ARMENIA TRAVELS AND STUDIES BY H. F. B. LYNCH Nature's vast frame, the web of human things. Shelley, Alastor. Who can foretell our future? Spare me the attempt. We are like a harvest reaped by bad husbandmen amidst encircling gloom and cloud. John Katholikos Armenian historian of the Xth century Ch. CLXXXVII. IN TWO VOLUMES WITH 197 ILLUSTRATIONS, REPRODUCED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS AND SKETCHES BY THE AUTHOR, NUMEROUS MAPS AND PLANS, A BIBLIOGRAPHY And a Map of Armenia and Adjacent Countries VOL. I THE RUSSIAN PROVINCES LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. LONDON: 39 PATERNOSTER ROW NEW YORK AND BOMBAY 1901 PREFACE This book contains the account of two separate journeys in Armenia, the first extending from August 1893 to March 1894, and the second from May to September 1898. Before embarking upon them, I was already familiar with the contiguous countries, having spent a considerable portion of the years 1889 and 1890 in Mesopotamia and Persia. The routes shown in my map from Aleppo to Diarbekr and down the Tigris, and from Batum across Georgia and the Caspian to Resht, were taken during the course of these earlier wanderings, and they contribute no part of the ensuing narrative. What attracted me to Armenia? I had no interests public or private in a country which has long been regarded even by Asiatic travellers as a land of passage along prescribed routes. One inducement was curiosity: what lay beyond those mountains, drawn in a wide half-circle along the margin of the Mesopotamian plains? The sources of the great rivers which carried me southwards, a lake with the dimensions of an inland sea, the mountain of the Ark, the fabled seat of Paradise. With each step forward in my knowledge of the countries west of India came a corresponding increase of my original emotion. Sentimental were reinforced by purely practical considerations; and I seemed to see that the knot of politics tightening year by year around these countries was likely to be resolved in Armenia. I became impatient to set foot upon Armenian soil. When my wish was realised, my first experiences of the country and of the Armenians in the Russian provinces exceeded my expectations--fringed with doubt as these were by disappointment with much I had seen in the East. So I passed over the Russian frontier, struck across to the lake of Van, and spent the winter in Erzerum.