We Didn't Want To Leave Edirne

Thracian Turkey is treeless, a gradual slope of farmland rising from the Bosphorus to the border with Greece and Bulgaria. A February snowfall had turned the fields silvery. On the way westward we passed textile factories and tiny mosques. The drive was sleepy, the sky was still heavy with winter grey.

Arriving in Edirne was like waking up. It had life and layered history, friendly people, no tourists. This is what every mid-sized, self-possesed city strives to be - a place where locals chat in the streets next to great museums and lively cafes.

Right up against the borders, at the point where three countries with wildly different histories come together, Edirne sits nestled into a crook in the Maritsa River. It’s been the capital of the Ottoman empire and the Bessi Thracians, but now serves simply as capital of the province. And that’s precisely what it feels like – a border town and a provincial capital, infused with market town energy.

It would be possible to be impressed by Edirne without seeing any of the sights. Saraçlar Caddesi, the main pedestrian thoroughfare, is a riot of sweets shops and fruit vendors. The call to prayer from four mosques woke us in the predawn light. Tea men ran down the street with trays of glasses, delivering to the dozens of barbershops and scores of cobblers. Near the big market, men drove horse and donkey carts loaded with goods or people, a farrier did brisk business.

But there are sights. We went to Edirne because it felt inevitable. There aren’t many roads to travel in Eastern Thrace, especially in the winter, and the capital had places to stay and things to see. There are a slew of important mosques, ancient bridges, a famous museum of health, Thracian walls, an excellent fishmarket and old wooden houses.

Close enough to Istanbul to be ignored, Edirne is mistreated by guidebooks mostly because it’s in the wrong direction. Turkey’s a big country, there’s only ever so much time to see everything and it’s easy to be lured toward Cappadocia and Ephesus. If we hadn’t been focused on the European part of the country, the mosques and health museum probably wouldn’t have brought us to this corner.

In 324 AD, a key battle in the Roman civil war occurred in Adrianople, as Edirne was then called. Later in the fourth century, the deciding battle in the Gothic War was fought here, eight hundred years later, the Crusaders suffered a critical loss in the city, being routed by the Bulgarians. In 1912, the location became the most notorious of the First Balkan War. Edirne has had sixteen major sieges and battles, its history is as bloodstained as any town's.

But, like so many places that were able to avoid the worst of the World Wars, Edirne doesn't feel like a ravaged city. It feels old in a lived in, unaffected way, with lots of prewar buildings that have had time to decay at their own rate.

The thing to eat is tava ciğeri, or fried calf liver. Most kebab shops offered it, and - unlike the "local dishes" of many other places - the locals really did seem to love it.

The meat is sliced into thin strips, lightly breaded and fried in deep pans of sunflower oil, along with Thracian peppers. The liver is crispy edged, but succulent inside. The peppers are hot enough to be dangerous - the patrons at the ciğeri shops drink ayran, a salty yoghurt drink, to temper the spice.
We planned on spending just two nights in Edirne, but ended up sleeping there for three. It seemed silly to leave a place that we were enjoying to head into the wintery uncertainty of off-season beach towns and slumbering fields.

These always seem to be our favorite spots - the places that no one expects to fall in love with. After three days, we were talking about coming back in the summer, about what the river must be like in the spring, about other parts of the city to explore.

