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There is a city that, over the past few months, has started appearing more and more often in our distracted everyday vocabulary — the one increasingly shaped by the web, infotainment platforms and algorithms.
That city is Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.
Direct flights from the main European cities are increasing thus allowing the city to enter entering the Western travel imagination.
International attention peaked during the European Political Community summit held on May 4–5, 2026, when Yerevan hosted heads of state and government from 48 European countries, including EU member states as well as representatives from the United Kingdom, Norway, Turkey and Canada.
The summit represented far more than a diplomatic event. Symbolically, it marked Armenia’s attempt — under Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan — to redefine its geopolitical position by moving closer to Europe while gradually distancing itself from Russia’s sphere of influence.
From a Western European perspective, this process may appear understandable, even desirable. Armenia is currently one of the most dynamic and interesting countries in the post-Soviet space: Yerevan is young, safe, culturally vibrant, filled with cafés, bookstores and new creative spaces increasingly speaking the language of contemporary European capitals.
The European Union has announced new strategic investments as well as the deployment of experts tasked with countering Russian propaganda, cyberattacks, hybrid interference and disinformation campaigns ahead of Armenia’s parliamentary elections on June 7, 2026.
Part of the population believes that closer ties with Europe represent a real hope for stability, modernisation and gradual emancipation from historical dependence on Russia.
For others, however, this process of “normalisation” risks becoming something far more painful: the gradual erasure of the collective trauma surrounding Artsakh, and the feeling that historical wounds — including the memory of the Armenian genocide and the deep identity bond with the diaspora — are being archived too quickly in the name of geopolitical stability and the need to “move on”.
Yerevan’s population is strikingly young. You can see it not only in official statistics — the average age is 37 — but also simply by observing its crowded streets, outdoor cafés and groups of young people sitting around the city’s monumental fountains.
It is almost impossible to speak with an Armenian without hearing, at some point, that Armenia was the world’s first Christian nation, that wine was born here — as archaeological discoveries seem to confirm — and that Armenians from the diaspora have left a profound mark on global culture, including contemporary culture.
Some people provide more politically nuanced answers.
Like Anush, who tells me — while sharing a platter of Armenian cheeses in a fashionable restaurant in central Yerevan — that Armenia has recently been ranked among the safest countries in the world by the World Travel Index.
Anush is a frequent traveler, with her husband and daughter, or with her sister Armine, a marketing professional.
Together, they run Miss Morning Armenia, an Instagram page blending entertainment and culture, where they explain Armenian language, habits and cultural nuances, in English, against the luminous backdrop of Yerevan.
Most of their followers are Armenians from the diaspora — a potentially enormous audience considering that while roughly three million Armenians live in Armenia itself, more than twice as many live abroad.
This alone reveals how strong Armenian identity remains even far from the mainland.
Both Anush and Armine strongly believe that closer integration with the European Union will bring benefits not only economically, but culturally and socially as well.
“Our Prime Minister is an honest person,” they tell me, as though honesty in politics were already something revolutionary.
“The alternative is a businessman deeply tied to Russia through both his past and his business interests. Russia fragmented us in the past and is still trying to do it now. It is much easier to control a people when they are divided.”
They are referring to Samvel Karapetyan, oligarch, businessman and leader of the opposition coalition Strong Armenia.
Closely connected to Russia’s gas sector and considered close to Putin’s political circle, Karapetyan owns the Tashir Group as well as Armenia’s main energy company.
At the same time, he is also known as a philanthropist who funded hospitals in Artsakh and Armenia and remains one of the largest financial supporters of the Armenian Apostolic Church.
And in Armenia, religion is not merely spiritual identity: the Armenian Apostolic Church remains deeply intertwined with politics and electoral dynamics.
“Pashinyan is not perfect,” Armine adds. “He makes mistakes like everyone else. But giving up endless wars, accepting painful compromises and openly challenging Russian dependence — even though much of our GDP still relies on Russia — is an act of courage and vision.”
