Unlike the snow-covered, gloomy provincial town where the murders of Orhan Pamuk’s imagination took place, the Kars that welcomed my friend and me on our short trip to Western Armenia was warm, lively, and hospitable; enough to set my soul at ease, after a tumultuous arrival in the country.

Indeed, as I had crossed the border from Georgia to Turkey, feeling the weight of our collective past on my shoulders—a whirlwind of mixed feelings had coursed through me. On the one hand, I was excited to finally see the land of my forebears for myself—I had been waiting for this moment for so long. On the other hand, I had felt a gnawing sense of unease, reinforced at the sight of the first Turkish flag; a stark reminder that our ancestral homeland remained in the hands of the descendants of those who had tried to wipe us out of existence.

“Do I really want and need to go to a place where the blood of my forefathers has been spilled? Where Armenians continue to experience discrimination and local authorities actively attempt to suppress our community’s traumatic memories and rewrite history?” These are the questions that I constantly asked myself.

But there, wandering around the historic city set on a high plateau in Eastern Anatolia, the inner resistance gradually melted away, and I began to relax. Was it the sights we explored? The vibrant atmosphere we soaked up? The delicious cuisine we sampled? The locals we met—with whom we shared stories and connected?