The Dilijan you know today with wooden verandas, coffee shops didn’t start under Soviet rule, or even the Russian Empire. This is the story of how the land above the Aghstev River went from a Kura-Araxes settlement to a royal getaway for Armenian kings, long before it had its current name.

Part 1: Ancient Times and Great Armenia

People Were Making Pottery in Dilijan Thousands of Years Before Armenia Existed

Archaeologists trace the earliest signs of life in this area back to the Kura-Araxes culture, around the third millennium BC. People here already farmed with simple wooden plows, raised livestock, and made tools out of metal — sickles, axes, spearheads — though stone tools were still part of everyday life. Pottery was a real point of pride: by hand, they shaped thousands of vessels and jugs, each one carved or pressed with geometric patterns.

A King’s Signature in Stone 

Artashes I, 2nd Century BC

On the road from Dilijan toward Ijevan, near the village of Tekhut, two stones with Aramaic inscriptions were found. King Artashes I placed them there — the same king who declared Great Armenia an independent state in 189 BC. The stones marked the edges of his kingdom: a rare case where a 2,000-year-old border survives not in some old chronicle, but as a real, physical object.

Not Just a Province, but a Royal Getaway 

The Arshakuni Dynasty and Hovk, 1st Century AD

The area became part of Great Armenia as the Varazhnunik district of the Ayrarat province, and for a long time it stayed just that — a province. Everything changed when the Arshakuni dynasty took power: the lands along the Aghstev River, including Dilijan itself — then known as Hovk — became a royal residence and hunting ground.

The World’s First Christian State

301 AD

Under Trdat III, also from the Arshakuni line, Armenia officially made Christianity its state religion. For Dilijan — where the monasteries of Goshavank and Haghartsin would later rise — this marked the start of an entirely different culture.

 

But centuries later, a unified Armenia ceased to exist: by the end of the 4th century, the country was split between Byzantium and Persia. What happened to Dilijan next — that’s the next part of the story.

Dilijan has never struggled to feed a visitor. There are barbecue grills, family kitchens, cafés for long coffees and tables that seem to appear wherever the mountain air becomes particularly convincing. But until recently, there was a gap in the town’s culinary map: a place built around the spices, colours and slow hospitality of India.

That place is Haveli, a new North Indian restaurant in a two-storey old Dilijan house. Its founder, Inna, does not describe it as simply a business or a menu with a new flag attached. For her, it is “a little India through my eyes” – and, just as importantly, a home where nobody should feel hurried.

The idea is more personal than a trend. It began with a childhood fascination with history, geography, ancient civilisations and the many ways people build a life. Later, as she met friends from different countries, India stopped being a distant point on a map. In 2010, Inna travelled there to meet the parents of friends. A few days in, she had a surprisingly clear feeling: she had fallen in love with the country.

“I felt at home there,” she says. “Even better than at home, honestly.”

A restaurant that took its time arriving

Haveli did not appear overnight. Inna has worked in hospitality for around sixteen years and continues to do so. Like many people who spend enough time taking care of other people’s evenings, she had long carried the thought of one day creating a place on her own terms: a place that would work the way she believed hospitality should work.

Inna has lived and worked in Dilijan for the past twelve years. She speaks about the town not as a seasonal business opportunity, but with the quiet affection of someone who knows its rhythm: the clean air, the forests close to the streets, the relative calm and the feeling that the city is becoming more confident year by year.

Dilijan is developing quickly, but it still has room for places with a specific personality. A restaurant can be one of them. It can give visitors another reason to stay for dinner, bring neighbours together after work and make a familiar street feel slightly more alive. Inna wanted her small business to do some of that work – to make the town better, and people a little happier.

Of course, the route from “why not?” to opening a restaurant is rarely poetic for very long. There were unexpected questions, practical problems and plenty of moments when the plan had to be rebuilt while it was already moving. But, as Inna puts it, when you have a goal, the obstacles become part of the story rather than the ending.

