Elen Mkrtchyan is 17 year old. At the age of 8 she was diagnosed with osteogenesis imperfect-brittle bones. Despite the fact that the secondary school was not set out for independent movement, anyway, she finished it on her own and with her parents’ facilitation...

The Nor Kharberd Specialized Children’s Home is intended for children aged 6-18, but most of them stay here even after becoming adults; behind the walls of the orphanage there is an integration problem.

Each year more and more Iranians come to Armenia. The majority of them stay in Armenia with their families and work in various areas. They try to keep their national identity and traditions. They attend the mosque and take their children to an Iranian school.

For centuries, the role of women in Armenian society was limited to raising children and dealing with everyday problems. Now much has changed, and women have become more independent

The lifestyle of the women, living in Armenian villages significantly differs from the ones of urban-dwelling women. There are numerous props of life, which make the life of a city woman easier, however in the villages even earning money sometimes demands a lot of physical effort, patience and toughness.

Six years ago, the Grigoryan family lost their house in the center of Yerevan due to urban development. Since that time, they have changed four houses over the course of 6 years.

Malatia mart, is considered to be one of the oldest marts in Armenia. It has been open since 1991. During the USSR, there were livestock barns and the pastures. After the collapse, they stopped working, like the whole state economy. Later, in place of the barns, the mart was created, which throughout the years expanded both its territory and the variety of products. The latter now includes not only clothes; here one can also find everything for the household with good prices. 

89 year-old grandfather, Garush Danielyan, has three children, eight grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren. Not all of them live under one roof, but at least four generations do. Despite that fact, there is a gap between the generations because of their different outlook of the world.

This year was a fruitful year for Armenian agriculture, especially for growing grapes. However, this season many factories are refusing to buy grapes. Russia, one of the biggest consumers of Armenian wine, has plenty of last year’s wine in reserves and isn’t looking to buy more this year.

Armenians are generally not as physically active as Europeans. Though parents usually take their children out to different sports clubs, few of them continue their sport life when they grow up.

It has been 4 years that the family of Lee has lived in Armenia. The spouses teach Chinese language at The “Confucius” center and at the public school named after Chekhov in Yerevan. Living thousands of kilometers far away from their homeland, they are trying to preserve their national traditions in the Armenian environment both by preparing special meals and celebrating holidays.  Chu Yan, the daughter of Lees, whom the family calls Tong-Tong (the Chinese call their child by a different name at home) goes to the Russian section of Chekhov school. She speaks Armenian, Russian, Chinese and English. As my children are course mates with Tong-Tong and there are close relations between our families, we had a unique chance  to be at their place and taste some traditional Chinese New Year meals.  

Aside from the fact that the women from Aregnadem village, Armenia, have to take care of their households in the absence of their husbands, they also are engaged in the unique 'entrepreneurship' of felt-making; they make wool dolls, which are then exported to Norway.

Yerevan is an ‘early bird’ city. On the contrary,  it is also a night owl, as well. At 6am scores of trolley buses, marshutkas  (minibuses), and trams join taxis and clang along the streets of Armenia’s capital without pause until midnight. Drivers at the helms of this army of vehicles are on the constant move, yet sitting still, watching the flow of humanity getting on and getting off. For long hours - time with families and beloved ones have to be crafty tailored around long shifts that can last up to 16 hours per day, cumulating in around a AMD100000 ($200) monthly salary. Encapsulated in this working-space-on-wheels, drivers surround themselves with colour - artificial flowers, fluffy animals, tiny toys, crosses of any size and decor, religious icons, and patriotic quotes that adorn their world on the move, with passengers often chipping in.  

In 1988 Armenia and Azerbaijan were linked by a feeble hookup, the Soviet Union, in its dying years. The war in Nagorno Karabakh was yet to explode into open conflict, when the first inter-ethnic clashes started, changing forever the lives of Armenians living in Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis living in Armenia. In this tense, ethnic and socio-political unrest, people in some villages began to swap houses - Armenians in Azerbaijan would purchase houses from Azerbaijanis in Armenia and vice-versa.

The village of Fioletovo in northern Armenia is one of a kind. Nestled among the mountains north of Lake Sevan, it is home to 1,500-odd Molokans, a Christian sect which split from Russia’s Orthodox Church in the 16th century. Its members, also known as Spiritual Christians, were persecuted under the Russian tsars and by the early 19th sought refuge in remote areas of the Caucasus and Central Asia.

It doesn’t take much to push the boundaries - sometimes doing the washing up or kicking a ball on a pitch is just enough to get frowned upon. That is, when a man does the former and a woman the latter.

Six years ago, 45-year-old economist Nerses Ter-Petrosyan and his brothers and sisters, natives of the Armenian village of Goght, erected a monument to their grandfather and 16 other villagers who died or were exiled during Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s 1936-1938 Great Terror, a gruesome time when hundreds of thousands of people throughout the Soviet Union were executed, imprisoned or sent into exile; often for little or no reason at all.

A father’s love gives a young man the strength to create a stable home for his two daughters.