Exploring the Debed Canyon, Armenia

Tbilisi, December 5, 2018

Persimmons drying in the backyard of our B&B in Odzun

It's a wet, cold evening here in Tbilisi, perfect for writing up a blog post.  Just under two weeks ago we had a long weekend here in Georgia for St. George's Day, and were dismissed from school at noon on Thursday, November 22nd.  Terri and I packed up Douglas (our Delica, named after the mountaineer and explorer of the Caucasus Douglas Freshfield).  Our plan was to drive south from Tbilisi to the Armenian border to explore the old churches and dramatic landscape of the Debed Canyon.  I had visited the canyon back in 2009 on my bicycle in the company of my fellow cyclists Adam and Cat, and remembered it fondly.  I thought that Terri would enjoy visiting these monuments to early Christianity in the Caucasus, so by 2:00 pm we were rolling south.

Odzun church catching the last rays of afternoon light

It's not terribly far to the Armenian border from Tbilisi.  We drove the longer but less-travelled bypass around the east side of Tbilisi, then headed south through Marneuli.  The weather was grey, cold and miserable, making for unpleasant, slow driving.  It took us a while to get through the border, but after getting our passports stamped, our car perfunctorily searched and our free Temporary Import Permit issued, we paid 44 lari (about US$ 16) for 10 days of third-party insurance and drove into Armenia.  It was slow going, with much of the highway torn either up for construction or from decades of neglect.  By the time we climbed up a steep series of switchbacks from the bottom of the Debed Canyon up onto a high plateau into Odzun, it was completely dark.  Our first choice of accommodation proved to be closed for renovations, but they directed us to another B&B near the church, Aghasu Tun (Aghasi's house), where we settled in for a couple of nights.  Our hostess, the affable Amalya, cooked us up a great meal and we were in bed early, ready for a full day of sightseeing the next day.

An obelisk outside Odzun church

Ancient inscriptions on the Odzun church

November 23rd dawned grey but not actually raining.  After a hearty breakfast, we walked across to Odzun's church to start our explorations.  It's a big, impressive church, first constructed in the 6th century and reconstructed in the 8th century into the three-naved basilica made of pinkish stone we see today.  The church was locked, but we pottered happily around the grounds, inspecting ancient gravestones and medieval khachkars.  The ground was a jumble of carved stones, adorned with figures of warriors holding swords, and other unmarked rocks, and the entire place felt tremendously ancient.  There is an unusual monument of two tall, thin stone pillars with the figures of saints carved onto their surfaces.  These are allegedly a 6th-century gift from an Indian king, but they look (aside from the saints' halos) more Egyptian in style. 

Three exquisitely carved khachkars outside Ardvi church

The petrified snake turned in Ardvi village

From there we drove a few kilometres south and west to the tiny village of Ardvi and its church.  The setting was magnificent, with high mountains rising to the west and a steep cliff looming to the east.  The church building is fairly old, but the ground around it has much older graves dating, according to signs, back to the 4th century.  The church feels as though it has sprouted organically from the rocky ground around it, and the feeling of having 16 centuries' worth of villagers buried in the surrounding earth was impressive.  Opposite the church is a sill of dark volcanic basalt that is said to be the body of a giant snake who was ravaging the surrounding countryside until the local catholicos (bishop), the Holy Hovhan, intervened and turned the reptile to stone.  Water trickles out of the rock at the point that should be the serpent's navel.  We sat and contemplated the passing of time, with so many generations of local farmers having sowed their crops, grazed their sheep and buried their loved ones in the village.  Once again there were lovely carved khachkar stones (distinctively Armenian monuments with elaborately decorative carving adorning crosses) and gravestones of warriors, and we had the entire place to ourselves.

Ardvi churchyard, with its extensive collection of ancient gravestones

The Holy Hovhan, turner of snakes into stone

We bumped off downhill again after a while under sullen skies, headed for Horomayri, another obscure local sight recommended by Amalya.  We made it to the striking two-toned stone church located on the edge of the precipice which leads down to the Debed River 400 metres below.  Peering cautiously over the edge, we spotted Horomayri Monastery, almost invisible some 80 metres below us, nestled into a protected spot on a narrow sill of flat land.  A long hiking trail led to the monastery from the main road up the escarpment, but from where we were standing it would have required rappelling to reach it.  We were content to look out over the edge and watch griffon vultures soaring past on thermals.

