Discovery and Delight in Armenia and Georgia

by Naneh V Hovhannisyan

Green Mountains: Walking the Caucasus with Recipes

Caroline Eden, Quadrille, 2025

We’re undoubtedly pivoting to the East. The Russian-speaking lands of the former Soviet Union — by turns for promising and abysmal reasons — are getting more airtime and column inches in the western mainstream. As they open up but not yet homogenise, new hippies are seeing them afresh, free from the baggage that the locals carry. My teenage daughter tells me there’s a “whole aesthetic trend” her English classmates follow on social media, called ‘Eastern European core’, conjuring up nostalgia for communism, largely through kitsch and romanticisation of misery. These currents run parallel to America’s and Europe’s cultural and political power — not to mention moral authority — draining away from the former socialist streets. Simultaneously, a globalised, assertive generation from the former Soviet camp has sprouted up. As they straighten their backs, cooking up new ways of good living, fusing their identities, their lands become more visible. Many have moved over here. They — we, for I’m an Armenian living in England — are in our midst. From my neck of the woods, I’ve seen an array of Georgian restaurants and Armenian cookbooks on the British high street since the 2010s, where there was near-naught a decade prior. London’s The Author’s Club’s Best First Novel Award 2025 featured a Georgian story, Georgia-born Leo Vardiashvili’s debut, on its shortlist. Things like these force our society to update what we know about Europe’s periphery. One book on the South Caucasus reflects this change of tone in travel and food writing: Green Mountains: Walking the Caucasus with Recipes is a product of this interest as much as its author a pathmaker.

The book is the work of an award-winning travel and food writer, journalist and book reviewer, Edinburgh-based Caroline Eden. No chef or a hard-core hiker, but a traveller first and a cook second, by her own admission. She is someone who uses food and landscape as a way into the culture, to connect with the people — from priest to proprietor — and collect their stories. Her interest lies firmly in the post-Soviet regions, as attested by the previous two books in this ‘colour trilogy’ from Quadrille Publishing, Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes Through Darkness and Light (2018) and Red Sands: Reportage and Recipes Through Central Asia (2020). Her stated aim is to bring those lesser-known places closer to increasingly curious readers.  

In the early 2020s she’s in Vayots Dzor in Armenia, walking the lands between the Black and the Caspian seas (though only parts of the distance would be tackled on foot). Green Mountains is the final in the trilogy, featuring journalism and essays. It’s the last leg in a combined journey of several years from Eastern Europe to Central Asia (except Turkmenistan, due to access restrictions, and Russia, for political reasons). Once you accept all the provisos mentioned and get your teeth into it, you’re in for a rare treat.

In this latest instalment, that begins with drawing parallels between walking and cooking, and an ode to walking (followed by a hearty meal), Eden is in pursuit of ‘a certain human, animal, botanical, and edible portrait of Armenia and Georgia.’ On the quest, lots of Jermuk and compot was drunk, not forgetting Borjomi; hardly any meat was eaten.

The two countries that share a border, a religion and a substantial amount of history, have nevertheless, distinct geographical, national and culinary characteristics.This almost begs for a compare-and-contrast approach. For example, early on, Eden’s lament to an Armenian, ‘We cannot get apricots like this in Britain,’ was met with, ‘because you don’t have Armenian apricots in your country.’ And, I could hear the beloved actor Mher Mkrtchyan, giving his famous one-liner on dolma in the iconic film Mimino (1977, Mosfilm, dir. Georgy Daneliya), featuring an Armenian and a Georgian as lead characters. Paraphrased, the retort is: you don’t like dolma, because you people don’t know how to make real dolma.

Yet rather than pitted against each other or being exoticized by their visitor, Armenia and Georgia appear side by side, their contemporary inhabitants, as well as much-loved artists, writers and climbers of the past providing the sauce for affectionate rendering. Perhaps symbolically, Eden starts in the province of southern Armenia, where in 2008 likely the world’s oldest leather shoe, aged 5,500 years, was found. Moving north and then westwards, the journey ends on Georgia’s littoral. All of these places are full to the brim with multi-cultural history and seismic happenings, their depth, bitterness, wisdom and humour coming from these ‘riches’.

