The strongest impression from my first day in the city was the sense that only one language was spoken on the streets and everyone looked more or less alike. Armenia is a monoethnic country. According to statistics, over ninety-seven percent of its residents are purebred Armenians. You notice the rare tourists on the streets of Yerevan immediately.
There is no hostility towards visitors, but people keep their distance. The homogeneity of the cityscape was so unusual that I immediately wanted to ask whether anyone besides Armenians lived in Yerevan. It turned out there were small communities of Kurds, Yezidis, Assyrians, Greeks, and Molokans descendants of sectarians deported from Russia in the nineteenth century , but they are closed to contact with outsiders.
None of my Armenian acquaintances had any personal or professional ties with people from these ethnic minorities. The crowds on the streets seemed more diverse to me when I learned to distinguish Iranians from the mainly local tourists. Most of them were quite easy to approach, and so I did dozens of portraits of Iranian women and men during my first few days in Yerevan. Unlike Russia, where people are alienated from each other, mutual support and monitoring is cultivated in Armenian society.
The notion that the Armenian state is one big Armenian family is supported by the government and makes criticizing the authorities problematic. The topic of the Armenian Genocide comes up constantly. The very first poster at the airport compares the Turks to Hitler. Every evening on Northern Avenue, musicians sing songs about Armenian resistance to the Turks from the time of the genocide. Armenians from the large diaspora, who come to Yerevan for the summer, instantly surround the musicians and enthusiastically sing along.
During the Electric Yerevan protests, protesters also sang songs about the genocide. Official Armenia media almost never report news from the neighboring countries of Turkey, Iran, and Azerbaijan. If you walk through downtown Yerevan without peeking into the inner courtyards, you might think that Yerevan, with its desire for glitziness, resembled Moscow. During my first days in the city, I could not figure out where the cheap local fruits and vegetables were to be had.
