Home story #40/2026

It's not just the mornings that crows and clucks: the neighboring poultry

The Jungle World occasionally has an office dog in the Berlin garden house, but that's about it with animal presence. At our workplace in Armenia, the animal quota was significantly higher. In addition to the two dogs, who barked loudly to ensure peace and order, there were a dozen cats roaming around the property of the guesthouse on the outskirts of Yerevan, a handful of them barely older than a few weeks, as well as chickens and ducks.

Many may believe that roosters crow primarily at dawn. However, the research of your favorite newspaper has shown that they are already making noise before that.

Many may believe that roosters crow primarily at dawn. However, the research of your favorite newspaper has shown that they are already making noise before that. And afterwards anyway, and with astonishing persistence. But we were reconciled with the heap of chickens when we had freshly laid eggs for breakfast. The owner of the guest house brought them to us, a friendly older gentleman who personally fed the chickens and gave the kittens eye drops. The first clue to his amazing life story was a photo that hung in our conference room. It showed our host as a slightly younger man shaking hands with former US Vice President Dick Cheney. Here you can find out who the friendly older gentleman was and why everyone we told about him in Armenia didn't want to believe that we knew him personally.

While the editorial team of your favorite newspaper was still sitting in the Armenian sun, tasting beer from Gyumri and fine-tuning their texts, election results arrived from far away Germany that didn't exactly make you want to return. But everything comes to an end, even the traffic jams at rush hour in Yerevan. The "pink city" was not only full to the brim with cars, but also with sculptures and street dogs, with a lot of amazing and bitter history, with countless political conflicts, with punks and exiles, oppositionists and soldiers, drag queens and refugees, and all of it can be found in this edition of your favorite newspaper, which is extra long like a lawash - the large, thin national bread of the Armenians that ends up folded on the table like our supplement. Well, get it!