On our way back from Yerevan to Tbilisi we drove through the Debed Canyon, forming a part of one of our pilot catchments. It is a very impressive canyon, with several industrial cities.
During the Soviet period a vast and high-tech industrial and water infrastructure was developed for irrigation of agricultural lands, hydropower generation, and municipal water supply and wastewater collection and disposal.
Following independence and the economic crisis in the first half of the 90s, there was a marked reduction in the ability of the state to manage, operate and maintain the infrastructure. The main reasons are that the communist did not consider energy inputs, so it was extremely energy ineffective. Also inferior construction standards and materials during Soviet times made it impossible to run it after independence. As a result, industrial production stopped, the irrigated areas declined substantially and the municipal water services rapidly deteriorated.
We passed several big industrial sites totally abandoned, and looking as ruins, a rather depressing sight. All this activity was probably set up to create jobs and secure the support of the population to the soviet system. It must have been a major chock for the population when all the jobs disappeared more or less overnight after the soviet collapse.
But the water quality has improved. Due to industrial activity the river was dead during the soviet industrial expansion, but now it has recovered.
As the oldest Christian country in the world Armenia has a lot of very pretty and very old churches and monasteries, the pictures shows one of them together with a couple of gravestones.
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