Where and why Armenia?

First reaction is silence ... lingering silence ... then the question, "Where exactly is Armenia?"

Khor Virap monastery and Mt Ararat

Armenia nestled in one of the oldest and tumultuous areas of the world: a hotbed of religious, historical and cultural grudges dating back centuries.

Squeezed in between modern day Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan and Georgia, little Armenia has been divided up between different powers and its collective memory is stained with the blood of millions.

This devoutly Christian country teeters at the edge of both Europe and The East, a geographical crossroads of history that has witnessed and borne the brunt of millions of armies and travellers in motion; an ongoing parade of marauders, merchants and monks since the days of the Urarti tribes.

Armenia is a land of abandoned stone monasteries and open sky; an enormous rolling space and grassy steppe where my mind can escape that overbearing crush of city life.

Armenia celebrates a Christian faith dating back to 301AD and in a miracle of faith the country has withstood invasions by the famous armies of history: Byzantines, rampaging Persians, Mongol hordes and their much despised modern enemy, the Ottoman Empire.

The Turks claimed much of historical Armenian territory for their own, including Mt Ararat, and purged the Armenians in the little-recognised but undoubtedly first genocide of the twentieth century.

24 April 1915: while the world's eyes are turned to WWI battlefields such as Gallipoli, the Young Turks took the chance to 'solve' their 'Armenia Question'. Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army were executed as were boys and men in villages that Turkey now deemed their territory. In Constantinople Armenian intellecutals were murdered. Women, children, the elderly and infirm were deported to deserts of Syria.

Few survived.

The ghosts of 1.5 million will certainly hang over the history that I will hear. It's an interesting time as the Armenian genocide is back on the international agenda and Turkey is finally being taken to task by world media and the EU.