Built to Last

In the small town of Uzunköprü ("Long Bridge") stands this very long bridge, the longest stone bridge in the country, in fact. It was built between 1426 and 1443 by Sultan Murad II who used it to advance into the Balkans, crossing the Ergene River and the incredibly marshy area around it. It's over 4,560 feet long and has 174 arches, all still in tact.
Uzunköprü's bridge has remained actively in use for over 600 years. In 1963 it was renovated. Concrete paving makes the ride across less bumpy, but mostly everything else is all original. Cars move across in both directions, squeezing past each other, and trucks and buses take turns traversing the narrow lane. The structure sure is durable, which says a lot for Ottoman architecture. It's also pretty. Some arches are rounded, some are peaked. Little details show that no matter how functional a design was, aesthetics were important as well.
On one side of the bridge is an information board giving some background history. While we were there, sloshing through the muddy marsh, a family of female tourists is floor-length hijabs pulled up. The daughter, about our age, offered us a potato chip from her bag and explained that they were in town visiting her brother who is in the military. That's when we noticed the large army base right across the street.
On the other side of the bridge was the town's bus station a-bustle with passengers arriving and departing and simit vendors with huge trays of looped pretzels balanced on their heads. Under the bridge, a man disappeared beneath an arch, trash was heaped and this cow's head sat around waiting to become a balder, more picturesque skull.
In Edirne, at least four historic bridges still stand. The Tunca Bridge, named for the river it spans, is recovering from a recent flood. Melted snow, coupled with a Bulgarian dam which had sprung a leak nearby, resulted in a huge rush of water and overflow. Cars couldn't make it across and, just six days ago, Edirne's officials were talking about possible evacuation. An old man sitting feet away from the entrance warned us about crossing, even though it is clearly passable at this point. Uprooted trees and walkways showed the effects of the near disaster- but the 400+ year old bridge itself looked no worse for the wear.
These structures have survived storms and storming troops. Cows, carts and cars have been their daily traffic. They are historic and utilitarian, full of meaning and also just a means to an end. As we stood at the center of the Tunca Bridge, taking photos of an engraving in Arabic script that had been graffiti'd with smiley faces, horse-drawn-carts and tractors shared the road with new cars. The bridges and mosques stand tall with modernity flooding up all around them and then, gradually, recessing back to let them shine.

Edirne, A City Of Mosques

In 1453, the twenty one year old Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II left home with two hundred thousand men and three hundred ships. A few months later, he had conquered Istanbul, brought down the last vestiges of the Byzantine Roman empire, and begun the final ascension of Ottoman power. Istanbul was made the new capital, the Bospherous would never again change hands.
But what of the city that Mehmed left behind? Today, Edirne is a thriving border city of one hundred forty thousand people, with tons of energy and lots to do. But once it was the capital and cradle of the Ottomans, nurturing the future Sultans and serving as the center of a burgeoning empire. Some of the finest mosques in Turkey survive from that time, including one that ranks among the greatest in the world.There is a high concentration of mosques within a small area near the city center, all built within a span of two centuries. The middle mosque in the timeline is probably the least-used, but is still extremely interesting. Called the Üç Şerefeli mosque, or the mosque of "three balconies," the temple has a number of compelling architectural details. One of them is the partially covered courtyard, which became a feature of many later Turkish designs. Built in the middle of the fifteenth century, its appearance represents a transitional period - Üç Şerefeli was the last grand project before the capture of Istanbul. As the Ottoman empire grew, their mosques became more distinctive, the style solidified.
Inside, the space feels more contemporary than it is, thanks in part to a six walled support system for the massive dome. Unlike previous mosques, which featured square rooms with necessarily smaller domes, Üç Şerefeli is more open and feels spacious. The frescoed ceiling is among our favorites, the place has almost no visitors.
Most intriguing to the casual visitor, probably, are the four minarets. Not one of them is like the others, and the tallest one has the three balconies which give the mosque its name.

When Üç Şerefeli was built, Edirne was asserting itself in the region. This was the final stage of the conflict between the Ottomans and the Byzantine Romans that had been simmering for two and half centuries. As the Christian influence in the eastern Mediterranean region was diminishing and the Ottomans were gaining power, the construction of symbolically massive religious buildings became an obsession.

The Eski Camii, or "Old Mosque," was the original grand religious building in Edirne. Built at the beginning of the 15th century, it has a much lower, multi-domed design that's typical of large pre-classical buildings like it.

