By Luca Bonafede · October 12, 2025 · ⏱ 7 min reflective read
Today, October 12th, Yerevan celebrates its 2807th birthday.
I left just four days ago, after more than a week walking through its streets, and I can’t shake the sense that I left something unfinished behind — or perhaps that something unfinished remained within me.
Yerevan is not a city you simply visit; it’s a city that reflects you back at yourself.
Founded in 782 BC, before Rome, it has endured conquest, earthquake, ideology, and rebirth. Through it all, it remained unmistakably Armenian — ancient, wounded, yet quietly confident in its own rhythm.
Today, roughly 1.1 million people call Yerevan home — about one-third of Armenia’s population.
Nearly 98 percent are ethnic Armenians, with small communities of Yazidis, Russians, Assyrians, Kurds, and Ukrainians completing the mosaic.
That degree of continuity is rare in a world of fragmentation; it gives the city an unusual coherence — an identity rooted not in uniformity, but in endurance.
⛪ Faith, Memory, and the Soul of a Nation
Armenia became the first nation in history to adopt Christianity as a state religion in 301 AD.
The Armenian Apostolic Church, ancient and austere, stands less as dogma than as memory carved in stone. Its churches — often rising from bare rock — remind you that faith here is not merely belief; it’s the architecture of survival.
No reflection on Armenia’s endurance can ignore the Genocide of 1915, when over a million Armenians perished under the Ottoman Empire.
That tragedy lives not as resentment, but as a structure — a scar that has turned into a backbone.
It taught this nation what suffering requires: not vengeance, but the moral courage to rebuild.
🅰️ The Alphabet That Learned to Fly
In the fifth century, Mesrop Mashtots gave Armenia a script of its own — 36 letters, each shaped with intention and grace.
They say the letters resemble birds, because every word carries a soul that must rise.
It wasn’t just an alphabet; it was a declaration: our thought, our language, our being will never be borrowed.
When language becomes sacred, civilization takes root.
đź’§ Water, Purity, and the Everyday Sacred
Yerevan is a city of fountains — pulpulaks — small marble mouths that offer free water to anyone passing by.
During the city’s 2750th anniversary, 2,750 pulpulaks were built, one for each year of Yerevan’s existence.
Locals proudly drink straight from them; the water comes cold and clean from mountain springs.
It is a quiet symbol of trust and generosity — order flowing visibly, sustained by care.
🌇 The Living Landscape
Each evening, the city glows pink as the volcanic tuff stone catches the sunset.
From the top of the Cascade Complex, the view opens toward Mount Ararat, vast and still across the border — a mountain that no longer belongs to Armenia politically, yet never ceased to belong to it spiritually.
Down below, Republic Square fills with fountains dancing to folk melodies and foreign songs alike.
Walk toward Kond, one of Yerevan’s oldest neighbourhoods, and the air shifts — narrow alleys, hand-painted doors, and the smell of bread from unseen courtyards.
At Vernissage Market, craftsmen sell icons, carpets, and fragments of history carved into wood and stone.
Everywhere, the past speaks — not as nostalgia, but as a living conversation between what was and what endures.
🛡️ Order Made Visible
What struck me most was not just Yerevan’s beauty, but its visible sense of security.
Everywhere I went — crossing a street, walking through a square, or pausing near a café — there was the quiet, watchful presence of the police.
Not oppressive, not theatrical — simply there.
It reminded me that security should not only be perceived through headlines or statistics, but seen — embodied in those who guard the boundary between order and chaos.
That visible vigilance gives a city moral structure. It’s the external form of responsibility — exactly what every society should aspire to.
🔥 Conflict, Continuity, Becoming
History has a way of testing nations the same way life tests individuals — by demanding meaning in the face of suffering.
For Armenia, that test returned in 2020, when the frozen conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh burst once more into fire.
In six weeks of violence, the familiar landscape of mountains and villages became a field of loss. The war ended with a Russia-brokered ceasefire, but not with peace. Some wounds close; others stay open beneath the surface, waiting.
Then, in September 2023, the silence broke again.
Azerbaijan’s swift military operation lasted barely a day, yet its impact will echo for generations.
Over 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled Nagorno-Karabakh — an entire population uprooted in less than a week.
What collapsed was not only a territory, but a form of presence, a visible symbol of belonging that had endured despite exile and fire.
And still, Armenia stands.
Because survival here is not the absence of tragedy — it is the transformation of it.
The people have learned that identity is not something inherited intact, but something reforged each time the world threatens to erase it.
Their endurance is a moral act — a defiance of meaninglessness itself.
🕊️ We Become Who We Are
To walk through Yerevan is to see the struggle of order against chaos expressed in stone and sunlight.
The city remembers everything and yet refuses bitterness.
Older than Rome, scarred and reborn more than once, Yerevan stands as living evidence that rebuilding is sacred — that to preserve meaning, one must renew it daily.
And as I always say, we become who we are — not in comfort or certainty, but through the disciplined confrontation with what stands before us, again and again.
That is what Yerevan does: it endures, it rebuilds, and in doing so, it becomes itself — every single day.
If you ever find yourself there, don’t just look for monuments.
Listen to the language, the laughter, the fountains, and the quiet vigilance that protects them.
You might realize, as I did, that Yerevan isn’t merely ancient; it is alive with becoming — a mirror of the human spirit striving toward order and light.
Happy Birthday, Yerevan.
May you keep teaching us how to stand upright amid ruins — and to face the sunrise with dignity. 🇦🇲
#LiveanExtraordinaryLife✨
With gratitude, Luca Bonafede