A Goodreads user asked Vardan Partamyan:

What do you like about your home country?

Vardan Partamyan Thanks for the question, William! Armenia, my home country, is a small, landlocked country on the outskirts of Europe. It has a population of less than three million people and four neighboring countries. Two of these countries have, for the last quarter of a century, maintained a land blockade and one of them - Azerbaijan is threatening to wipe us from the face of Earth. My country has no natural resources to speak of and the scars of natural disaster, war and the fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union are still very visible. Sounds grim, eh? Well, it is to a point. That point is the realization that Armenia is one of the oldest countries in human civilization, its culture the contemporary of ancient Egypt, Greece, Assyria and Rome. Our language also dates back thousand years and is a separate, unique branch of Indo-European tongues. Our religion is Christianity and Armenia is the first country to adopt Christianity as state religion in 301. It is also the country that was able to preserve its identity in spite of being overrun by overwhelming foes throughout its history that reads as a sweeping human drama where, at several points, the very existence of Armenia was under question. And yet, all these thousands of years, wars, disasters and the 1915 Ottoman Turkey conducted Genocide of Armenians later, here we are. Still here. Still moving forward. Still being able to laugh and joke and love and live and die as a free and proud people. The country is small and landlocked but it is also beautiful in a rugged way and holds thousands of years of memories and artifacts you can not find anywhere else...

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