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Georgia and Armenia: a spiritual journey By Peter Hughes 7 Feb 2014 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/georgia/10623968/Georgia-and-Armenia-a-spiritual-journey.html http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02815/armenia-ararat_2815019b.jpg For the people who live there, the upheavals in the Middle East have been disastrous. But for travellers they have also placed many of the region’s great archaeological sites out of bounds, leaving big blanks in the atlas of cultural tours. Yet one site’s quarantine is another’s discovery, and holidaymakers in need of their annual history fix are casting around for new lands and new epochs for their edification. It was in that prospecting spirit that I went to Transcaucasia and the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Georgia. They were two countries that hitherto had not loomed large on my list of places to go. I was wrong. There are 300yd of no man’s land at the Bagratashen-Sadakhlo border crossing. A no man’s bridge spans a no man’s river and carries a trickle of fleetingly stateless trucks – no man’s transport. Two of us were on foot. An old lady dressed in black shuffled into Armenia. I was trundling my suitcase in the opposite direction, north into Georgia. Paradoxically, few places could be more distinctive than the countries we were swapping. Or different. http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02815/Armenia-BNXYAA_2815016c.jpg photo of the 7th Century Odzun Church in Debed Canyon I had been driven to the border through the bosky gorge of the River Debed, whose steep sides were deep enough to be in shadow in the middle of the day. The river teased the road, appearing first on one side and then the other. But the road itself was so badly potholed that drivers wove between craters. Then suddenly we were confronted by an abandoned factory. In such a sylvan scene it came as a shock. I had come to expect dilapidation in Armenia’s towns, whose edges were frayed in dereliction. Once-vigorous state-owned factories now looked like scrapyards. Clapped-out vehicles were littered around buildings of blackened concrete . Yerevan, the capital, was the same. It’s a grey, utilitarian city, except for Republic Square, formerly Lenin Square. More oval than square, it’s ringed by ceremonious neoclassical buildings faced in tufa stone, pink and mottled like mortadella sausage. Among them is the History Museum of Armenia. According to my guides, the triumphs in Armenia’s history owed as much to low cunning as to high command. In 1918 they duped the Turks about the size of their army, and in the Seventies they conned the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev into sanctioning the Yerevan metro. Under Moscow’s diktat, cities had to have a population of a million to qualify for an underground. Yerevan was half that size, but the Armenians contrived a big traffic jam to persuade the old goat otherwise. In the History Museum another guide launched into what was to become a familiar chorus. Standing beside a map of “historical Armenia”, she pointed to the lands the nation had lost, first to the Ottomans and Persians and then to Russia. “This country is one tenth the size it used to be,” she said resignedly, before moving to a Bronze Age leather shoe, the world’s oldest. More significant was a fifth-century Bible, whose illuminated pages shone as fresh as wet paint. Armenia was the first country to adopt Christianity as its official religion. That was in 301, almost within touching distance of the crucifixion. To this day the true glories of Armenia are spiritual. I visited 10 monasteries and churches in three days, the earliest dating from the fourth century. The newest was the least typical, not least because it had seats. In the Orthodox Church worshippers normally stand. Yerevan’s cathedral of St Gregory the Illuminator also has more windows than older churches. Consecrated in 2001 to celebrate 1,700 years of Christianity, it feels more auditorium than cathedral. Relics of St Gregory, who converted the country, are kept beneath an imported Baroque panoply. We drove south from Yerevan through a valley of scruffy agriculture; a shepherd chivvied his sheep down the road; watchtowers staked out the frontier with Turkey. At the monastery of Khor Virap there should have been a view of Mount Ararat across the border, but it was cloaked in cloud. The site’s attraction now is the rock pit, down a 27-step ladder, where St Gregory was imprisoned for 13 years in 288. Outside, boys were taking money to release doves, aka homing pigeons. Another Armenian ruse. West of the capital, at Echmiadzin, Mass was being sung in the cathedral. Nine priests, two in black hoods, glided before the high altar to a mystical choreography. Their gutsy plainsong swirled around the domes. A woman approached me and spoke in Armenian. Apparently I was being ticked off for crossing my hands behind my back. Echmiadzin has been at the heart of Armenia’s religion since the fourth century. In elaborate silver-gilt cases in the cathedral museum, there are claimed to be not only splinters from Noah’s Ark and the True Cross but the heavy iron head of the spear that stabbed Christ at Calvary. The thrill of Armenia’s churches comes not so much from their ancient masonry or antiquities but from their energy as fervent power plants, steeped in the certainties and rituals of the faith they have kept for more than 1,000 years. At Geghard monastery, a Unesco World Heritage site, two churches have been cut into rock. A monk billowed in, enveloped in a cloud of incense and irritation. He swung his rattling censer with the urgency of one fumigating the place against a dangerous outbreak of doubt. This article continues into Georgia, the rest is about Georgia: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/georgia/10623968/Georgia-and-Armenia-a-spiritual-journey.