Home story #37/2026

View of Yerevan with Mount Ararat in the background.

Yerevan, with its notoriously noisy traffic, is particularly busy in September: summer holidays are over, schools and universities are resuming operations. Russian can be heard on the streets even more than usual at the moment, as tens of thousands of Russians have headed south in recent weeks out of fear of renewed military mobilization, many of them to the Armenian capital, which has offered safe and free exile since 2022.

Preparations are in full swing: contacts are being made, interview appointments are being arranged and research trips are being planned.

When this newspaper is on the newsstand, it will only be a few days until the editorial team gets on the plane to Yerevan. Preparations are in full swing: contacts are being made, interview appointments are being arranged and research trips are being planned. In Yerevan you can go to underground drag shows, a Rabiz concert and play Nardi in shady backyards. Contact is being made with exiles from all over the world - it is a consequence of Armenia's tragic history that the country is now a safe haven for the persecuted, almost unique in the region, said one interlocutor. And we meet some of the almost one hundred thousand people from Nagorno-Karabakh who - on September 19, the third anniversary of this - were driven from their homeland by a hunger blockade by the Azerbaijani army in 2023. Other editors travel along serpentine roads to the mountainous south of Armenia, where Iranians cross the border to vacation, where a mining company majority owned by a German company dumps waste from copper mining into a picturesque lake landscape, whose residents are compensated with the equivalent of 100 euros a month, and where during the 2020 war the borders were redrawn by the militarily superior neighbor in the east, so that military posts are still in place in some places today lie in the villages.

And then there it is, the extra-thick Jungle World Armenia issue, packed with research and stories from the country that was already considered the freest in the region during Soviet times. If you want to celebrate this – with Armenian wine, cognac and Gata – in Berlin with the editorial team, you should mark October 2nd in your calendar.