Letter from Yerevan: The tragedy of Armenia

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Editor's note: Some years ago, Kanye West, touring Armenia with his then wife Kim Kardashian, decided to do a concert by Swan Lake, a shallow pond in the centre of Yerevan. Midway through his impromptu performance, electrified by the energy of the crowd, he dived into the pool. A handful of entrepreneurial Armenians immediately bottled the water, sacralized by contact with Kanye, and put it for sale on the internet. “I called it holy water,” a young computer engineer in Yerevan told me. “Americans paid 200 dollars for it.” Armenia is awash with nostalgia for the days when their tiny republic, having grown accustomed to drawing distinguished visitors from the West, appeared poised to reclaim its ancient status as a centre of commerce and culture on the intersection of Europe and Asia. But the war with Azerbaijan in 2020, culminating in defeat and the loss of the ethnically Armenian territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, has psychologically debilitated the world’s oldest Christian state. Baku, the capital of its oil-rich rival, has blossomed into a facsimile of Dubai on the Caspian coast. Armenia, for all its …