We were never quite able to go in. The interior is supposed to be wonderful, but we've been dissuaded by constant funerals. It's a very functioning place, it seems. From the minarets, the loudest call to prayer booms out over the city. The row of foot-washing stations outside is particularly long, there are always people performing wuḍhu before their prayers.
By 1566, not much more than a century after Mehmed took Istanbul, the Ottoman empire had become bloated and the sultanate was decaying. That year, Selim II took the throne, which some historians believe was the beginning of the empire's decline. Known as "Selim Mest," or "Selim the Drunkard," he was famous for his debauchery and excess. In 1569, as part of a grand-works spree that nearly bankrupted the country, he commissioned the Selimiye Mosque in the old capital.

Luckily for the city's skyline, Selim hired the famous architect Mimar Sinan to design it, and gave him unlimited funds to build a masterpiece. Here it is at sunrise, flanked by its four minarets - each two hundred and seventy feet tall.
The amazing thing about Selimiye is how many windows there are beneath such a huge dome. Wider even than the Aya Sofia's, in Istanbul, Selimiye's central roof soars to one hundred forty feet, and is seemingly held up by nothing at all.

The secret to the openness and size of the place are a series of setback pillars that bear most of the weight while remaining unobtrusive. During the day, the carpets and corners are awash in natural light from all the windows. The dome is so well designed that it withstood Bulgarian artillery shelling during the first world war with only minor damage.
It is difficult to describe exactly how ornate the interior is. There are so many layers of frescos that it's impossible to take them in all at once. Sinan's stroke of genius here was to allow so much openness that the dome is visible, almost whole, from everywhere in the building. It takes a while for the eye to travel outward, finding the secondary alcoves and the undersides of the archways. The gaze is continually drawn up and inward; patterns rearrange themselves from different vantage points. It's a magical building, one of the heights of Ottoman classical architecture. A few tourists circled in awe, men knelt for prayer in distant corners.

Wonderfully, Edirne still feels like a city that was left behind - not by its colorful residents, and not in a mournful way, but like a childhood home. The history and life of the place are still there, maybe more vibrantly than ever. Un-preoccupied by the ongoing course of life, it feels like a time warp - the city that was capital and home to sultans, still waiting for Mehmed, its hero, to come home.

From the rooftops the city looks especially proud and unchanged. The jutting minarets are monuments to that bright moment in the history of its people, when they were setting out to take on the world.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Valentine's Day wasn't a holiday we'd expected to celebrate while abroad. I mean, sure, we may celebrate it on our own, but we hardly thought we'd be stricken with mid-day anxiety about getting a table at dinner tonight. As it turns out, just like Halloween in Spain, St. Valentine's Day is starting to take this part of the world by storm - even Muslim Turkey. Luckily, they happen to have one of the key Cupid Day components down pat - sweets.
A variety box of Turkish delights and some pressed fig balls covered in coconut, nuts and chocolate nibs felt like the right candy choice for our purposes. But, man, was there a lot to choose from. We're currently in Edirne, a great little city west of Istanbul, right near the country's borders with Bulgaria and Greece. The main pedestrian drag has a dizzying array of sweets options, including more than one "baklava salonu."
Triangular, square, circular, cigar shaped, pistachio, walnut, hazelnut, with and without green flakes sprinkled on top - so many different baklavas! The end result is pretty much the same, a puff pastry crunch that leads to a sweet, dense, honey-soaked heaven. The baklava from these specialty bakeries are a far cry from the New Jersey Greek diner variety I grew up with - they're fresh, which adds this teensy bit of breathing room between the layers, allowing the different elements to mix and really explode in your mouth. This is not hyperbole.
Of course, there's also Turkish Delight or lokum, as it is known here. The finer varieties are cubes of chopped dates or nuts held together with gel and flavored with something lovely like rose water. The cheap-o ones are bright colored cubes with lemon, mint and other "flavoring." (See first photo in this post). These classy ones were displayed in a store window like jewelry, in boxes that you could snap closed oh-so-playfully on Julia Roberts' gloved hand. (It's Valentine's Day - you've gotta let me have a rom-com reference).
There's a stage being set up in the main street right now and posters around town advertise Valentine's music shows. The flower shops have wrapped carnations in heart patterned paper and clothing stores have moved all their red sweaters to the front window. We wanted to buy some marzipan, which many people believe was actually invented right here in Edirne when it was the capital of the Ottoman empire. But, since the city is also known for its fruit-shaped soaps, we were too afraid of mixing up the two. Happy Valentine's Day from Turkey!

