Arts & Culture

Once an agricultural settlement, tidily inscribed into the picturesque mountain landscape, Dastakert was remade by the Soviet state into a site of copper-molybdenum extractivism. That project failed. What happened to the city?

“A murderer could get amnesty, but not people like me. Bribery was considered the worst thing, although during Brezhnev's time bribery was everywhere, widespread and first of all in his own system…”

Although it was initially created to teach mathematical concepts 50 years ago, today, people have turned the Rubik’s Cube into a competitive sport called speedcubing. Armenia is now part of that world and holds several records.

Yerevan’s Christian heritage has usually been overshadowed because of its proximity to the Holy See of Ejmiatsin. The first accounts about churches in Yerevan are from records dating back to the Third Church Council of Dvin in 607 AD.

The 2007 discovery of a 6,000-year-old winery in a cave in the Vayots Dzor region was an invitation for Armenians to rediscover their ancient wine-making traditions. Armenia’s once-forgotten wine culture began to reemerge and take on new forms.

With the recent discovery of Turkey's first female professional studio photographer Mariam Shahinian, a group of women are inspired to work together to try to decipher this page of her story left in the shadows.

Today, there are ongoing excavations of archaeological sites throughout Armenia, including the excavation at the site of the ancient Armenian capital of Dvin. Despite the country’s huge archeological potential, specialists in the field often face numerous barriers.

There’s a new generation of artists, innovators and entrepreneurs that are writing a new story. One that goes beyond the classical interpretation of art, and dares to explore and combine different mediums at the intersection of art and entrepreneurship.

Writers and thinkers from Armenia and the diaspora are now linked, writes Tigran Yegavian, and argues that this rapprochement is indispensable for the liberation of Armenian thought.

A peephole view into the kaleidoscopic distortions of other people’s lives where human interaction is set in ways foreign to you and distant from you yet in your city where the “hero” is your friend. A true, but not a real story from the ninth floor, in building 9a, in the Ninth District, the door without the peephole.