At zero point of Türkiye and Armenia’s closed frontier: ‘Ready, but not yet open’

By Yagiz Efe Parmaksiz
May 11, 2026 05:15 PM GMT+03:00

The barbed wire is rusty but has been holding strong for 33 years. Yet, it is bound to get weaker.

Beyond it, the gravel rail bed stretches into the green hill, unobstructed, going nowhere in particular. Or rather, going nowhere at all since 1993.

This place is a border crossing no more. This is the zero point of the Türkiye-Armenia border near Akhurik, the last station on the Armenian side before Kars.

A camouflaged military post sits quietly in the middle distance. A few kilometers ahead, Turkish watchtowers look back.

I stood there as a Turkish journalist, in early May, during a week in which Yerevan hosted the European Political Community Summit, the first-ever EU-Armenia summit, and the Yerevan Dialogue 2026 Forum, thanks to an EU-supported Caucasus Edition journalism fellowship.

The diplomatic energy inside the conference halls was palpable; forty-plus leaders and a joint EU-Armenia declaration running to forty-four articles one day. The next, panels on South Caucasus peace.

Outside, on this hill, nothing had moved since 1993.

But the rust, the diplomatic events showed, was not the only thing slowly giving away.

Station that never really closed

A short drive away, at the Akhuryan Station on the Armenian side, the rails of the Kars-Gyumri line are still there.

Rusted, overgrown with grass sprouting up between the sleepers, a manual switch lever frozen but unbroken, unbuckled, no gaps.

The infrastructure is not the problem.

Even after the border closed following the First Karabakh War in 1993, a conductor named Agop Gevorgyan refused to leave. Dismissed from his job driving the train to Türkiye’s East Gate station in Kars, he was reassigned as a guard and stayed.

The Armenian public radio reported his words a decade ago: “After the services were halted, I started working as a guard at this station. Our time was spent sitting, mostly idly. For 20 years, we have been waiting for the train service to start. Over there, we could see the lights of Türkiye. We have been watching those lights for 20 years and waiting for the border to reopen.”

He also spoke of a Turkish railway official named Sukru, a friend made on those daily Kars runs, whose connection to him was severed the day the border closed.

He learned, years later, that Sukru had died. “I would have wanted to see him again,” Gevorgyan said.

The station office still looks ready to open on any Monday morning. What stops it from actually opening is the political will, the working groups, and the gauge.

Türkiye and Armenia had already agreed in 2025, in talks between Türkiye’s Special Envoy for the Normalization Process Serdar Kilic and Armenian Vice President of National Assembly Ruben Rubinyan, to launch the technical work on the railway’s rehabilitation.

That agreement was translated into action on April 28, a week before I stood at the Akhuryan Station, when the two sides convened the first meeting of a joint working group in Kars.

The Turkish and Armenian rail systems run on different track widths. This means bogie-exchange facilities would need to be built, or sections of the track re-laid to a unified standard.

In Soviet times, engineers solved the same problem by swapping wagon bogies at the border. Whether that solution will be revived, or something new is agreed upon, is among the questions the working group will need to answer. The timeline for what comes next remains open.

‘This is trust-building process’

Back in Yerevan, I asked Serdar Kilic a direct question. In his opening speech at the Yerevan Dialogue Forum, he had corrected the very name of the process he is running: “This is not a normalization process,” he said from the podium.

“This is a trust-building process.”

After the panel, Türkiye Today asked him what that distinction meant in practice, what steps both sides still need to take to build the said trust.

His answer pushed back on any suggestion that the label was merely rhetorical. “Of course, this is not a normalization process; we are already putting those steps in,” he said.

“We have arrived at the stage where borders can be opened. We are working on that. For the Kars-Gyumri railroad restoration, we met last week in Kars. There are many other things, contacts between peoples can be deepened further.”

He pointed to Turkish Airlines beginning daily flights to Yerevan on March 11, with a second daily service set to launch on May 15, and Pegasus already operating on the route. He also cited reciprocal scholarships for five university students from each country and visa facilitation measures for diplomatic and official passport holders.

Then he reflected on his own experience in Armenia. “I came to Yerevan at the beginning of last September. The attitude I encounter here today is very different from what I experienced on Sept. 11. People have begun to embrace the process much more. When Ruben and I first started, there was probably some hesitance, some timidity. Now even that is gone.”

Rubinyan, who serves as Kilic’s counterpart, made the stakes concrete from the other side of the same panel. He noted that Türkiye, Georgia, and Azerbaijan are already connected by rail and that Armenia is the missing link in that chain.

Closing that gap, he said, would create enormous opportunities not just bilaterally but for EU connectivity as well, and called this a historic opportunity that should not be wasted.

Week of firsts in Yerevan

The European Political Summit (EPC) itself witnessed many firsts. On May 5, Armenia and the EU held their first-ever summit, signing a joint declaration that ran to forty-four articles.

Buried within the dense diplomatic language was a line that mattered directly to Ankara: the EU explicitly endorsed the normalization of relations between Armenia and Türkiye, and supported the reopening of communications in the region.

The joint statement also acknowledged progress on the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) connectivity corridor, which runs through the Armenian territory and whose success depends, at least in part, on what happens between Ankara and Yerevan.

Türkiye was present at the EPC summit too, represented by Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz, the highest-level Turkish official visit to Yerevan in 18 years. On the sidelines, a separate and quieter moment took place: the signing of a protocol for the joint restoration of the Ani Bridge, a structure dating to the 11th and 12th centuries, with one footing in Türkiye and one in Armenia.

Its central span collapsed long ago. Kilic, who has been leading the normalization process since January 2022, said that moment alone showed how far things had come. “If someone had told us in January 2022 that we would reach this point today, no one would have believed it,” he said. “Frankly, we might not have believed it ourselves.”

A bridge whose middle is missing, waiting to be restored from both ends simultaneously. The normalization process, it turns out, works much the same way.

Ready, but not yet open

Kilic was careful not to overpromise on the border itself. “The border can be considered ready to open,” he said, “but there still are some bureaucratic and technical steps to be finalized. You cannot simply declare it open and allow people to cross. Fiber-optic cables need to be laid. Security personnel, customs officers, all such arrangements must be in place. Without completing all of this, opening the border just for the sake of saying it’s open would be meaningless.”

It is worth sitting with that word: meaningless. In a process this symbolically charged, where a joint bridge restoration protocol makes headlines across the region, where a vice president’s Yerevan visit is described as a “turning point,” the temptation to perform progress can outpace actual progress.

Kilic, to his credit, seemed wary of that. His insistence on calling this a trust-building process rather than a normalization process felt less like semantics and more like a warning against rushing the conclusion.

Last few kilometers

The Akhurik crossing looks just the same as it has for thirty-two years. Rusty wires, a gravel road running into green hills, a camouflaged post, a lone building in the distance. Nothing there announces that anything is about to change.

A short drive away at Akhuryan, the rails are intact, the switch lever frozen at position eleven, grass sprouting up between the sleepers.

A conductor once spent twenty years here as a guard, watching the lights of Türkiye from across the wire, waiting for a train that never came.

However, the talks are real. The momentum is real. The wire at Akhurik and the rails at Akhuryan are separated by just a few kilometers of road.

In diplomatic terms, that distance has taken 32 years to almost cross.

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