For long we simply referred to ‘the village’ when we talked about this little place in Turkey’s far east. The village that we visited for the very first time twenty something years ago. The Kurdish village is situated in what was once – and still is – a remote area. It is the home village of a family we met in the Netherlands. When one of their daughters returned ‘home’ to get married, me and my parents have visited her and her family numerous times. It is there that we met all these wonderful people and their (often harsh) life in the village. It is also the place where we came into contact with the Armenian history. The ruins of the ancient Armenian capital Ani are just a stone’s throw away and the nearby river Araks is the border with Armenia (and the Soviet Union until 1991). This border had been hermetically sealed when it was the Warsaw Pact /NATO dividing line, was open for just a few months in 1992, and has been closed again ever since. In the village small stories of every day life meet with world history.