Is this the world's first Christian country? | Hacker News Reader

Is this the world's first Christian country?

bbc.com

18 pointshwayern22 comments

Been thinking about a trip here for a while. I was in Eastern Turkey a few years back and a taxi driver that was taking me to a ruined city called Ani stopped at a small memorial at the side of the road on the way. 'This is where the Armenians slaughtered a whole village including pregnant women..' etc. etc. Sorry to say it, but what a load of crap the Turkish are taught/speak about their history.

I feel like I owe it to Armenia to visit. Seems like they have suffered a lot of hardship over the years.

edit: bollocks to the visit, I could already retire there! http://www.escapeartist.com/blog/live-armenia/

My wife is Armenian and I have visited 5 times. It is a beautiful country with a rich and friendly culture. They love visitors. I highly recommend visiting!

Armenia. This is common knowledge for those of us who live in los angeles, which has a sizable population of Armenians.

Yes. I don't know why this article is phrased as a question - it is an established fact. Also, what is going on with the location debate Europe vs Asia? Armenia is in the squarely between the caucuses and the middle east.

When I first met my friend who had the last name "Arabian", as a naive 23 yr old I asked him if he was arab. and he said "no way man, I'm armenian, we're the first christians."

I was properly rebuked, we became life long friends, and that fact has become a fundamental part of how i view all armenians. I went on to learn about their incredible history of survival including the still unrecognized genocide at the hands of the turks. an ultimately triumphant struggle to remain independent and preserve their culture.

I still find it strange that we consider the Europe/Asia distinction relevant now that we know they're part of the same tectonic plate.

They're still separate cultural regions, maybe (insofar as religions that tend to spread through one will peter out at the borders of the other), but if we're talking about regions of cultural influence, then the ex-Soviet states are all effectively "Europe", while the Middle East [in modernity] forms its own region.

But for some reason we keep trying to classify things as "in Europe" or "in Asia." There's no there there, folks.

My last name ends in "ian." This suffix is common among Armenians. Yet as far as I know of my ancestry, I'm eastern-european (Poland, Romania, Belarus, Ukraine) Jewish. So I doubt I've got any Aremenian in my blood. I'd love to figure out the provenance of my last name. Maybe just a typo immigrating to America (the oldest U.S. census on which my name appears is 1900).

>>> We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee.

Well, I wasn't expecting that.

Yeah, it really sucks that those of us in UK are blocked from accessing parts of the BBC website whilst everyone else can.

(It's essentially down to the fact that the BBC aren't allowed to display adverts — which feature on the website — to users in the UK. Apparently it's too costly to have the site not display adverts to UK users, so they simply block access to the entire site.)

You can still access the article via the Wayback Machine, though:

http://web.archive.org/web/20170406163007/http://www.bbc.com...

VPN ftw

I don't understand that - I get why licence-fee funded stuff wouldn't get broadcast to those who wouldn't ever pay it, but why not allow people who do pay the license fee to access the same stuff on the same terms as people who don't?

The Beeb is forbidden by law from showing ads in the UK.

Sure, so hide the ads instead?!

Then you are showing content to people who are not paying for it any any way(neither TV Licence nor ads). I mean, I think it wouldn't make any difference whatsoever, but I can see the logic why it's done that way.

As I alluded to in another comment, I distinctly remember seeing a web page on the BBC website explaining that this is a cost/resources issue. Apparently the capability to display an advert-free version used to be there, but it proved too costly to maintain. I've been trying to find that page, but unfortunately with no success.

I meant hide the ads for the UK, show them elsewhere.

Sure, but then you have content funded by ads, and then you hide the ads for the whole country - that's gotta cost something.

I'm surprised the economics are so vastly different from hiding the content and displaying this message instead.

Maybe they could check if you have an ad blocker and only show the site if you do :)

Reading the other comments, it feels like the right thing to do is amend the law and permit the BBC to show ads in connection with content that is not funded by the license fee. Seems to me the hardest part of that is the accounting required to ensure all funding is kept separate for international and domestic projects, and that must have already been done.

I want to Armenia for fun lat year because nobody else I know has ever been. It was so fun! I regret not trying harder to get out of Yerevan. If you want to see a part of the world that doesn't make the press a lot, but has charm, old-world flair, beautiful and unique scenery, worth the trip!

The co-working spot Aeon is pretty cool.

Just keep an eye on the politics before going.

Why is Javascript required to render the text of the article? Pretty annoying.

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