An Armenian haveli with an Indian heart

The name tells you a great deal about the ambition of the place. A haveli is a mansion or small palace – a word often associated with historic homes in India. Haveli in Dilijan is not trying to reproduce one of those houses brick by brick. That would be a strange mission for an old Armenian home in the mountains, and the building has enough character of its own.

Instead, the restaurant works with a kind of parallel. It occupies a two-storey, old Dilijan house: a building with the scale and intimacy of a private home rather than a glossy dining room designed to move people through at speed. Inna calls it an Armenian haveli, and the phrase fits. It is her small, beautiful palace – only with an Indian heart.

That idea shapes the atmosphere as much as the food. A guest should be able to come in, settle down, eat well, talk for as long as needed and forget that they are following a timetable. The ambition is simple: you are welcomed, you are fed something good, you have a conversation, and the evening goes on from there.

For a town where many visitors arrive looking for a pause, that feels like a very Dilijan kind of luxury.

North India, as Inna came to know it

The menu is mainly inspired by North Indian cuisine, reflecting the regions of India where Inna spent most of her time. That distinction matters. Indian food is often treated abroad as one large, convenient category – a menu label that somehow has to contain a vast country and its many regional traditions. Haveli begins from a more honest place: the food is a tribute to the India Inna knows personally, to its people and to the traditions she encountered there.

There is also a nice irony in bringing this food to Dilijan. The town is known for misty forests, mineral water and stone-and-wood architecture – not exactly the first landscape most people picture when they think of North Indian cooking. But that contrast is part of the charm. Travel does not always happen by covering more kilometres. Sometimes it happens when a familiar town gains a new smell from its kitchen.

Respect is the main ingredient

Ask Inna about the principle behind Haveli, and she does not begin with a secret recipe. She says: respect.

Respect for yourself, for food, for guests, for the team and for the work behind every detail. In her view, the rest grows out of it: the quality and quantity of a dish, the way it is presented, the care in service, the mood at a table. These things are not separate departments. They are all ways of telling a guest that their time matters.

That is why Haveli is meant to be more than a place where someone tries Indian food once and takes a photo of it. It is a space with an atmosphere – warm, calm and open. Inna wants every person who enters, whatever their nationality or religion, to understand something of why India means so much to her. Not through a lecture, but through the feeling of being received well.

In its first weeks, Haveli was already welcoming a mixed crowd: guests from India, Arab countries, Europe, Russia and Armenia. For a new restaurant, this is a particularly meaningful early test. Food can be judged very quickly. People may disagree about politics, playlists and whether dinner should begin at six or ten, but they tend to know when a meal and a room have been made with care.

Before the menu: what people used to eat in Dilijan

Ask what to eat in Dilijan today and the answers arrive quickly: khash, khorovats, gata, tolma. All are worth trying. None, however, tells the whole story of how people here actually ate.

The older food memory of Dilijan is less photogenic. It lives in braids of dried wild sorrel, jars of pickled mushrooms, beans stored for winter and fermented milk made to last long after the cows had left their summer pastures. It tastes of nettles in spring, mushrooms after rain, rosehips in autumn and grains when almost nothing fresh is growing.

This makes sense once you look outside the kitchen. Dilijan developed inside one of Armenia’s richest forest landscapes. The Ministry of Environment lists 902 species of plants in Dilijan National Park, while Armenia’s official tourism portal describes Tavush as a region particularly rich in wild edible herbs, berries and mushrooms. In other words, the forest was never just scenery. It was part of the pantry.

And that is probably the best way to understand traditional Dilijan food: not as a list of recipes, but as a system built around seasons, preservation and family knowledge.

Spring began with what appeared on the ground

After a mountain winter, the first exciting ingredient was not meat. It was green.

Local culinary records describe nettle soup as one of Dilijan’s characteristic spring dishes, cooked with potatoes, egg and butter. Mallow also went into soups and stews. Sindrik – Solomon’s seal (a wild plant with asparagus-like young shoots) was boiled and eaten simply, often with salt or matsun. Then there was aveluk, the wild sorrel that appears across Eastern Armenian cooking.

