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BELMONT, MASS. AS AN ART HISTORIAN who has studied ruins in remote areas of Armenia for 25 years, Lucy DerManuelian is used to apartments that lack heat, run-arounds by state officials, and lots of nightmarish driving. She is especially fond of anecdotes in the last category. In 1988, the Tufts University scholar traveled by jeep to a monastery three hours south of Yerevan, Armenia's capital. She wanted to see whether what remained of the structured perched atop a mountain matched the 13th-century descriptions of an academy for Armenian scholars. A local cultural official was driving, and she had invited along an American nephew who was studying in Yerevan. "When you looked to the left, you'd be staring hundreds of feet down," Ms. Der Manuelian says in the comfort of her living room in this suburb of Boston. "When you looked to the right you saw the same thing. Whenever there was arise in front of us, the driver would gun the accelerator, but you didn't know if there's be a turn to the left, or the right, or if there'd be a road at all."
A WILD RIDE
Her nephew, she says with a guilty laugh, chastised her for risking his life. But after that ambivalent show of contrition, she is off describing another wild ride, this time to a church in northern Armenia. "If you didn't hang on to both sides of your seat, you'd be like this..." (The diminutive Tufts professor bounces up and down off her blue cushioned chair, nearly a...