Eceabat: Beyond the Sights to See, A Life by the Sea

Most people visit the Gallipoli Peninsula because they're interested in the lives lost. They come to pay tribute to the fallen. They see the historic stretch of land as an enormous graveyard and that's not that far removed from the truth. The things is, though, there are signs of life absolutely everywhere and the present day population winds up leaving an even greater impression than the commemorated thousands. People have lived here since antiquity, before any battles were ever fought here it was "The Beautiful City." Now, the peninsula is in its latest phase of a long life - a mix of farming villages and harbor towns.
All of this became quickly apparent to us upon arrival in Eceabat, which would be our home base for a couple of days while we explored the historic sights. The town's name used to be Maydos, but at some point in time switched to this derivation of an Arabic word for 'command point of a battlefield.' War may have redefined its name and war tourism undoubtedly plays a huge role in its modern identity. But Eceabat is still just a seaside town like so many others. Charming, salty, laid back.
There are bicycles parked outside of stores and ice cream vendor carts sidelined by the off-season at the base of the ferry dock. Motorbikes are popular, with men in waders buzzing through the main drag. Probably a good idea, as I can't imagine it'd be easy to pedal in galoshes. Narrow stores sell the necessities. Dusty bottles of water, candy, nuts, seeds and a cornucopia of odds-and-ends that lands somewhere between a General Store and a 99cent store. If you need a pencil, fork, new alarm clock, you can find it. Anything larger or more vital doesn't have to be available. There's a ferry right there, waiting, to take you to Çanakkale.
Throughout the day, buses, trucks, cars and walk-ons are ferried across the Dardanelles from here to Çanakkale - a city with a population of about 100,000 vs Eceabat's 5,000. It's always amazing to see these ships unload cargo trucks and buses like an aqua clown car. People go over there to work, school and play, which leaves Eceabat with a daytime population of men, old women and young children. At night, the sky and sea are belted by Çanakkale's illuminated skyline. We're happy to stay tucked in on this side, though, still getting our Turkish sea legs.
It's only our first few days in the country. So, of course, we've been easily excited by all signs of Turkishness, hyper-aware of anything that feels new and different. Turkish carpets cover large piles of fishing nets on the dock, their brightly covered undersides show how faded the patterns facing the sun have become. The national flag flits at the end of a pole on every vessel. The sound of seagulls mixes with the ferry's horn and the daily call to prayer. (The sidewalk is currently being torn up and replaced, hence the rubble).
At "Kaptain Pub," shellacked lobster shells hang from a fishing net like any good seaside watering hole. Turkish basketball plays on tv, the owner plays nard with a young men and two 'customers,' stash bags of fresh produce in the fridge before sitting to read the newspaper sans drink. Sand is dragged in and coats the floor in spots and our glasses of Turkish wine and beer are served with the best beer nuts I've ever had - large, plump peanuts with a thick layer of salt crusted onto their red skin.
Kaptain Pub may be our favorite spot, but it's definitely not the most popular in town. Social clubs range from a barber shop in which a cluster of men are always hanging out neither shearing nor being sheared, a "cafe" that doesn't seem to serve up anything at all except the television in the corner and a tea house that has a perpetually steamed up front window and packed to the gills interior. The bright cafeteria style restaurants feed locals lentil soup and freshly baked pide. A few vaguely Australian themed places are waiting for the tourist season to begin again.
The fishmongers specialize in sardines and anchovies this time of year. Next to this little fish market, attached really, is a kebap joint. It looks like every other kebap place at first, except through the window there is a big bowl of fresh fish instead of a spinning shawarma. The smell of fry, grilled round bread, bowls of shredded lettuce, onion and sliced tomato are all the same but the finished product is decidedly local. The proprietor, popping his head through the to-go window, called us in for 'Balik Ekmek,' translating it literally to "Fish Bread!" It's a sandwich actually, wrapped in immediately grease-spotted paper with little blue and red dolphins on it. We dug right in to our perfect encapsulation of 'Turkish maritime.'