The striking thing about these plants is that they blur the modern distinction between “ingredient” and “something growing by the path”. Ethnobotanical research in Armenia has documented a remarkably large repertoire of wild foods, while the Smithsonian magazine has described the harvesting of edible greens as a practice passed through generations.

Aveluk is a perfect example. Fresh leaves are only the beginning. Traditionally they are dried and braided, which changes their taste and allows them to be stored. In Dilijan they have been used for soups, salads and fried dishes: one local version, prtuk, thickens an aveluk soup with flour or small pieces of dough.

So spring did not simply produce spring food. It produced part of winter’s food too.

The forest had its own mushroom season

If one ingredient deserves to be called distinctly Dilijani, mushrooms have a strong case.

They are far less central to the stereotypical image of Armenian cuisine than lavash, grilled meat or cheese, yet the humid forests around Dilijan are exceptionally suited to them. The Smithsonian’s reporting on Armenian foraging specifically points travellers towards the mushroom-rich forests around Goshavank, while Armenia’s tourism authority singles out mushroom diversity as one of Tavush’s culinary characteristics.

Traditionally, mushrooms were not treated as a gourmet curiosity. They were simply seasonal food. What could not be eaten immediately could be salted or marinated for later.

That knowledge mattered. Knowing which mushroom to pick was part of knowing the landscape, much like knowing where the best berries or herbs appeared. Today, of course, amateur foraging is another matter: the Armenian 1000 Leaf project explicitly warns against eating anything that has not been positively identified. The culinary tradition is worth exploring, guessing your way through wild fungi is not.

Summer was partly about preparing for winter

A summer kitchen in Dilijan had two jobs: eat what was fresh and make sure some of it survived.

The forests around the town contain wild fruit and nut species including walnut, cornelian cherry, plum, pear, hazelnut and hawthorn. Fruit became preserves, herbs were dried for cooking and tea, mushrooms were pickled, rosehips harvested later in the year could become tea, jam, juice or the local preparation known as masramatsun.

Even green beans could move from summer vegetable to winter ingredient. Local Dilijan culinary documentation records a dried form known locally as khasham lobí: the beans were stored, then soaked before being cooked in cold-season soups.

Milk had a winter plan too

Perhaps the cleverest transformation happened with dairy.

Matsun is still so ordinary in Armenia that it is easy to overlook how useful fermentation was before refrigeration. But Dilijan’s pastoral traditions went one step further with choratan: matsun concentrated and dried so that it could be stored for long periods, then reconstituted when needed.

Food-science research describes choratan as precisely that – a long-keeping dried form of matsun that can later become a creamy base again.

Local Dilijan accounts add the human geography. Pastoral families would spend the summer higher in the mountains with their livestock and process the season’s milk into products that could survive the colder months. Choratan could later become a soup, tan with mint or part of khankyal, served with fried onions.

And here the idea of a single “authentic recipe” starts to fall apart. Local documentation explicitly notes that families had their own ways of using choratan. That is how domestic cuisines usually work: the name of the dish may be shared, but the important details belong to a household.

Winter food was deliberately unglamorous

Once the fresh season ended, Dilijan cooking became heavier, slower and more dependent on the pantry.

Beans, wheat and corn mattered. So did the things prepared months earlier: dried aveluk, dried beans, pickled mushrooms, preserves and choratan.

One Tavush cold-season dish is korkot, a substantial combination of wheat and pork. Another local preparation, tsandil or khatkhash, combines corn, wheat and beans. Bean soups paired pulses with grains such as dzavar. These are not the dishes most likely to dominate a restaurant Instagram feed, but that is precisely the point. They were designed around satiety, storage and what a household actually had.

The menu was a calendar.

The villages around Dilijan added their own flavours

Dilijan’s food memory was never sealed inside the town limits.

