Yerevan is called a sunny city,  above all for the intensity of the sunlight. The urban planning of the city is ‘sunny’ too. But in the future, Yerevan can also justify its name for other reasons. The population can produce solar energy not only for their own needs, but generally for the country too.  

The Armenian Gull, a nationally and globally endangered bird, will have to look for a new habitat due to the increasing level of lake Sevan.  

During the first years of Armenia’s independence, in the course of the Karabakh war, the country had to endure a heavy transport blockade. In those years, the southern border with Iran became a source of life for Armenia. Trucks with Iranian products were unloaded directly on the central square, and, by coincidence, were being sold directly on a street with a "Persian" name, Ferdowsi. 

Despite the excess of teachers in Armenia, many regional schools suffer from a serious lack of professionals. Meanwhile, only approximately one-fifth of recent graduates from pedagogical universities have the opportunity to find teaching positions at schools; moreover, the remote areas are not the most attractive job destinations. But there are certain young teachers, who do seek to spend a part of their life working in regional schools.

Because of the economic crisis in Russia, Armenian wine and cognac producers sold only a small part of their production and this year many of the wine factories didn't buy the grapes from farmers, which were unexpectedly rich. Those farmers who failed to sell their crops began to protest, some of them blocked the roads, and others just threw out their spoiled harvest on the way.

Since the beginning of the crisis in Syria, about 17,000 Syrian Armenians have arrived in Armenia. The first issue, the country decided to solve, was the education of children. Special classes were opened for pupils from Syria, which also included the teaching of Arabic language.

Summers are scorching hot in Armenia. For the last four years it is not only the the heat that has clung to the city, as much as street protests and mass demonstrations.

No charming walks under the full moon, nor lovingly gazing into each other’s eyes. Instead, sit-in protests, shout-aloud slogans, and hectic runs to flee from the police have come to characterize the courtship of many young Armenian couples in the country. As love has many faces and reveals itself in different forms, many young Armenian couples have come to know that more clearly.

In 2013 the Armenian government moved towards a liberalization of the aviation system with the aim of creating a free-market environment and equal competitive conditions for all airlines. Yet, the open sky policy complicated the life of Armenian carriers which started struggling, and then, unable to compete, went belly up.

The Yerevan Computer Research and Development Institute (YCRDI) occupies a few offices in a concrete-and-glass multi-storey building in the centre of Armenia’s capital - a faint image of the landmark institute’s former glory.

Sixty-four-year-old font designer Edik Ghabuzyan likens the predicament of Armenian fonts in the digital era to a story by the late Japanese writer Kobo Abe. A Japanese man, from childhood, has seen an American warship floating off the coast of Japan. The ship sits idly, but the man sees its image every day and, with time, it changes his mentality. For Ghabuzyan, head of  theArmenian National Book Chamber’s Department of the Creation and Preservation of Armenian Computer Fonts,and other Armenian typography specialists, the dangers of such a change are real.

Fourteen-year old Tigran Gharakhanyan walks to school in a crouch, flattening himself up against buildings on his village’s main road. He has good reason. His village, Chinari, is barely a kilometer away from Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan, directly in the line of fire of the Azerbaijani armed forces.

Sanam Chagharyan first sensed something terrible had happened to her 20-year-old son Aghasi, an Armenian soldier serving on the Nagorno-Karabakh frontline, when she could no longer reach him by phone. More than 23 years later, she still does not know where he is.

Freshwater fishing is not usually the riskiest of occupations. Unless, that is, you’re a fisherman on the Joghaz reservoir, a sort of aquatic buffer between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In that case, you fish at night.  Built in the late 1970s for irrigation and a planned fish factory, the 2.14-square-kilometer reservoir, set against a majestic column of volcanic rock (called Gavazan or Göyəzən), may look Tolkienesque, but life here is no fantasy.   Since the early 1990s, when full-fledged war broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno Karabakh, this shimmering body of water has been off limits to both sides.

They call it “home.” And for many of Mer Doon’s 16 female residents, the two-storey, beige-stone building in the Armenian town of Etchmiadzin is truly the only home they’ve ever known. The sole facility of its kind in Armenia, Mer Doon (Our Home) is a non-profit organization that accommodates women and girls from orphanages and low-income boarding housesthroughout the country. They live at Mer Doon for four years while pursuing an education in Echmiadzin or the capital, Yerevan, about a half-hour’s drive away.

When we speak of Armenians in Istanbul, the first thing that might come to mind are the remnants of a once large community; today, estimates of ethnic Armenians in Turkey range up to 70,000. We might think of the emptying or shuttered Armenian churches dotted around Istanbul, or of the journalist Hrant Dink who was shot down on the streets of his city twelve years ago this month by a young Turkish nationalist. But now, “Armenians of Istanbul” might refer to another community; Armenian is heard again on Istanbul’s streets — but now, that also means the eastern dialect spoken by migrants from the Republic of Armenia.

Since the late ‘80's and early ‘90's, on the outskirts of Yerevan, in one of the buildings of the former boarding school, now the Centre for care of patients with mental disorders "Dzorak", several families of Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan live. The decade of the 1990s was near fatal to their lives, which came to a standstill in a very grave situation, similar to the name of the site itself, called ‘the Turtle gorge’.