Darik
A highland village at Shirak's edge

What is this place

Darik is a tiny mountain village in Armenia's Shirak Province, perched at 2,200 metres near the country's northern border. Only a handful of people live here now, surrounded by pastures, wind and silence.

Darik sits in the farthest corner of the Amasia municipality, north of the village of Zorakert, on the rolling uplands of Shirak. Until 1991 the village was called Oksuz; its former residents left in 1988 during the Karabakh conflict, and the abandoned houses were soon damaged by the devastating earthquake of that same year. Darik has stood nearly empty ever since: the 2011 census counted just 11 people, and the population has only dwindled further.

Life at 2,200 metres is harsh, with metres of snow in winter and temperatures dropping to forty below. Yet the village has not vanished. A small family farm keeps around 1,600 sheep here, raising the native Armenian Balbas breed adapted to the cold mountain climate, along with Van cats and Gampr dogs. This sheep farm has become the focal point of an effort to revive Armenian wool.

Darik greets the traveller not with monuments but with its landscape itself, the openness of the Shirak meadows and the sense of standing at the edge of the inhabited world. Not far from the village stands an ancient vishap, a stone dragon-marker, a silent witness that these high pastures were settled by people long ago.