What Is an Armenian?

GONZO

A Whitman’s Sampler of ethnic charms

By Ancient Problemz · September 22, 2026 · 13 min read

“Don’t let the priest bless you,” my friend warns me inside a 13th-century Orthodox church. “You’re going to burst into flames.”

“If you think that’s bad, you should see what the Big Guy is going to do to the priest when he finds out I’m Jewish.”

I’m in Yerevan, Armenia, for an event which bears a striking resemblance to a wedding but, for legal reasons, can’t be. The priest is impossibly short for a religious leader, but he has a long, dense, well-coiffed black beard hanging from his leathery face. The locals are olive-skinned, while the Russians from out of town have somehow preserved their pristine pallidness. It’s 95 Fahrenheit and there’s no AC, but also no paperwork, no personal pics, no invitation. Eloping is when you run off and get hitched without telling anyone, but this is the exact opposite: Everyone knows exactly what’s happening, and none of it will have any legal implication whatsoever. No documents, no socials, no trace.

Am I at a gay wedding? No. Is this fraud? Not exactly. I’m visiting my American friend who’s been living there for the last few months waiting for his Armenian fiancée’s visa to clear so they can get properly hitched in the U.S., get her citizenship, and put a baby in her. If they even look so much as though they’re exchanging vows, the whole plan goes tits up and U.S. immigration gives her the ban-hammer. So, we’ll charitably call this a destination engagement.

But between the Russians, Georgians, and other Americans standing around the church, no one cares what you call it. We’re there to celebrate the couple and soak in the culture. But what is this culture? When people think of what to expect when they travel to Armenia, they draw a blank slate. Before leaving, my PAWG esthetician tells me to have fun in Albania. When I get back into town, a Colombian coworker asks how I liked Romania. We know the Kardashians, maybe even the Khachiyans, but besides a sort of ethnically ambiguous grey-skinned voluptuousness and lower-tier Jewish social tendencies, nobody has any clue about Armenians. Which begs the question everyone back home in Texas keeps asking: What the fuck is an Armenian?

There are only three types of guy in Armenia:

• Burt (short and stocky, 60% of the population)
• Ernie (unibrow, 25% of the population)
• Medium (reserved for teenagers and Yandex drivers, 15% of the population)

And only three types of women:

• Normal (young, hot, top-heavy, 55% of the population)
• Ice queen (skinny, striking, ~5% of the population)
• Soviet weightlifting champion (mandatory 45+ masters division, ~40% of the population)

Walking around, it’s obvious to see the country is 98% Armenian, making the Kazakh not-wedding photographer stand out like both the victim and product of inbreeding, his deep-set, diagonal eyes and prominent cheeks letting you know he comes from somewhere else. He carries his camera with the same pride a donkey carries its cargo. For every thousand people, you might run into a handful of guest workers from India, a black person from the U.S. or U.K. on vacation, or a class trip of teens on parade from Spain or Italy. Otherwise, Armenia remains fully, completely Armenian. The envy of the Western world.

Nonetheless, it’s important to clarify:

Are Armenians white?

Technically they’re caucasian.

Are they Jews?

No, but they did get genocided.

Who did the genocide?

The Turks. The same guys who specialize in oil wrestling and hair transplants.

Do they excel in the entertainment industry?

Actually, it’s mostly STEM, mercantilism, and white-collar crime, but, like the Jews, they’re hairy people who hang out in LA. This proximity to Jews, who used to run Hollywood, has let them a few borrowed reputational points as stage folk. The men wear gold chains and their women sport heavy milkers. Aside from public intellectual Dan Bilzerian, Americans will be most familiar with celebrity sex tape actress Kim Kardashian, professional pornstar Lena The Plug, and podcaster Anna Khachiyan, all of whom are known for beautiful faces and big boobs. Looking at their diaspora in America, you can see they’re no strangers to surgical enhancements, but an Armenian reader of mine who knows I’m not a fan of fake tushies warned me that if you’re in the market for a brunette with a juicy butt, it’s better to stick to Arab girls.