A Thin Strip Between Continents

We are just across the water from ancient Troy, at the point where the Persian emperor Xerxes built a bridge of boats to connect the continents, where Alexander the Great broke through the other way, where the Russian fleet blockaded Napoleon's supply line, along the stretch of water that made Constantinople rich. The Dardanelles Straits are less than a mile wide, the land we stand on not much wider. It is both a major water-route and a divider of ideas. Standing here in Europe, one can look square across at Asia. It isn't an arbitrary land boundary; here, one feels that they're at the edge. This is the Gallipoli peninsula.

On January 9th, 1916, British naval forces - led by a young Winston Churchill - retreated from this clay-and-scrub spit, leaving nearly a year of fighting and forty-five thousand dead behind them. The Ottoman troops who had defended Gallipoli were even more devastated. Eighty thousand men had died, one hundred and sixty thousand wounded. It was one of the bloodiest spots of the First World War. The land here is covered with cemeteries and monuments.

In fact, we found a peninsula littered with relics from millennia of war. The long strip of land borders one of the most contested waterways in history. The Dardanelles straits run a narrow line between Europe and Asia, connecting the Mediterranean to the Sea of Marmara and ultimately to the Black Sea, to Russia, Ukraine and Romania. The interior of the continent has long relied on this passageway with the outer world - on the other side of the Marmara, Istanbul stands sentry at a second narrowing point.

Turkey is mostly an Asian country. Only three percent of its land lies on the European side of the divide, in what has come to be known as Thrace - after the ancient and vanished Thracian empire that once ruled the territory. It is a fascinating triangle of land, and is Turkish mostly because it is so close to Istanbul.

To most westerners, of course, this would hardly seem like Turkey at all. Cappadocia and Ephesus, the mountains of Anatolia - those are the names that play to our mythology of Turkey, and for good reason. That's the heart of the country, the part to see if you want to experience the culture (supposedly). But that's not what our journey is about - we're interested in this part, where the land of Mehmet the Conqueror bleeds into the Iliad and Roman legend. This is where the two continents meet, where rusting artillery mounts stand guard over swift water, where WWII bunkers are dug in next to medieval castles.

We arrived in Turkey as the national gaze turned inland, towards the unusual blizzard that's gripped the interior. Several feet of snow had halted trains and buried houses. Ankara had more snow than it's had in years. Even here, with the waters of the Aegean lapping against the western beaches, the air is cold and small drifts of snow survive. Any thoughts of a warm Turkish spring dissipated. It's still winter, the season of Anchovy fishing and thick, seafaring sweaters. The locals are entrenched in the offseason, the economy is fishing and farming, hotels and restaurants are mostly quiet.

Such a peaceful place now, the Gallipoli has given its land up to a whole universe of stories, which seem part of the very stone and sand. At breakfast this morning we overheard a British man grilling his teenaged daughter on Heracles and Triton. Atatürk himself was forged here, Mustafa Kemal having cut his teeth fighting on the peninsula. To the ancient greeks, the idea of an Asian and a European continent would have seemed strange - this was the center of the world, the famous Hellespont. It was here that Helle drowned when she fell from the ram of the golden fleece, it was here that Paris brought Helen. To the Australians, it was a place that helped forge a national identity - the fledgling country's understanding of war was shaped by its involvement in the 1915 campaign.