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00716/025546f4-f4b6-11e3-_716998c.jpg LAST DAMES OF THE RAJ The Times, UK June 16 2014 Violet Smith, the Duchess of Sudder Street, who has run the hotel since 1936 by Robin Pagnamenta, Calcutta "I'm Armenian," says Violet Smith in a crisp English accent -- but her hotel looks as British as they come. Inside a grand old Georgian mansion on Calcutta's down-at-heel Sudder Street, guests at the Fairlawn hotel eat, drink and sleep amid a dazzling display of British memorabilia. Beneath the whirring ceiling fans, union jack tea-towels and photos of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge jostle for wall space with commemorative plates of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and signed letters of thanks from Felicity Kendal, a regular guest. Mrs Smith, who at 94 has been running the 18-room Fairlawn since 1936, is the last of a vanishing breed. "I'm the only one left," she says wistfully, seated amid the pot plants on her apple-green porch. "It was back in the 1970s that most of the last Europeans left Calcutta. Sometimes I feel a bit lost - but sometimes I don't feel lost at all. I've had a good life. I'm very happy." Mrs Smith, who was born in 1920 in Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh, moved as a child to Calcutta, where she grew up and married an English army officer three years before India gained independence. Today she presides over one of the last tiny shreds of Britain's once mighty Indian empire. "It was my mother who left me the hotel," she says. "She bought it from two English ladies, but it was a rundown old shack. Back then, Calcutta was a beautiful city - full of traditions. It was very social, lots of parties, lots of clubs. Now it's completely different." Back in its 19th and early 20th-century heyday, Sudder Street was home to wealthy British, Armenian and Jewish families, merchants who prospered trading tea, textiles and opium with China. Today, their former mansions are crumbling and the lanes that surround them are the domain of drug pushers and the homeless. The Fairlawn battles on, in part a testament to Mrs Smith's dogged determination and in part because its eccentricities have become an attraction in their own right. "I won't give up," she says, half smiling. "The staff look after me like my own family." Over the years, plenty of influential people have passed through the Fairlawn's grand portico and its chipped marble floored rooms. "Mother Teresa came to bless the hotel," she says. "She was a very nice lady." Patrick Swayze and Michael Palin visited while shooting films, she adds. India's third biggest city, with more than 14 million people, Calcutta has been in perpetual decline for more than a century, when Britain shifted its imperial capital to Delhi in 1911. It suffered a further blow at partition in 1947, when the creation of Eastern Pakistan cleaved the city's hinterland of Bengal - robbing its once busy factories of raw materials, such as jute, which were grown mainly across the border. Ever since, the city has become synonymous with poverty - a reputation enhanced by millions of Bangladeshi refugees who streamed in during the 1970s to escape a bloody civil war. Mrs Smith's parents were Armenians who, like many of their countrymen, fled their homeland to India to escape the Turkish genocide in 1915. "They came all the way by land - through Kabul and Afghanistan," she says. She became a British citizen through marriage in 1944. While most of her family are now in England - including her daughter Jenny, who lives in Somerset, the Duchess of Sudder Street, as Violet is known, clearly has no plans to return. "England is a beautiful country but I could never live that life - playing bridge with Mrs Brown one day and tennis the next. That's not my life - it's too insipid, too plastic. Here I get on with everyone on the street and I'm very respected. All day long I'm surrounded by people . . . I love Calcutta." http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/asia/article4119951.ece

aren't these can's and could's and may's tiring already? where's the beef??? where are the special tax incentives for these sectors? where are the government and private grants for r&d? where is the line of investors who can't wait to be the first ones to pour money into the next start-up from "technopark"? where is the culture of hard work? where is the superfast wan throughout the country? where are the f'ing COMPUTERS in public school classrooms (and I'm not talking about the written-off junk from last century that the shitbrain ministers so proudly beg from overseas corporations)??? any country can becoming anything... what ARE we becoming???

