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If you regularly travel through Edinburgh's well-heeled and historic New Town, then there's a chance that you've passed a half-hidden, foliage-obscured basement shop on Dundas Street with a name in cyrillic lettering that few locals can understand.

The name translates as 'Gallery Nagorno-Karabakh', and it may well be another piece in an ongoing puzzle that Edinburgh Live have been investigating since 9 January 2019, namely: who is Petros Vartynian?

What we do know is that Vartynian was the eccentric figure behind an exceedingly odd restaurant on Abbeyhill, near Holyrood Palace, based inside a crumbling single storey sandstone police station which also had cyrillic lettering above the doorway.

(Image: Reddit)

From the 1980s until at least 2008, the small ex-police station was transformed into the Aghtamar Lake Van Monastery in Exile, an Armenian eatery notorious for its random opening times.

For years, the restaurant was the stuff of legend. If you could track down the owner and make a booking (no easy feat - one reviewer says it took a "month of phone calls") you could access some utterly amazing food in the form of a ten-course Armenian banquet that diners raved about.

But that delicious fare came at a cost, as Vartynian had a reputation for throwing customers out of the restaurant for - amongst other things - asking for more food or wine, turning up a few minutes late (he would refuse to give people directions to the restaurant), or failing to join in with one of his Armenian dancing tutorials.

After writing our initial article about the Aghtamar Lake Van Monastery in Exile, we were also told that Vartynian, who still lives in Edinburgh, would ask customers to help with the washing up, and if people didn't finish one of their courses they weren't allowed any more food.

One group once asked for Turkish instead of Armenian coffee - forgetting that Turkey and Armenia have serious historical beef. They instantly regretted it, saying:

"In a sudden rage the owner unceremoniously threw out the entire group, ignoring their apologies and protestations. I think most saw the owner as part of the charm, temper and all. It wasn't really about a meal, it was about an experience."

Speaking about the Gallery Nagorno-Karabakh on Reddit, one user explained that he believed it was another of Vartynian's idiosyncratic businesses:

"I wish I could remember more, but as a starting point it is Armenian and was run by a guy called Peter. He also has the old Abbeyhill police station which he ran as a bizarre restaurant.

"Its named after an Armenian church/monestary which is now in Turkey and gets described as 'in exile' by Armenian Christians."

One fellow Armenian who visited in 2014 wrote about the experience on their Livejournal account, saying:



"One evening, I was riding a bus along Dundas street and was not thinking about anything, when I suddenly noticed the sign “Nagorno-Karabakh Gallery” out of the corner of my eye and thought that I was hallucinating.

"The next morning I went and checked - it turned out to be true.

"In the center of Edinburgh, among antique and interior stores, there is a gallery whose name no one can read. From morning till night there is an Armenian artist who wears different hats every day. He sits there, sorting out wealth, making coffee in a Turk, and seems to be doing nothing more.

"He only dreams of moving to Ukraine, maybe to Odessa - to warm his bones. For some reason I forgot his name. Or maybe he didn’t introduce himself. At night, he locks the white doors of the gallery and puts a long white cross to them. Opening in the morning, he hangs old dusty carpets on the railing."

(Image: https://seymoor.livejournal.com/)

It's not known when the gallery ceased trading, but it has been left empty for some time. One person took to Reddit to question why such a prime piece of real estate hadn't been snapped up by developers, and was told:

"If the owner is Petros as someone said, there's no way he's selling it. I had a chance to speak to him couple of times, he lives nearby and used to visit our store. He's quite eccentric but nice guy and if I recall correctly, he said it was his friend managing the gallery but it's now closed (I might be wrong though). It has been named after a formerly Armenian region just like that Aghtamar restaurant."

All we can hope is that the legendary Petros will finally reveal himself to us in 2020 so we can find out more about this enigmatic and mysterious figure.

Petros, if you're reading this, please can we come and visit your gallery and try on some hats?

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