An old gravestone in Ardvi

The strikingly coloured chapel on the cliff edge above Horomayri Monastery

Horomayri Monastery, tucked into the Debed Canyon cliffs

From there we had to descend off the plateau and down into the bottom of the Debed Canyon.  We had no Armenian cash and were in need of a money changer.  The gritty mining town of Alaverdi provided a supply of Armenian dram as well as a grocery store in which we bought Armenian red wine, dried fruits and a couple of bottles of obscure brands of Armenian brandy.  We then found one of the very few restaurants in town for a delicious, inexpensive lunch of khorovats (grilled meat, like Georgian mtsvadi or Russian shashlik).  Alaverdi was still as economically depressed as I remembered it from nine years ago, and the streets were grim and Soviet. 

It was a relief to drive away from the mining infrastructure (the copper mine is currently mothballed) and the drab apartment complexes, heading south towards Kobayr.  We parked the car and hiked up through an almost abandoned village to the ruins of a 12th-century monastery complex that I remembered as being incredibly atmospheric.  It certainly would have been atmospheric except for the workers helping restore the ruins; they were busy chainsawing a tree, making for a very noisy visit.  The monastery was originally Armenian Apostolic, but soon passed into the possession of Georgian Orthodox owners, crossing the religious divide between the Monophysites and the Chalcedonians.  Perhaps the most evocative sight there was a human jawbone that had been unearthed during renovation work; it was sitting atop a fallen column rather like a memento mori in a Renaissance still life.

Memento mori, Kobayr

Kobayr Monastery ruins

Terri and Amalya, our hostess in Odzun

It had started to rain lightly as we descended back to Douglas and drove further south in search of the monastery of St. Grigor.  It took a while to find the correct path, and by the time we had been pointed in the right direction it was raining fairly steadily and light was fading from the sky.  We decided to turn around rather than risk a descent in the dark, leaving St. Grigor for another time.  On the way back into Odzun, we stopped again at the church to see the pink stone come to life in the ghostly light of a cloudy sunset (the rain had stopped briefly).  A second delicious dinner at Aghasu Tun and we were ready for another early night, having discovered that Armenian red wine can't hold a candle to its Georgian counterparts.  As we headed to bed, we spotted the full moon peeking through a gap in the clouds, a harbinger of clearer weather to come.

Our Delica Van lives up to its decal! 

We woke up on Saturday morning to see snow on the hillsides above Odzun

Odzun church in the morning light

Light playing over dark interior, Sanahin

November 24th dawned clear, and on the high hill behind Odzun we could see freshly-fallen snow whitening the sere countryside.  We breakfasted, said goodbye with real affection to Amalya and Aghasi, stopped in at Odzun Church for a picture in sunlight, then descended into the canyon and back to the unlovely streets of Alaverdi.  We got a bit lost following a rogue road sign, but eventually found our way onto the steep road leading up to Sanahin, perched above Alaverdi on the other bank of the Debed.  When I visited 9 years before, Cat and Adam (two Aussie cyclists I was with) and I caught one of the mining cable cars up to Sanahin from downtown Alaverdi.  This time we saw a single cable car dangling unused halfway up, and soon found out that with the copper mine mothballed, the cable car is no longer running.  Sanahin was a slightly more cheerful version of Alaverdi, with the same soulless apartment blocks and dreary streets.  Sanahin Monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was free, both of entrance charges and of other tourists.  We wandered around for a good hour, poking around the sombre interiors of the church buildings.  They were built in the 10th century from basalt stone that has an exceedingly low albedo.  The inner walls are like black holes, absorbing every last ambient photon and leaving my camera gasping for light, even at an extreme ISO setting of 12,800.  It made every shaft of light sneaking in from outside through the rare tiny windows precious, and provided the opportunity for striking photos in the Stygian gloom.

Khachkar in Sanahin

Crosses carved on column in Sanahin

Me with a MiG-21 at the Mikoyan Brothers Museum

Eventually we emerged blinking into the daylight, took a few photos of intricate khachkars and took ourselves off to the 20th century in the form of a museum to the brothers Mikoyan, Anastas and Artem.  Sons of Sanahin, Anastas rose to become the number two man in the Kremlin, behind only Nikita Krushchev; the museum skated lightly over his role in Stalin's great purges of the late 1930s, preferring to highlight his introduction of ice cream to Soviet supermarkets and his involvement in defusing the Cuban missile crisis.  His younger brother was an aeronautical engineer and was the senior half of the design team for the MiG (Mikoyan-i-Gurevich) fighters that were the calling card of the Soviet Air Force and a major export commodity for decades.  Terri and I posed outside a MiG-21 outside the museum.