There are more stray dogs than tourists at the moment, but millions of Turks visit Gallipoli (or "Gelibolu," as it's known to them) in the high season. For Anatolians, this isn't "un-Turkish," it's the heart of the national identity, the border that they defended against Europe's imperial powers. If Istanbul is their great city, than this land is a necessary part of the whole - Istanbul was made great as Constantinople because it bridges this division, because the Ottomans were able to control both sides of the waters. The fighting during WWI gave birth to this modern nation, to its democracy. There are monuments from lots of nations, but the Turks have built the tallest. It is part of their pride that they didn't give in, that this land - more so than the Eastern plains and the border with Persian - was never lost, that the people here are still, almost unbelievably, Turkish.

Ships stream by, carrying goods into and out of the Black Sea. They lurk huge in the waters, brought close enough to shore by the narrows to see people on board, to hear - when it's calm enough - engines churning against the current. There are smaller boats too, fishing the rich waters. A strange double movement of water occurs here, with a flow from the Mediterranean slipping underneath the surface, which streams outward from the Marmara. Nutrients and species mix in the depths, the fish markets overflow.
In the Caucasus, we felt sometimes that the land there was only a vestigial part of Europe. Far removed from the rest of the continent, gerrymandered together from ideas and old boundaries, those lands felt more like an idea than a fact. Here, the land is suddenly, solidly Europe. It has to be - it is such a historical immensity, part of the line between places. Surrounded by this much mythology and confronted with this divide, it doesn't matter that we have to qualify and explain why we're here in this corner. This is Europe and this is Turkey. There is no argument. Sometimes, standing at the edge of something gives a better feeling for the whole than being lost somewhere in the middle.

Things Armenian People Like

Lavash. The word literally means good ("lav") food ("ash") in Armenian. It's a delicious, difficult to make wonder that is a true staple in the country. As we saw at the Yerevan food market, lavash is bought in encyclopedic folded wads. The so-thin-you-can-see-light-through it and so-chewy-it-is-elastic flatbread is about as close to a flour tortilla as a Dunkin Donuts bagel is to a real kettle boiled one. The baking process reflects its uniqueness.
We got to witness a lavash making troop of women in Goris and were mesmerized by the choreography. Woman A made balls out of the dough. Woman B rolled one out, stretching it by the corners and throwing it in the air like a pizza until it was less than 1/16 of an inch thick. Then, she threw it like a frisbee over to Woman C who was kneeling down by the in-groundtonir. Woman C stretched it onto a bata, a half pillow half board thing that reminded me of American Gladiators equipment. WHOMP! She'd quickly and forcefully smack the pillow onto the side of the oven so that the dough would stick right on, flat. After less than a second, Woman D swooped a long hook in and removed the dough, transformed into lightly blistered lavash. What's not to like?
Dried Fruit. The sheer variety available is staggering. Some market tables literally looked like a color scale: pear, fig, apricot, peach, papaya, persimmon, cherry, date, prune. It was extraordinary. Dried apricots were added to pilafs and rice dishes and raisins would find their way into vegetarian stuffed cabbage and chicken plates. It was the best fried fruit we've ever had - particularly the apricots - so it's no wonder they like it so much.
Pomegranate Imagery. Speaking of fruit, Armenians have really claimed the pomegranate as a sort of national symbol. It's odd, because the apricot or cherry would be more appropriate. I think it comes down to the fact that pomegranates are prettier. We saw the fruit incorporated into an old fence at Tatev Monastery, proving that this isn't a recent thing. However, there seems to have been a decision made on its marketability - because every souvenir shop is brimming with things shaped like the odd red fruit. Magnets, keychains, earrings, liquor bottlesand figurines.

Using Tissues as Napkins and, as a result, Branded Kleenex Boxes. In Armenia, a box of tissues is placed on every table to use as napkins. I have to say, tissues do not work particularly well in most eating scenarios. They tend to fly off a lap if placed there and stick to your fingers if you've eaten barbecue - which you almost always will have at an Armenian table. What made this affinity for tissues more interesting was the fact that almost every business had branded ones! Hotels, restaurants, cafes all had specially designed boxes made by a company in Yerevan. Right there, next to the bar code on the bottom, the product was listed as "dinner napkins." So, maybe I should say that Armenian people like dinner napkins that strongly resemble tissues?

