The Sound of Beauty, Strength and Melancholy. The Duduk.

"Still-Life with Armenian Musical Instruments Duduk Thar and Qyamancha" by Meruzhan Khachatryan

I left Artsakh with a piece of music running through my head - it's been continuously looping in my hours for days now!  It's because of an instrument that I was introduced a few days ago when I was in Garni.

Walking towards Garni Temple, I heard the melancholic strains of a musical instrument that I had never heard before. It was such a beautiful sound, I literally stopped walking to listen to it.  I asked Arshak what produced the sounds and he told me that the instrument was a duduk.  I had never heard of the instrument before so I did some reading on Wikipedia.  It's a 3,000 year old woodwind instrument that is indigenous to Armenia and it produces such a rich sound that gives me chills every time I listen to it being played.

A Day in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh).

"We Are Our Mountains", by Sargis Baghdasaryan, 1967 is widely regarded as a symbol of the Armenian heritage of Nagorno-Karabakh.

We spent today visiting a part of the world that few people outside of this region know exists and if they've heard of the place, they unlikely know anything about it.

I created this blog with the sole intention of documenting my travels so I that in my old age, I could recall the places I've been so lucky to travel to.  I deliberately have avoided making any political statements about the places I've been to as I do not want to state my views for the world to see.  I prefer to discuss politics rather than write about them.