Wonderful light and carving, Haghpat

Haghpat light and shadow 

Haghpat

From there we traipsed back down into the valley and back up another 350 vertical metres to nearby Haghpat, site of another UNESCO-listed monastery that was very much in Sanahin style:  solid, beautifully carved, with tiny skylights trying their best to illuminate the profound obscurity of the interior.  Again we had the complex entirely to ourselves, and I spent a happy hour seeking out new pools of light to photograph.  We came out to find that rain had returned, and found a restaurant for lunch in a vain attempt to outwait the precipitation.

Fresco on the walls of Akhtala church

Akhtala fresco (of the three Magi?)

It was raining steadily by the time we finished our repast, and continued as we drove north towards Akhtala, the third in our trinity of big-name churches for the day.  Akhtala's copper mines are still working, but the town looked even more economically depressed and spiritually depressing than Alaverdi; maybe it was just the oppressive drizzle.  We wandered inside the high, cavernous church interior to inspect the blue frescoes curiously labeled with Greek inscriptions.  There were Georgian tombstones on the floor as well, adding to the linguistic and cultural mix.  Apparently the Ottoman rulers of this area imported Greek labourers to work in the copper mines two centuries ago and they converted the church for their own worship.  The frescoes were barely visible in the gloaming, but my camera was able to capture far more light than our eyes could, and gave us a much better view of the delicate colours of the paintings.  The ceiling of the central tower is missing, and a temporary modern wooden roof is now leaking badly.  The church caretaker, a wizened former miner named Boris, told us that a new tower and roof are to be built next summer.  Boris had worked for a quarter century operating a jackhammer, and it had aged him prematurely; we were amazed to find that he was younger than Terri, although he looked a good two or three decades older.

Akhtala church

The skies were starting to open as we trudged back to our Delica, so we decided on the spur of the moment to drive back across the border to Georgia.  It wasn't far to the border, and we were definitely going in the correct direction; we were through two sets of customs in twenty minutes, while on the other side the lineup of Armenian cars waiting to leave Georgia stretched back four kilometres.  After stocking up on prodigious amounts of mandarin oranges, dried persimmons, apples and other sundry items sold in huge stands beside the road, we drove on through the rain and darkness until we found a hotel in Marneuli where we stopped, relieved to be out of the rain.

Our "shortcut" to Gardabani

Our plan for the day was to check out a nature reserve to the east, near the town of Gardabani, which had been highly recommended by the National Museum in Tbilisi a few weeks before.  We set off, following our GPS, and rapidly realized that we had made a mistake.  The road turned into a dirt farm track which, given two days of heavy rain, was a muddy, treacherous skating rink of clay.  I hopped out and let Terri (our off-road specialist during Stanley's Travels) drive, but even she had to admit defeat and turn around.  We drove the long way around on paved roads and eventually got to Gardabani, where we followed the GPS towards the reserve.  It was a hellacious place, a vision of post-Soviet, post-industrial apocalyptica.  Clearly there had once been factories, greenhouses and a collective farm where we stood, but the buildings, which would have been in operation only 30 years ago, looked more ruined than Pompeii, Ephesus or Karnak.  It was unspeakably sad as well as hideously ugly, with chunks of concrete, broken glass and abandoned rusting metal hulks everywhere.  When we finally got to the reserve, we couldn't enter since a group of men were hunting.  We gave up, trudged back to the Delica and drove back north, around the sprawling metropolis of Tbilisi, to our house in Dighomi.

Ruined industrial landscape, Gardabani

Destroyed greenhouses in Gardabani

Overall it was a wonderful weekend, Terri's first exposure to Armenia and a return for me after nine years.  The weather was disappointing, but the history, the culture and the interactions with the people we met were fascinating.  As for Gardabani, at least we now know not to waste any more effort trying to spot the birds and animals of the riparian forest there!

Now, after a couple of weekends spent in Tbilisi, we are busy packing up for three weeks of skiing  in various mountainous corners of Georgia.  (At least that's what we hope; Ullr the snow god is not being co-operative so far.)  It will be fascinating to see new corners of this fascinating country.

Pins in the map showing our various explorations around Georgia