Armenia

Armenia adopted Christianity in 301 AD and built its monasteries into the mountain landscape with a permanence that has outlasted every empire that subsequently tried to remove them. Geghard, Noravank, Tatev - each sits in a gorge or on a ridge as if placed there by someone who understood that the landscape was already sacred and the building should acknowledge that. Yerevan, the pink-stone capital, is a city of cafes and cognac and a diaspora culture that returns each summer and brings money, nostalgia and argument in equal measure. The genocide of 1915 is present in the national memory in a way that shapes everything, and any honest account of the country must begin with that.

Our guide is being written from the ground up, with the time this place deserves.

We are still gathering the notes that make a guide worth keeping: monastery circuit routes, Yerevan's brandy distilleries, Ararat valley villages and the lavash bakeries where the bread comes out of a clay oven in sheets that cool before you can stop eating them.