The context around Green Mountains reveals the limits of travel and food writing. The author is open about her bypassing Azerbaijan. This must have felt like a loss to the concept. However, she deemed it insensitive to have it alongside Armenia on the cover so soon after the strike against the Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh. This being a reference to nine months of blockade, followed by the 2023 military attack on Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians, both acts having been reliably named as ethnic cleansing and forced displacement, a book about food and walking faces tension between factual analysis, personal politics and catering to the genre (Eden had covered Azerbaijan in Samarkand, and warmly recalls its food, nature and people in interviews). Meanwhile, Dagestan in the Russian Caucasus was given a miss because of safety fears since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Throughout, this war looms over the route, with insightful reportage alongside condemnation of Russia’s aggression. Guilt is a recurring feature — as the conflict rages on the Black Sea’s opposite coast, while the author is satisfying her appetite and curiosity.

No need. There is enjoyment, but never boasting, othering, or superiority, characteristic of travel accounts of Global Northerners, who, rather than simply ‘finding themselves’ in far-flung places, travelled there thanks to privilege. In fact, two paragraphs dissect the arrogant dismissal of local people and traditions by the Victorian explorer Douglas Freshfield, apparent in his writings on the Caucasus.

If delight is an essential ingredient of travel writing, there is ample writer’s delight here. Once our guide, struck by the sight of a bird, exclaims, ‘A hoopoe, a hoopoe…!’ Hoopoes are not common in the country, Eden’s research reveals; nevertheless, I appreciated being reminded of the word’s common use in Armenian (a ‘hopop-like’ person is someone over-adorned, ridiculous-looking). Readers will delight at an outsider’s portrait of peoples whose own brands of post-Soviet nationalism tend to desaturate their colours. There is acknowledgment of the Molokan in Armenia and the Laz in Georgia, not to mention the nods to the range of Armenian communities via recipes like omelette with dates (Iranian in origin), lahmacun (Middle Eastern), and jingalov hats, the definitive dish of Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians. Over 100,000 of them fled to Armenia, bringing and popularising their staple (which sadly, is not explicitly acknowledged).

There are references to increasing literature on the region, including Lavash: The bread that launched 1,000 meals, plus salads, stews, and other recipes from Armenia (2019, Chronicle Books) by Kate Leahy, Ara Zada, and John Lee, as well as Tasting Georgia: A Food and Wine Journey in the Caucasus by Carla Capalbo (2017, Pallas Athene). Did I mention the axis tilting?

Eden’s own prose is brisk, sentences short and pointed, her observations of wildlife and flora extraordinary, the specificity of descriptions first-class. Take the people’s ordinary quirks: ‘the suck of the teeth’, a Garik jangling the ignition key in his hand while talking, saints stuck on dashboards, and the Georgian shrug, ‘more pronounced than the Gallic.’

In Armenia — where at one point she remarks: ‘Life looked easy here, but of course it wasn’t’ — she registers what a local might take for granted. A ‘truck carrying towering hay bales’, a vintage Lada Niva, tuff ‘made of compressed volcanic detritus’, goldfinches, Eurasian jays, great tits, hogweed, barberies, mountain greens that are as hard to find as their names are in Britain. Then there is a delight universally catching — the view of Ararat, and the apricot (tonnes exported to Russia alone), the fruit and the mount revered.  

We’re in Georgia next, smelling honeysuckle, or azaleas, grape hyacinth, sheep sorrel, chestnut, and khmeli suneli spice mix. There is chacha, churchkhela, and the fruits associated with Georgia when I was growing up in Armenia: quince, persimmon, feijoa, mandarins, and (who knew?!) a ‘superlative Meyer lemon variety.’ We note Tbilisi’s theatricality, its wooden lattice balconies. In the countryside, there is the ‘traditional Svan walking stick with a metal tip’, a faultless description of the marshrutka to Batumi, wooden mosques of Ajara with their hidden keys, sturgeon (no longer popular, as tastes are changing), plus walkers from Latvia feasting on ojakhuri. Inevitably, there is also a new secret for longevity that some local gives: neither kefir nor yoghurt but chacha, bread, and fresh milk. The texture here is different, yet the attitude still convivial, a mixture of discovery and openness, as befits quality journalism.