Follow the road towards Vanadzor and you reach Fioletovo, in neighbouring Lori province, the largest Molokan village in Armenia. The Russian Christian community has lived in the area since the 19th century, and its food traditions developed beside those of Armenian communities in and around the Dilijan basin.

Sauerkraut became such a characteristic product of Fioletovo that journalist Mark Grigoryan described fields of cabbage and the finished fermented cabbage as a calling card of the village. His documentation of Molokan family life also records homemade noodles – rolled thin, briefly dried over heat and later cooked in chicken or beef broth – as an essential wedding food. Today homemade jams and blini remain part of the village table.

Another layer arrived through migration. Dilijan culinary records associate the use of dzavar in one local bean soup with Armenians from the Middle East who settled in the town in the 1940s. This belongs to a much larger historical movement: during the mass repatriations of 1946-1948, tens of thousands of diaspora Armenians came to Soviet Armenia, many from Syria and Lebanon. People moved, and recipes moved with them.

Family recipes were less about measurements than memory

This may be the hardest part of Dilijan cuisine to put on a restaurant menu.

Traditional food knowledge often did not live in cookbooks. It lived in repetition: which greens to pick, how long to dry them, when the milk was right, how sour the pickle should become, whether a soup needed another handful of grain.

That makes “family recipe” slightly misleading. Often what was inherited was not a fixed formula but a method, and the confidence to adjust it without measuring anything.

Two neighbouring houses could therefore make the “same” food and still insist that the other house was doing it slightly wrong. Some culinary traditions are universal after all.

Restaurant Dilijan and home Dilijan are not quite the same place

None of this means that restaurant food is somehow fake.

Restaurants have a different job. A visitor arriving for one evening wants a meal, not six months of agricultural context. Familiar Armenian dishes travel well onto menus, a jar prepared in September for a family kitchen does not.

Even wild mushrooms, now quite visible in Dilijan restaurants, tend to appear in restaurant-friendly forms: with eggs, in soups, with potatoes, pasta or arishta. The domestic food system behind them is much harder to serve on a plate.

This gap exists elsewhere in Armenia too. Smithsonian researchers have noted that some traditional dishes built around wild greens remain far easier to find in private kitchens than in tourist restaurants. Local people do not need to order them: they already know someone who makes them.

And perhaps this is the useful distinction. Restaurant cuisine asks, “What should we cook for a guest today?” Traditional home cooking asked a different question: “What is available now, and how can we make it last?”

Dilijan’s gastronomic memory was never just a menu.

It was a way of living with the landscape.

Long before coworking spaces, artist residencies and creative-tech labs appeared in Dilijan, poets, composers, painters and filmmakers were already coming here to work. The tools have changed. The reason to come has not.

In June 1908, the composer Komitas wrote to poet Hovhannes Tumanyan about a problem familiar to anyone who has ever tried to finish a creative project: they needed to get away somewhere and finally do the work.

Komitas suggested Dilijan.

The plan was practical rather than romantic. They could spend around ten days there working on the libretto of Anush, Tumanyan’s poem that Komitas hoped to turn into an opera. There was no talk of “creative energy” or finding inspiration. They simply needed time, concentration and a place to work together.

More than a century later, this still feels like one of the best explanations for Dilijan’s relationship with creative people. Artists did not keep coming here only because the town was beautiful. Armenia has no shortage of dramatic mountains. What Dilijan repeatedly offered was something more useful – distance without isolation. Quiet enough to disappear into your work, connected enough to meet other people doing interesting things.

Private summer houses became Soviet creativity resorts. Composers were followed by filmmakers. Industrial buildings became art laboratories. Today the same town has TUMO students making animated films, artists creating installations, engineers prototyping at a Fab Lab and remote workers opening laptops within walking distance of the forest.

Dilijan did not become a creative city overnight. It has been rehearsing the role for more than a hundred years.