Prayer Cloths. There may be another name for this. I know that in Celtic areas, they are called "clooties," but that simply means "strip of cloth." They say that tying a strip of fabric to a tree makes your prayer more likely to be answered. Some people do this near bodies of water as part of a prayer for healing. Armenia is a religious, Christian country and signs of the faithful can be seen everywhere. The most abundant and, I think beautiful, marks are definitely these prayer cloths. When we encountered them in Xinaliq, Azerbaijan, we weren't exactly sure what they were. Having traveled through Armenia, we now know for sure.

Gypsy Kitchens: The Yerevan

Here's a cocktail for a strange city and a wonderful liquor. Ararat brandy deserves to be drunk more. Yerevan deserves a cocktail. This one is pretty simple.

Yerevan is the thirteenth capital of Armenia, only recently becoming important at all. In soviet times the population boomed, growing from thirty thousand in 1900 to about a million people in 1991, the year Armenia became independent.

It's a funny place - as gritty and sleazy as one would imagine, with crumbling USSR facades and dozens of strip clubs. At the same time, though, it's probably the most cosmopolitan capital in the Caucasus, with influences from all over the world. We had decent sushi one afternoon, upscale lebanese at one dinner, french-influenced trout another night.

The Yerevan skyline with the double peaks of Mount Ararat in the distance.

But the thing that struck us about Yerevan was the cocktail culture.

For Americans, Europe can feel shockingly devoid of good drinks. Sure, there's great wine some places, delicious beer, local spirits. And there are plenty of places with a cocktail menu on hand. But bartenders here aren't used to mixing anything. Outside of a few bars in a few big capitals, Europe's mixed drinks are terrible. Take it from us. We've pretty much given up.

But in Yerevan, that's not the case. We halfheartedly went to a mexican restaurant (called "Cactus" - how unpromising!) that was supposed to have a good bar. We expected margaritas, of course, but didn't expect the bartender to carefully stir a Beefeater martini. It would be hard to count how many times we've ordered a gin martini and received a glass of Martini & Rossi.

In New York, maybe this drink wouldn't have been all that special. But considering where we are, it was magical. Think of this: the last good, European martini of the trip was in another surprising place, Košice Slovakia. That's deep in Eastern Europe - and about one thousand five hundred miles west of Yerevan.
So, what to mix to create a drink for Yerevan? The obvious base was Ararat brandy (let's not call it cognac), which has a lot of oak but also a nice balance. The second ingredient could have been a number of things, but we have a very limited home bar at the moment (we have to carry it), and something local seemed appropriate.

Armenia's two great fruit contributions to the world are the cherry and the apricot - both originated here. There's even cherry Oghee, a homemade vodka - but that tends to run at about 60 to 70% alcohol, which would have singed the brandy's flavor.

Even though it's foreign, the pomegranate is probably more popular, and the locals produce a liquor from it that's a better compliment for brandy. Pomegranate wine is bracingly tart, dry and almost without sweetness. A small measure goes a long way.
We found a tiny, souvenir-sized bottle of it (no point in buying more). After an initial trial, adding sweet vermouth in addition seemed like a good idea, to bolster the sugar and mellowness. It was barely heated in our room - ice wasn't necessary.

Our version was good, with an almost smoky note and lots of complex herb flavors. It's tart and refreshing, not overly sweet, a great winter drink. We settled on two parts brandy, one part pomegranate wine, one part sweet vermouth, stirred in a glass. Very similar to a brandy perfect manhattan.

In America, where pomegranate wine is difficult to find, consider making a normal brandy manhattan, adding a few drops of that syrupy "Pom" stuff, looking out the window and thinking about an arid, distant land on the south slopes of the Caucasus.

(Also - and we didn't think of this until too late - garnish with an apricot)