Stepanavan: a Polish engineer's dendropark and the fortress of Lori Berd

Stepanavan is a town of 15,000 people on a plateau in Lori, at 1,400 metres, surrounded by forest and with the freshest summer air in Armenia. It has no monuments in the centre: it has a park on the outskirts unlike any other in the country and, four kilometres away, a medieval fortress above a canyon. Between the two you get a couple of hours that greatly improve the road between Vanadzor and the Georgian border.

The dendropark

It was planted in 1931 by Edmund Leonowicz, a Polish forestry engineer working for the Soviet government, on 35 hectares of beech and oak forest outside the village of Gyulagarak. The idea was to test which trees from other continents could stand the Lori climate, and the answer was almost all of them: today there are hundreds of species, with sequoias, cedars, firs from Siberia and North America and pines from everywhere, along avenues that cut through the native forest. It is a place to wander for an hour with no particular aim, best in autumn, when the beeches turn red and the conifers stay green. There is a cheap entrance fee and a café.

Lori Berd

Four kilometres from the town, on a spur between two canyons, lie the ruins of the fortress that David Anhoghin founded around 1065 as the capital of the kingdom of Lori, one of the small Armenian kingdoms of the time. Walls with towers, a church, a domed bathhouse and a medieval bridge at the bottom of the canyon remain. There is no ticket office and hardly any visitors; the view over the Dzoraget river is the reason to go.

The town

It was called Jalaloghli until 1924, when it was renamed after Stepan Shahumyan, the Armenian Bolshevik shot in 1918 with the Baku commissars; the house where he lived is a small museum. The 1988 earthquake, the Spitak one, damaged the town and it still shows. There is a market, a couple of cafés and guesthouses to sleep in.

How to fit it in

Stepanavan is about 140 km from Yerevan, two and a half hours via Vanadzor, and half an hour from the main road to Georgia. The usual thing is to stop here on the way between Vanadzor and Alaverdi, or to spend the night and see the monasteries of the Debed canyon the next day: Kobayr, Haghpat and Sanahin are an hour away. With dendropark, Lori Berd and lunch, half a day.

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