seventies explain how her grandfather had survived the 1915 massacres by walking barefoot through the mountains into what is now Syria. That conversation — the combination of sorrow, resilience, and extraordinary hospitality — undid my two-week plan entirely.

Over the following nine months, I travelled every region of the country: from the high alpine villages of Lori and Tavush in the north, dense with monasteries hidden in beech forests, to the wind-scoured plateaus of Syunik in the south, where roads cut through gorges so dramatic they feel like the edges of the known world. I slept in guesthouses, family homes, a converted Soviet sanatorium, and on at least three occasions, in my car when passes closed early with snow. I ate whatever was put in front of me — tolma, harissa, manti, khorovats — and drank more than my fair share of homemade mulberry vodka.

My travel philosophy, if I can call it that, is simple: go slow, go deep, talk to everyone. I am not a tourist who arrives at a monastery, photographs it, and moves on. I want to know who built it, who still prays there, who walks three hours from their village to light a candle on a saint's day. That kind of knowledge does not come from a guidebook. It comes from showing up and being willing to sit with someone for as long as they are willing to talk.

I came to Armenia knowing almost nothing about its language. I left with a working knowledge of Armenian greetings, the ability to bargain in a village market, and a list of phone numbers pressed into my hand by people who called me a friend before they called me a guest. That asymmetry — being given so much more than you bring — is the fundamental experience of travelling in this country.

This blog is my attempt to put that experience into words worth reading. I write not as an expert on Armenia — I am not one — but as an outsider who fell genuinely, irreversibly in love with it. Every story here is true. Every person mentioned gave their permission. Every photograph was taken with gratitude.

I returned to Dushanbe in October 2023 with a full notebook, an over-weight luggage bag, and an already-forming plan to go back. Armenia has a way of doing that to people.