A journey through Syunik’s cities reveals overlooked details: laundry lines, rustwoven structures, and abandoned railways, that tell richer, more intimate stories of place than tourist checklists ever could. Maria Gunko’s reflection on memory, materiality and urban meaning.

Maria Gunko explores the city’s transformation after dark, where familiar spaces shift, new rhythms emerge, and urban night pulses with secrecy, revelry and uncertainty. From hidden bars to shadow economies, it captures the mystery, intimacy and contradictions of Yerevan’s nocturnal self.

Metsamor embodies a complex interplay of post-Soviet deindustrialization, utopian aspirations, and organic transformation. Once a symbol of Soviet modernity, it now reveals a layered reality—marked by decay, resilience and the unplanned vibrancy of everyday life.

Delving into the rich cultural legacy of Venice’s San Lazzaro degli Armeni island, Maria Gunko reflects on the enduring significance of Armenian heritage around the world, the beauty of discovery, and the philosophical charm of places seemingly untouched by time.

In this month’s column, Maria Gunko explores how the pronouns "they" and "we" are used to navigate narratives of destruction, complicity and survival. She examines the shifting boundaries of agency and the struggle for meaning in a post-socialist, post-truth landscape.

In the forests of the Armenian Highlands, lies a small town stripped of Soviet modernity with no more than metal corpses left of industrial buildings. For the past 30 years, the town has been reclaimed by a tide of greenery and with it, wildlife has returned. Now the howls of jackals echo through the streets.

Many have heard of the concept of the "sixth sense" but does it truly exist? Through stories of survival tied to an inexplicable sense of danger, Maria Gunko delves into how intuition may serve as a powerful, unacknowledged survival mechanism.

While wandering through spaces without a predetermined route or destination, allowing herself to be guided by the contours and atmospheres of the environment, Maria Gunko reflects on the sensory and emotional imprints of the Armenian town of Goris.

“Homeing” is a fluid process of habituating and domesticating the ever-changing world, where movement—whether migration, modern nomadism, or displacement—is the rule rather than the exception. Maria Gunko writes about her relationship with Home in this next installment of .

Being no stranger to post-Soviet 1990s hunger, poverty, and instability in central Russia, Maria Gunko learns about the Armenian experience of the “cold and dark years” at a 2016 exhibit at Yerevan’s History Museum, and is astonished by how little is known about these events outside of Armenian society. In her latest piece, Gunko explores the happiness that comes when the electricity comes.