It is easy to describe where modern Armenia is. Go to Turkey, go to the far-eastern end and you will find Mount Ararat. Go up and over Mount Ararat, and when you come down the other side you will be in Armenia. It lies in the centre of the mountainous regions of the South Caucasus, with Georgia to the north and Azerbaijan to the east.
But it is Christian and proudly so, having adopted Christianity in the year 302, ten years before the conversion of Constantine. And because it is Christian, it is also quite distinctly ‘European’. It has a population of around three million, of whom a third live in the capital, Yerevan (or Erevan).
Yet historically, Armenia was very much bigger, and modern Armenia is only the eastern part of ‘Greater’ Armenia. Up to 1915, Greater Armenia included much of what is today eastern Turkey, and Mount Ararat, the sacred mountain of the Armenians, lay in the centre of the country, rather than, as today, in Turkey. But how did it come to be divided up?
