The chapel of Dzordzor sits in a narrow valley of north-western Iran, a small Armenian church in country where the hills fold into one another and the villages are few. The name in Persian is Darresham, and the site belongs to the same UNESCO group as the great monasteries of Saint Thaddeus and Saint Stepanos. It is the smallest of the three, but it carries the same quality of stubborn survival: a stone building, rebuilt and repaired by the community that depended on it, still standing in a landscape where most of the evidence of earlier lives has been scraped away.
The air smells of dust and wild thyme, and in early summer the slopes carry a thin cover of grass that bleaches fast. If you are heading into Iran proper, the road toward Khoy runs through this sort of country, with long gentle gradients and tight bends where it crosses a ridge, and you meet more shepherds than traffic.
The local culture is a layered one. Armenians, Azeris and Kurds have lived side by side in this part of Iran for centuries, and each group left its mark: churches with conical domes, mosques with blue tilework, caravanserais along the old trade road from Tabriz to the Black Sea. The Armenian community here once ran schools and workshops and now numbers far fewer people than it did, which is part of why the chapels matter so much to those who remain. Pilgrims still come at set times of year, bringing food and candles, and the valley comes briefly alive.
Plan fuel carefully. The nearest town with services on this side of the river is Culfa, about sixteen kilometres away, and Khoy, a large Iranian city, is a long way to the south. Water bottles and some food are sensible, because villages here do not have shops open all day. Spring is the best time, when the hills turn green and the roads are dry. Autumn is calm. Winter is cold, windy and sometimes impassable, so leave it to people with local help and studded tyres.