The Dome Above Byurakan

The number for the tour is a mobile number and a woman answered it on the second ring, which is not how I expected to book an hour at an observatory founded in 1946. Byurakan sits on the south slope of Aragats, about forty minutes out of Yerevan, and the site tour for a foreigner costs nine hundred dram. I paid it. Then I stood in a courtyard that smelled of cut grass and warm diesel and waited to be collected.

The two point six metre telescope went into service in 1975; the one metre Schmidt has been here since 1960. The survey Markaryan built out of this hill went into the UNESCO register in 2011, which is more official memory than most Soviet science ever gets. The detail I came for is smaller and has no plaque anywhere on the site. In the second half of the 1950s this place organised the microwave radiophysics work, and in 1960 that work left and became its own institute at Ashtarak.

That is the sentence I came for. My radio book is not about stars: it is about who built the receivers, and Armenian receiver work has an address and a founding year. Monday is the other kind of ticket, four kilometres from here by marked trail: fifteen hundred dram to enter at Orgov, fifteen thousand for permission to photograph, three working days of paperwork before either. I wrote the founding year on the back of my hand.