Inside every Armenian is a Whitman’s Sampler of ethnic charm. Try booking a ride to the airport and you’ll instantly see that they’re smart, stubborn, long-winded, and argumentative like Jews, needing to “win” every interaction, pushing you to leave when it’s convenient for them and pay cash. Despite the dollar’s relative strength, they still want dram because they’re just that stubborn. Plus, every time you try to exchange USD, they shave an extra 5% off any bill that isn’t pristine. At one point, I tried to pay a Yandex driver with a twenty, which was roughly three to four times the price of the ride, and we got into a shouting match neither of us could understand until I called my friend to berate him on speakerphone.

They dress like black guys trying to dress like Italians. You see knit vests, tennis bracelets, designer jeans, chains for days, and barely anyone owns a mid car. They either drive 20-year-old Ladas whose tires are falling off or luxury vehicles like Benzes and Bugattis. Drivers of both live uniformly in Soviet shitboxes that look like the projects.

Every time you hear someone honk their horn, there’s a 100% chance the same guy is talking on his phone while telling the person in front of him he’s going to burn his house down. I didn’t see a single female driver the entire week. Drivers push into crowded crosswalks like they’re trying to hit you. The way Indian people avoid hitting cows walking through the street, Armenians do the opposite to pedestrians. Their driving is so pronounced that stray dogs wait for the signal before crossing the street, the big plastic earrings indicating that they’ve been trapped, neutered, and returned flopping around their ears like gauges on dinergoths.

Despite being the oldest Christian nation, Armenia sits in Asia just above Iran, and its habibi streak runs deep, giving the place a charred, Middle Eastern, kebab-ass flavor. Through the course of the festivities, my wife and I watch them dance like Persians, circling hand-in-hand while men break loose, jumping, twirling, and freeze-framing with Renaissance hands until a single Spanish song suddenly hits the speakers and everyone bolts like a grenade just went off. Even the huge Georgian guy dancing with his daughter on his shoulders evacs the dance floor like he’s withdrawing from Afghanistan. Despite mandatory military service and macho demeanors, they fear what they don’t understand. These are landlocked mountain people who have no clue what salsa is or how you dance to it, so my wife and I show them how it’s done. With few exceptions, no one is going to Armenia but Armenians.

Despite the availability of cheap, high-quality electric basses and guitars, despite Zildjian being both Armenian and the most famous cymbal brand in the history of the world, the motherland takes a cafeteria approach to modernity. They still play snake-charmy music on primitive instruments that should have been forgotten centuries ago, some of which are undoubtedly strung with cat guts, but at least there’s no Bad Bunny or Bluetooth bandits.

They’re not quite Eastern, Western, or Slavic, but they display elements of all three. Unlike most Middle Easterners, they drink, making incredible alcoholics, downing vodka like palate cleansers between coffee, tea, and cigarettes. Yet despite sporting Slavic levels of alcoholism, you’ll find many Russians still call them churka, the rough equivalent of nigger. And despite being churki, their rap absolutely sucks.

Like blacks, Italians, Persians, and Jews, you can’t shake the fact that Armenians can be deceptive, which is nothing if not pragmatic. Their ability to navigate bureaucracy was first honed through the Kafkaesque paperwork of Soviet communism and later refined through the art of American insurance and hospice fraud. If you look at the Armenian diaspora, you’ll find them hanging out in places like Los Angeles, California or Krasnodar Krai in the Russian Caucuses, regions which provide a steady supply of smog, luxury vehicles, and opportunities to defraud everyone from insurance carriers to the government. Regardless of their age or occupation, the Armenian cannot get enough fraud or smog. The only thing they like more than fraud and smog are looks-gap relationships.

For centuries, scholars thought Beauty and the Beast concerned a hirsute Frenchman gently molesting a peasant woman while talking to his pet candelabra, but anyone visiting Armenia can see this exact pairing everywhere he goes. Like peanut butter and jelly, wide, ogremaxxed men with impressive paunches walk next to some of the most beautiful, feminine women you’ve ever seen. Dresses, heels, makeup, jewelry, and perfume, the whole shebang just to leave the crib. Whether alone, out with the girls, or walking with their men, the women are almost always done up.

Despite the extreme sexual dimorphism, the one characteristic they both share—the dead giveaway you’re looking at an Armenian—is their gait. Going out downtown is like participating in the world’s slowest stampede. The only time they pick up the pace is when they’re rushing into the shade, even when there’s no space, thousands of them piling up in an orgy of hip dysplasia that makes you question if they have some congenital orthopedic or navigational issue you’ve never heard of. While they run a few inches shorter than the average American, which their shrunken architecture makes obvious, their desire to walk straight into you doesn’t seem related to the length of their legs. Slow and side to side is just how they move when they aren’t mogging people at vehicular homicide or Olympic weightlifting.