“Pashinyan behaves like a coward, or better, like a defeatist,” says Gegham Stepanyan instead.
Stepanyan is a human rights defender (Ombudsperson) representing displaced people from Artsakh.
He welcomes me with tea and biscuits inside the building of the Permanent Representation of Artsakh in Yerevan that now host what remains of Artsakh’s institutions after the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh and the agreements signed in 2020 and later consolidated after diplomatic negotiations in Granada in 2023.
If pacification is what modern Armenia needs in order to move closer to the West and distance itself from its post-Soviet legacy, the price — according to Stepanyan — is the forced removal of still-open wounds.
“The passive acceptance of humiliation directed at Armenians and Artsakh refugees cannot become the basis for real peace,” he tells me.
“A few days ago, at the end of April 2026, Azerbaijani forces destroyed the Holy Mother of God Cathedral in Stepanakert, an important symbol for Armenian Apostolic Christianity. Our Prime Minister said it was not a matter worth discussing in Armenia. But for Artsakh Armenians, it is another humiliation added to exile, loss and the destruction of memory.”
Among those carrying these unresolved wounds, is writer and poet Hermine Avagyan.
Through her books, she explores exile, loss and collective trauma, but also the hope of return and healing.
Her latest work, Lettres du paradis où il n’y a plus personne (“Letters from a Paradise Where Nobody Lives Anymore”), is an epistolary novel written together with French intellectual Ulysse Manhes.
“The project,” Hermine tells me, “was born from the need to tell the world about Artsakh’s tragedy — a tragedy most people know nothing about and which now risks being forgotten even more. I wanted to move people emotionally, but also to speak about hope and the future imagined by Artsakh’s people.”
She barely remembers her father, who died during the first Nagorno-Karabakh war when she was two years old.
“During the first Artsakh war, my father went in search of peace. On the last day we saw each other, before leaving for the war, he said: ‘I am going to bring you the best thing possible.’ When I grew up, I understood that the best thing was peace.”
She outlines the difference between peace and pacification:
“The Prime Minister speaks about pacification and moving forward,” she adds. “But there cannot be real peace while Azerbaijan is carrying out cultural genocide in Artsakh by destroying our historic churches, khachkars, and our historical and Christian presence. There cannot be real peace while Armenian prisoners are being held in Baku, including the military and political leadership of Artsakh.”
As of today, around twenty Armenians are still detained in Baku prisons, including former Artsakh state minister Ruben Vardanyan, along with political representatives and civilians being tried behind closed doors under detention conditions that continue to alarm international observers.
Their photographs hang outside building of the Permanent Representation of Artsakh.
While Gegham Stepanian appreciates and considers appropriate the position taken by Narek Karapetyan and Robert Kocharyan, former prime minister, former president and leader of the third-place coalition favored in the polls, according to which the exiles of Artsakh will have to return to their lands sooner or later, when the conditions for this are met,
Hermine has no optimism regarding the upcoming elections.
She neither trusts the opposition coalition, but also view a possible re-election of Pashinyan with deep frustration.
Hermine herself cannot vote.
“My passport was issued in Artsakh, but it says ‘Republic of Armenia’ on it. In Artsakh, I considered myself a citizen of the Republic of Armenia, and I still consider myself one today. Only one code is different. Today, the Armenian authorities are trying to convince me to change my passport, claiming that it is not a passport of the Republic of Armenia. I will not do that. I feel like a citizen of the Republic of Armenia, even though, with this passport, they do not allow me to participate in the elections. I am in my own country; I am not a refugee.”
She shows me the stamp from her latest trip to Europe. I see that one symbol is missing from my own newly issued Armenian stamp: Mount Ararat.
“Our current government has already removed Ararat from Armenian passports,” she says. “Soon they will try to remove it from every Armenian symbol as well — simply to avoid upsetting Turkey.”
Today in Armenia, the desire for peace increasingly clashes with the concept of pacification itself, while coexisting with a constant fear of loss — not only of territory, but of identity, symbols and collective memory.
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