The first thing to understand about Ani is that you stand in one country and look into another. The ruined city lies on a promontory above the Akhurian River, and that river is the border between Armenia and Turkey, shut since 1993. The ruins themselves are on the Turkish bank, while the nearest Armenian towns, Maralik and the villages around it, are twenty kilometres or more away across open plateau. A rider coming from the Armenian side can get close enough to see the walls and the cathedral dome across the gorge, and that is a strange, quiet, rather moving experience in its own right.
In the tenth and eleventh centuries this was the capital of the Bagratid kings of Armenia, and the stories about it grow with the retelling: the city of a thousand and one churches, a population that may have rivalled the great cities of Europe, a crossroads on the Silk Road. The cathedral, finished around the year 1001 to a design by the architect Trdat, was a marvel of its time. Then came the Seljuks, the Georgians, the Mongols in 1236, and finally an earthquake in 1319, and the city was left to the wind and the swallows. What survives is a scatter of red and black basalt churches standing in grassland, still lovely, with faint frescoes peering out of the apses.
The landscape here is high, bare steppe at something over 1,500 metres, rolling and windy and treeless, with the deep cut of the gorge below. The roads across it from Gyumri and the south are wide and fast in places and broken in others, and between villages you may see nothing but sheep and a distant tractor. Weather turns quickly on this plateau: bright mornings, afternoon thunderstorms in early summer, and a long hard winter when the whole area is under snow. Late May to early October is the usable window.
There is nothing at the border viewpoints, so bring water and fill the tank in a larger town before heading out; this part of Armenia is thinly served, and the closest reliable stations are in the bigger towns of the region rather than the villages named on the map. A flask of coffee and a picnic of bread and cheese fit the place better than a restaurant would. Stay a while, and let the bells of memory ring: for Armenians, Ani is both the proof of a golden age and a place they can see but cannot reach.