The Tuff Republic

Armenia does the same thing to Soviet modernism that it has done to everything else that ever arrived here: it cuts it out of tuff.

Tuff is compacted volcanic ash, and this country is made of the stuff — pink, orange, grey-lilac — soft enough to saw into blocks and hard enough that the churches built from it in the seventh century are still standing. So when the Soviet Union turned up with a plan for what a modern republic should look like, Armenia built the plan and faced it in the same stone it had been cutting for fourteen hundred years. The modernism here doesn’t look like the modernism anywhere else in the union. Same shapes, warmer material, and in August light the whole thing glows.

Why radials

Every other route in this journal is a line. This one is a wheel.

Armenia is small and Yerevan sits in the middle of it, so nothing worth driving to is more than about two hours away, and every road comes back to the same city because that is what the roads were built to do. You take one bed for four nights and go out and back: north-west on the first day, north-east on the second, then the city itself, then the airport. Under three hundred kilometres in total, and you never pack a bag twice.

I have done trips where the driving was the point. This isn’t one, and it is better for it.

What’s on it

The north-west day carries the two best things on the route. A Yakovlev Yak-40 standing on concrete blocks on a shelf of black basalt above a gorge, nowhere near an airport, with nothing at all to stop you climbing onto the wing. And then, an hour further up and a great deal higher, fifty-four metres of mirror telescope lying in a fold of Mount Aragats: four thousand panels, optically perfect, switched off since 2012 and waiting for somebody to decide it is worth paying for. That one is not a ruin. It is an instrument on hold, and it is the reason I went to Armenia at all.

The north-east day gives you the second aircraft — a Tupolev parked on a bluff above a reservoir and rigged wing to wing with festoon lighting, because somebody turned it into somewhere to have a party — and then Lake Sevan at nineteen hundred metres, where an entire resort complex stands on the grass above the water having never been finished, never been glazed, and never had a single guest.

Then the city, which is the part people skip and the part this route is actually arguing about. And then Zvartnots on the way out, where the control tower is a concrete flying saucer on a stalk, because in the 1970s that is what an airport was for.

Four days, one bed, and a country that faced the future in pink stone.

Side stops

Four of the places on this route are smaller than an entry and don’t appear in the journal’s index at all: a half-working film studio with a row of dead cars parked underneath it, a residential block long enough to close a street and completely full, a metro station built to carry daylight underground, and the old terminal at the airport. I gave one of them an afternoon. One I photographed over a railing on the way to a plane.

They’re on the map with everything else. Whether they’re worth your time is a decision I would rather you made than have me make it for you by leaving them out.

How to use this

Every stop here is somewhere you can stand and look from public ground. This is a route past these buildings, not a way into them — and on this particular route that matters more than usual, because half of it is in use: a studio with people working in it, a station with trains in it, a block with families in it, an airport with aircraft on it.

The map below has each stop, where to leave the car, and what you can see from where you leave it. The drive above is broken into four days that each start and end in the same city, with honest times — meaning what it actually takes, including the hour you spend walking up a mountain that no routing engine will ever tell you about.