Reflecting on learning Armenian and the unexpected doors it opened, from a late-night restaurant in Leipzig to a train station in Ghent, Maria Gunko reveals how this “small” language creates instant belonging within a global network shaped by kinship, hospitality and shared identity.

The holidays in Yerevan are a layered season shaped by Armenian Christmas, Soviet New Year, and Western traditions. Maria Gunko explores how these parallel celebrations coexist through food, ritual, nostalgia, and excess revealing a city comfortable with multiplicity and contradiction.

Explore Armenia’s most unconventional dishes through the eyes of Maria Gunko who views every meal as cultural inquiry. Blending humor, discomfort and discovery, she examines how food rituals reveal identity and the intimate logic of a place.

A walk through Kond during an autumn drizzle becomes a sensory meditation on one of Yerevan’s oldest neighborhoods with its layered histories, lived realities and fragile beauty. In this evocative essay, Maria Gunko explores how rain transforms the district’s mood, revealing both its charm and its unresolved uncertainties.

In a modest Yerevan neighborhood, the Lusik Aguletsi House-Museum stands as a sanctuary of memory. Through art, carpets, jewelry and traditional dress, Aguletsi preserved the soul of a vanishing Armenia, transforming remembrance into a living, radical act of cultural resilience.

Between Kars and Gyumri, reality bends on the map. Maria Gunko traces how geography, technology, and politics conspire to blur borders in the South Caucasus, where every route reveals both connection and confinement, every map is a tool of both navigation and imagination.

Inside Yerevan’s National Library, Soviet grandeur collides with digital work culture. Once a temple to knowledge, its vast halls now host students, scholars and freelancers alike, each negotiating silence, discomfort and architectural awe in an unlikely coworking experiment.

What does it mean to love a land? In this moving piece, Maria Gunko takes the reader on a journey into the heart of a land where mountains breathe history and rivers carry memory. While tracing Armenia’s landscapes and contradictions, she ponders how affection endures when beauty, uneasy history, and complex geopolitics collide.

Perched on a Yerevan rooftop, the Museum of New Analogies blurs the line between art, architecture, and everyday life—an ephemeral, sound-sensitive space for experimental installations, quiet performances, and surreal encounters high above the city's layered chaos.

A sweltering Yerevan summer, a pilgrimage to Lake Sevan, and the shock of diving into its icy waters. Maria Gunko captures the sensory journey of heat, relief, memory, and the joy of feeling comfortable in your own skin.