While I wouldn’t quite call it shifty, you can see their pragmatic attitude on full display as we gather together to bless a couple who isn’t supposed to get married until immigration waves the magic wand.

The not-wedding is a three-day affair that kicks off with priests, an old organ lady, overdressed, sweaty little kids, flowers, chocolate, and gray babushka women tearing up as their husbands count down the seconds before they can step outside for a smoke. The greenskeeper outside the church looks like he’s straight out of a Stephen King movie, but he’s wearing Armani selvedge and only has two teeth, both of which are gold. Once inside, we sweat it out and light long, droopy candles until we have to clear out for the next family angling to burst in for a confirmation. A dove shits in my friend’s hand and we leave for dinner.

On the second night, we’re gorging sturgeon, kebab, and lavash while drinking wine and brandy, but most of my calories are coming from vodka. One of the bride’s brothers sits at our table with his smokeshow wife. He looks like the kind of guy Hollywood casts as a terrorist: tall, dark, and devilishly handsome with a pristine beard and crisp suit. His wife is tall, dark, and skinny with thick black eyebrows and a dress that looks like a million bucks. She doesn’t speak once the whole night.

I don’t know if we go more than 20 minutes without someone slurring through a toast in Russian before we’re pounding another vodka. We dance, my wife gives me a black eye with a sparkler, I cut my finger open picking up a shot glass I break, and the bride’s father and her other brother (both surgeons) show up to cauterize it with cigarette ash before taping a napkin around it. Her brother says he doesn’t usually smoke. I tell him I don’t normally smash shot glasses.

I’m completely wasted when I invite the bride’s father to visit us in Texas. I explain that we have the best barbeque in the world when he counters that they have their own barbeque festival in a week. He says people come all the way from Georgia just to taste it. Without even looking at my calendar I promise I’ll come back for it, which is a lie because no way am I about to travel an entire day just to eat something we have at home.

On the final day of festivities we all cram into a sprinter van and tour the outskirts of Yerevan hungover and sweating vodka. We visit a pre-Christian temple and Geghard Monastery, both carved and built out of tuff (pronounced toof). It’s a porous volcanic rock that comes in pink or gray, the same stone that makes up the brutalist buildings all over town, a subtle upgrade from the cement Soviets used in other states. You can see hermit holes carved into the side of the cliffs flanking the monastery where people used to lower food to nutters, undesirables, and other hoe-scaring antisocials. A Russian girl wearing a black slip and sneakers feeds a marmalade cat honeycomb bread called Khaliat al Nah before he tries to raid a family’s picnic. An old lady starts cursing and waiving her hands to shoo him away before I call him over and give him a few pets.

Like many former Soviet countries, communism made a lot of Armenians atheists. Nevertheless, there are enough people with enough spirit that religion is still a serious thing here. Even if you aren’t Christian, the churches will get to you. The icons, the way the women cross their hearts on the way in, the candles, you can feel it coming up through your body. Between the men’s machismo, the women’s femininity, the breeze drafting through the buildings and the stone they’re made of, it feels like curing anemia with the juiciest steak. Leaving the androgyny, stripmalls and plastic of the U.S. is one thing but replacing them with something beautiful and lindy is another thing altogether.

At the end of our trip, we leave the couple united but unmarried, heading out the way we came in, through Zvartnots International Airport. An army of ice queens check passports while wearing makeup and heels, like off-brand IDF baddies with those what-do-you-want stares, upset we’re making them do anything at all. Almost everyone traveling is either a local heading out for a trip or a diasporoid heading back to Russia or California where they make money they’ll send back as remittances. We’re surrounded by the same people who walk the streets like rickety tanks. All of them crash into a massive blob of humanity rather than anything resembling a line. Through the heat and particulates perfuming the air, the cigarette smoke and smell of coffee, entire families schlep to welcome or say goodbye to other family members like they’re heading off to or coming back from war. In America, you become DoorDash the second you touch down, but in Armenia, a horizon of tough, old-country people greet you with flowers and balloons, excited to have a drink and a smoke and argue with you like you never left.