Indeed, it’s striking what interesting stories — that are happening now and lie unreported — would have been missed without the author gathering them here. Her focus is on the minor shifts that nonetheless add to our understanding of the realities in the region, otherwise unnoticed. The truckloads of red wine in Coca-Cola bottles smuggled into Iran through Armenia. Or, Georgia’s fishing rights sold to Ukraine and Turkey in the desperate 1990s: as a result very little fish is for sale from the Black Sea, greatly impacting the local economy. It’s worth emphasising the lengthy list of superb resources used and the remarkable body of research kneaded into the essays. At one point I stopped to look up ‘criminality around cryptocurrency mining in Svaneti.’

As the author takes respite pauses in the provinces butting onto the high mountains, then to the parts hugging the Black Sea, commonalities gently appear. The historic Iranian rule, Islamic connections, the modernisation following tsarist conquest, the Soviet industrialisation, the 1930s’ purges, the socio-economic undoing of the 90s, the current Russian military presence — stuff otherwise known as rich history. All the way, punters of the Caucasus will tick off the towering figures and flagship chronicles. Among them: king David the Builder; grandee Shota Rustaveli, the author of the epic The Man in the Panther’s Skin; the Argonauts; Strabo; the tragic musical prodigy Komitas; painter Martiros Saryan; and Hovhannes Tumanyan, aka ‘the national poet.’ Not forgetting the honorary foreigners, such as the great Osip Mandelstam (Journey to Armenia) and John Steinbeck (in Georgia), who subsequently penned A Russian Journal. The under-appreciated locals include Mariam and Yeranuhi Aslamazyan, two remarkably striking artist sisters, whose life trajectories mirror geopolitical vicissitudes, and two alpinists — Mikhail Khvergiani, who removed the Nazi flag from Elbrus, and Guram Tiknadze, the mountaineer and photographer. These stories are diced in edible portions, piquing our curiosity, serving to help us get re-acquainted in a world tilting eastward. They allow us to dig deeper, as the author does, chasing a trail of a Chinese tea-grower, awarded a medal at the 1900 Paris Exhibition. This was the time when Batumi Oil Terminal was founded by Alfred Nobel’s brothers. Batumi, laid out by Prussian gardeners.

Perhaps Samtskhe-Javakheti, the Georgian region bordering northern Armenia, with a sizeable Armenian population could have made a good stopover, as a physical link uniting the two republics. Regardless, stories of larger-than-life artists like song-writer Sayat-Nova and film-maker Sergey Parajanov, cultural amphibians who belong to the South Caucasus as a whole, transcending ethnic division, evoking its cosmopolitan juices, feed the reader’s urge for unity. For two peoples who go back deep into the past, for an area overlooked in the anglophone travel writing, reporting from inside Armenia and Georgia for new audiences might have been cluttered with background information. Yet, excursions into the duo’s various convoluted historical epochs are mentioned matter-of-factly, sometimes as population numbers — charmingly given for every tiny village in brackets.

And the food itself? Easy, you-have-been-warned-inauthentic but kept-to-the-spirit (away-from-meat) recipes are peppered throughout, accompanied with simple images. It only remains for me to ask: what happened to the photograph of the aubergine yogurt dip, and where’s the recipe for my favourite, adjaran khachapuri?

So, as both locals and visitors re-discover this wide isthmus as a place rich with natural beauty, people, and produce, Eden’s book is one more resource that renders the South Caucasus alive and throbbing, providing new readers with an education and insight into the under-the-radar culture of the region.

NANEH V HOVHANNISYAN writes book reviews, essays and memoir pieces. Her work has been published by EVN Report, WritersMosaic, the Armenian Institute, and The New Welsh Review, among others. Her short story was included in the anthology, New Stories for Readers (The West Midlands Readers’ Network, 2021). She co-edited Armenia(n)s: Elevation, the special issue of Wasafiri Magazine of International Contemporary Writing (2024).

Art by Georgie Walker