One of the stranger villages I've visited in my travels happened to be in a country that has remained unrecognized internationally for over two decades. The Nagorno-Karabakh Republic is a
de facto independent state situated in the Caucasus region, and the town in question is Vank.
Situated in the northern part of the disputed region, Vank is the go-to village when visiting the historical 13th-century Gandzasar monastery. Well preserved of its Armenian architecture, this medieval monastery hold relics believed to be from St. John the Baptist, and so its one of the more "well-known" tourist attraction in Nagorno-Karabakh. However, aside from Gandzasar, Vank has turned out to be almost an attraction in itself.
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| Beautiful Gandzasar Monastery |
You see, the village happened to be the birthplace of a certain Levon Hayrapetyan, a Moscow millionaire businessman, who decided to give back to his hometown. He pumped in money building a modern new school, a lumber mill, and a bizarre hotel named Hotel Eclectica, which everyone calls Hotel Titanik, presumably because, well, it is shaped like a ship!!
Together with the huge modern school building, the "Titanic" looked perfectly and spectacularly out of place in a village of simple stone houses. And somewhere between them, a street runs with a wall-fence of some sort that seemed to be made of rusting car license plates. Which in fact, it is. Apparently, these are car license plates from Azeris who had fled during the Nagorno-Karabakh War! (The Nagorno-Karabakh War is an ethnic war fought between the Armenians in this region and Azerbaijan)
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| Village of Vank |
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| Village school building |
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| Hotel Eclectica/Titanic |
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| Hotel Eclectica/Titanic |
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| I'm sure you can guess which part of the hotel this is.... |
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| Hotel restaurant |
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| Wall of license plates |
I stayed only 1 night in a cold unheated room in the Titanic @ 6000 (Armenian) dram a night (I remember it was approx us$16-18 then). I believe I was the only guest in the hotel. I was certainly the only guest in the restaurant and the food took 50 minutes to arrive. And I didn't have time to visit another "attraction" - a lion carved out of a mountainside rock. Apparently, it will roar when visitors walk past it. Hmm.
Vank is easily accessed via
marshrutkas from Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. I will cover more of Nagorno-Karabakh in my next post. Watch for it!
