Bashgyukh
Highland village on the Ashotsk plateau

What is this place

Bashgyukh is a small Armenian village in Shirak province, set at around 2,020 metres above sea level, roughly 17 kilometres north-east of Gyumri. Only a few dozen people live here today, making a living from farming and livestock.

Bashgyukh sits on the cold Ashotsk plateau of Shirak province, one of the highest and most starkly beautiful corners of Armenia. The village was founded around the 1830s: its first inhabitants were people resettled from Mush and other parts of Western Armenia, who built a new home for themselves under this open mountain sky. For a long time the place was called Greater Bashgyukh, to tell it apart from a same-named village to the west.

The climate here is genuinely alpine: long, frosty and snowy winters with biting winds and frequent fog, and a short warm summer when the plateau fills with grasses and wildflowers. At such altitudes people have always lived off the land. In Bashgyukh they sowed grain, grew potatoes and vegetables, raised livestock and kept bees, and those same pursuits still sustain the village's few remaining residents.

Over a century and a half the population of Bashgyukh has thinned dramatically, from almost six hundred in the 19th century to about 64 today. A traveller will remember this village not for grand monuments but for the silence of the highlands, the open spaces of Ashotsk and the views of the surrounding ridges. There is also a small lake near Bashgyukh, along with old village shrines that locals still keep in memory.