Parted Horisons, Armenia-Turkey

Under protocols signed in Switzerland in 2009, Turkey and Armenia were meant to establish full diplomatic relations and re-open a border that has now been closed for more than seventy years. Relations remain strained by history — above all, Turkey’s denial of the 1915 Armenian genocide — and by regional alliances. Turkey recognized Armenia after the USSR’s collapse, but hopes for normal ties collapsed in 1993 when it sided with Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh war. In 2025, the border is still shut to civilians, though technical and political groundwork for reopening is finally in place. Renovations at the Margara crossing are complete, and both governments have declared readiness to restore limited transit. Progress, however, depends on the broader Armenia–Azerbaijan peace process. That process reached a turning point in August 2025, when Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a historic peace agreement in Washington, pledging mutual recognition and an end to decades of conflict. The deal includes plans for new trade and transport routes — including the TRIPP corridor (Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity) — a major highway and rail link running through Armenia’s southern Syunik province along the Iranian border. The corridor is designed to connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave and further west to Turkey, redrawing the map of regional movement. For those living near the frontier, change was slow and mostly unseen about a decade ago when I made that essay. Contact had been denied for generations. To travel between two border towns only a few kilometres apart could take 15–20 hours, detouring through Georgia. My essay follows that closed frontier — a landscape caught between isolation and reopening, between stillness and motion.