Armenia, Travels and Studies (Volume 1 of 2) The Russian Provinces

At five o'clock in the afternoon of the 4th of October we set out for Edgmiatsin. It is a drive of about thirteen miles across the plain. Our luggage was consigned to a waggon o...

In Europe we may find examples of mediæval towns from which the tide of life has long since receded, and which have been preserved almost intact to the present day. Less fortune...

On four different occasions, both in summer and in winter, I have sailed along the southern shore of the Black Sea almost from one extremity to the other; yet I do not remember...

The solid block of territory over which Russia now rules on the tableland of Armenia is neither a new acquisition nor the fruit of a single conquest. At the commencement of the...

In the present chapter I shall invite my reader to make good his advantage over the traveller, and to realise, before proceeding further with the journey, the true meaning and w...

Next morning the sun had already risen as I let myself down through the open casement of the window and dropped into the garden among the dry brushwood encumbering its sandy flo...

Discussing the projects of our future travel, I was reminded by Colonel Tarasoff that we must not fail to make a stay in one of the villages of Russian peasants which were situa...

Retracing our steps down the side of the cone, we soon regained the streaming sunlight. I called a halt, and we rested on some rocks, embedded in snow. Our next task was to sear...

Where else except in London will you see clever driving? Is not England the only country where you can trust your coachman to shave his corners and keep his team in hand? With f...

Oriental cities--and Erivan is still essentially Oriental--may perhaps be said to be built upon two planes. There is the plane of the street, and there is the plane of the flat...

Astishat--Mount Karke, in face of the great range, Taurus--with the immediate surroundings of the present cloister of Surb Karapet (see Vol. II. p. 177). The view which I shall...

It had never been our intention to enter Armenia by the well-beaten avenue of Trebizond and Erzerum. The season was advanced; our first objective was Ararat; and it appeared dou...

October 14.--We left the cloister at half-past eight, our little party of five persons including the Armenian cook. We had hired in the district ten miserable ponies, of which f...

While Ani, the deserted stronghold and capital on the banks of the Arpa, appeals to the patriotism of Armenians, her neighbour Kars, that fortress at once of ancient and modern...

Erivan is a town of gardens in which a network of irrigation channels preserves from early spring into late autumn the perfection of the foliage. In the heart of the business qu...

The distance by road between Akhaltsykh and Akhalkalaki is 66 versts, or nearly 44 miles. The post divides the journey into four stages, of which the shortest is 9, the longest...

[146] It is given at length by Agathangelus, and may be found in that portion of the treatise to which I shall hereafter allude as "the Acts" (see note on p. 291, infra). There...

During our stay at Alexandropol it had required no small effort to detach our minds from the paramount object with which they were filled. Every day, every hour, which separated...

The long and lofty barrier of the Ararat system affords a natural partition of the surface of the Armenian highlands, and, corresponding with the frontier between the Russian an...

The city and district of Alexandropol are included in the administrative division of the Government of Erivan. Yet they are separated from the capital and territory of that name...

At Akhalkalaki we had reached a country which is peopled in large preponderance by the Armenian race. The town is the centre of an administrative division (ouezde), which is dep...

September 25.--We passed the morning upon the mound, in the little open summer-house, face to face with the airy snowfields which we had scaled to their topmost vaulting, with t...

To-night we are to sleep on the banks of the Arpa, by the waters which swell the flood of the Araxes and sweep the base of Ararat! This was the reflection which lightened the mo...

[398] According to Sandwith (op. cit. p. 286) no less than 6300 Russians were buried by the besieged after the grand assault on Takhmas. Loris Melikoff informed the Daily News C...

East of the town of Akhalkalaki, which almost touches the long train of the western slope, a bold mass of mountain features the landscape, square-seated on the floor of the plat...

Ararat from Aralykh Frontispiece Trebizond from above the Head of the Western Ravine To face page 12 Trebizond: Hagia Sophia 24 Trebizond: Façade of Hagia Sophia on the South 25...

in comparatively remote times into a Christian martyr. A local cult of this nature seems to have attached to Herakles in certain countries; therefore it might quite well have be...