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After spending the morning convalescing and adjusting to the less hectic life of Yerevan, my heart grew restless, and I arranged to leave for Haghartsin monastery in the afternoon.  What better way to begin a journey than to visit one of my favorite places in Armenia?  The road to Haghartsin, past Sevan and through the tunnel to Dilijan is one well-trodden during my recent travels.  Once past the tunnel, Dilijan always manages to have a surprise or two in store for me.  Today’s first surprise is that Dilijan has had a drier than usual spring, and though the town and surrounding hills are their usual vibrant green, the blossoms are long gone, and the moss covering the trees is being decimated by the scorching heat of the onrushing summer.  Nowhere is this more apparent to me than on the gnarled tree guarding the 90 km marker on the Yerevan-Dilijan highway, which is a shadow of its usual self on this hot spring day.  The tree is covered with newly sprouted leaves and branches, but the blanket of moss I’ve grown accustomed to seeing now covers less than half of this enigmatic tree.

I made sure to purchase mushrooms from the roadside vendors at the turn-off to Haghartsin monastery, having learned my lesson from my previous trip, and, for perhaps the only time in Armenia, letting the quest for food briefly take the upper hand to photography.

Haghartsin has also changed since my last visit.  As Gago and I pull into my favorite vantage point in his black natural gas-powered Volga, I am struck by what’s missing!  Sometime in the past year, the trees around the 13^th century cave-like sanctuary have been cleared and a path laid to another sanctuary and cluster of khachkars further up the hill.  Alas, though, the “better half” of my Khachkar and Blossoms photograph, the flowering tree framing the ancient khachkar on the sanctuary’s wall, has fallen victim to this purge.  I am left speechless by this loss, which I feel personally, as if a part of my being has been torn away.  My Khachkar and Blossoms, the juxtaposition of natural and man-made beauty that symbolizes Armenia, now reflects a scene that will not be recreated here in Haghartsin. 

Tearing my eyes away from this and turning toward Haghartsin, I realize that though I’ve almost always visited the monastery at about the same hour in the late afternoon, this is the first time that it’s actually sunny, and the sun is square in my eyes.  In a way, I’m glad that the natural lighting of the scene is forcing me away from producing yet a third shot of the monastery from the same vantage point.  

In all, we spent the better part of an hour on the monastery grounds, then returned to Yerevan just in time for yet another unusual spectacle, a concert of Apache Indian music and dance co-sponsored by the Cafesjian Foundation and the U.S. Embassy.  Sitting at the Studio Café and savoring a perfect steak, I cannot help but note the wonder in the eyes of the crowd, most of whom have never seen American Indians, let alone Apache, before.