1- Not true. What happened is that they made new buildings in Yerevan, fast constructed and mostly by concert cement walls and not by stones as they used to build, then invited people from rural areas of Armenia to come and live in Yerevan in order to raise the capitals' population to one million. Both Yerevan and the rural areas were harmed because of this faulty maneuver. But the one-line metro was build mostly for as emergency-shelter. 2-Not so Peter Hughes! some are homing pigeons but mostly they are not. Pigeons are cheap there in rural parts and not expensive as in England.

CZECH JOURNALIST REBUFFS AZERI MISINFORMATION PanARMENIAN.Net 10.03.2010 /PanARMENIAN.Net/ Azerbaijanis organized "exhibition" at the Lidice-Memorial, which was called the worst mockery of the Lidice victims by the Check journalist Dana Mazalova. The "exhibition" at the Lidice-Memorial was aimed to spread misinformation about events in Khojalu. Azerbaijanis tried to present the Czech village of Lidice , destroyed by the Nazis, and the Azerbaijani town of Khodjalu as twin towns. The exhibition displayed "photographs" allegedly shot by civilian and military journalist Chingiz Mustafayev, the author of the famous cover of the Khojalu tragedy. None of the photographs has been made by Mustafaev, Dana Mazalova , well-known Czech journalist told a news conference in Yerevan jointly held with Ara Saghatelyan, Director of the Public Relations and Information Office of Armenian President. Dana Mazalova is an eyewitness of those events, she was covering the hostilities in Karabakh. "Unfortunately, the Czech authorities did not check what the Azerbaijanis had said or shown. We together with my Czech colleagues have decided to respond to the black PR of Azerbaijan. The only person who can do it - it's me, because I have seen all the raw materials, which Chingiz Mustafayev made," Dana Mazalova said. According to her, on the photographs, presented by the Azeri, naked bodies of men are shown, but the photos by Mustafaev featured only people in cloths. After Mustafaev discovered the bodies of people, he carried some of them and when he returned for the rest, the corpses had been already mutilated and scalped, she said. The photos by Mustafaev featured only people in cloths, she stressed. According to the Check journalist, a video, shot by Mustafayev shows that dead people are lying near Aghdam and one can see the single moving person in the Azerbaijani uniform, not even reacting to the helicopter above. She said, that the "exhibition" is the worst mockery of the Lidice victims. The corridor between Armenia and Azerbaijan was open, there is factual evidence, Ara Saghatelyan stressed. The interview of the former Azerbaijani President Ayaz Mutalibov to Dana Mazalova in 1992 is another evidence to that. Ayaz Mutalibov particularly said: "According to survived Khojalu dwellers, everything was organized for my resignation". He said, he does not believe that Armenians ever might be involved in such fascist actions. "One can assume that some people were interested in focusing everything on my person. If I say that it is the fault of the Azerbaijani opposition.... The corridor to leave was left by the Armenians. Why should they shoot then? Especially in the territory close to the Aghdam, which had enough forces to go out and help people or simply agree over civilians leaving? This was the practice all the time ". Saghatelyan also reported that in late March a film about the Sumgait events will be screened, which will show the unique shots filmed by Russia's specialists.