Before creative residencies had a name

The first version of creative Dilijan looked less like an institution and more like a summer house with an unusually good guest list.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Dilijan had developed a reputation as a mountain resort. Wealthy families from Tbilisi built summer homes here, among them was philanthropist and cultural activist Princess Mariam Tumanyan. Her house became a meeting place for Armenian intellectuals and artists, associated with figures including Hovhannes Tumanyan, Alexander Shirvanzade, Avetik Isahakyan and Armen Tigranyan.

This matters because Dilijan’s artistic reputation did not begin with Soviet cultural policy. The pattern was already there: leave the city for summer, move into the forest, and discover that half the people you wanted to talk to had apparently had the same idea.

Komitas’s 1908 letter fits neatly into this world. Dilijan was somewhere work could happen precisely because life slowed down without becoming intellectually empty.

Mariam Tumanyan’s house later had an appropriate second life. Painter and cultural figure Hovhannes Sharambeyan lived there and helped transform it into Dilijan’s folk art museum in 1979. Following restoration, the building reopened in 2026 as the Armenian Textile Museum, combining historical collections with workshops, music, festivals and contemporary craft.

A former summer salon becoming an active cultural centre more than a century later is almost too perfect a metaphor for the town.

Then the Soviet Union made the retreat official

If pre-Soviet Dilijan developed its cultural reputation organically, the USSR put infrastructure around it. Across the Soviet Union, Creativity Houses were established for writers, architects, artists, composers and filmmakers. They were part workplace, part sanatorium, part professional club: places where members of creative unions could live for weeks, work individually and meet colleagues away from city life.

Dilijan proved particularly suited to the model. In 1963, the House of Composers’ Creativity opened in the wooded hills outside town, largely through the efforts of Armenian composer Edward Mirzoyan. It began with a small collection of cottages and later expanded to include a library, cinema, restaurant, sports facilities and the Beethoven concert hall.

Even its architecture explains what the place was for. The cottages were separated so that one composer’s piano or rehearsals would not destroy another’s concentration. The idea was simple: give people privacy when they need it and company when they don’t. It worked remarkably well.

The guest list became slightly absurd

At some point, reading the names associated with Dilijan’s Composers’ House starts to feel like opening several cultural encyclopedias at once.

Dmitri Shostakovich came here. So did Benjamin Britten, Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya. Armenian composers including Aram Khachaturian and Arno Babajanyan were closely associated with the resort. Rodion Shchedrin, Giya Kancheli, painter Martiros Saryan and ballerina Maya Plisetskaya also appeared in its orbit.

The anecdotes make the place feel considerably less solemn than the guest list suggests. Local histories remember composers playing football, Plisetskaya collecting mushrooms and Saryan sitting among the apple trees. One story has Shostakovich refereeing a football match and protesting whenever a badly aimed ball knocked apples from the trees.

Which is a useful context. Dilijan was not a remote monastery where Great Men sat alone and produced masterpieces on command. It was social. And sometimes the work followed.

Shostakovich’s stays associated in local histories with work on his Ninth String Quartet and music for Grigori Kozintsev’s “Hamlet”. Benjamin Britten’s 1965 visit is more firmly documented: while staying in Dilijan with Peter Pears, Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya, he composed his Pushkin song cycle “The Poet’s Echo”. Armenian musical sounds encountered during the trip found their way into the piece.

Dilijan was not simply hosting cultural celebrities after their important work was finished elsewhere. Some of the work was being made here. And the tradition has not entirely disappeared. Beethoven Hall continues to host concerts and contemporary music programmes, including new generations of Armenian composers.

It was never only about composers

The name “House of Composers” makes Dilijan’s cultural life sound more neatly divided by profession than it really was.

Painters, writers, musicians and performers moved through the same social world. Martiros Saryan’s connection to the Composers’ House is one example. Hovhannes Sharambeyan’s life in Dilijan is another. Writers including Tumanyan and Yeghishe Charents also belonged to the broader intellectual history of the town.

This cross-pollination may explain more about Dilijan than any list of famous visitors. Creative communities become interesting when categories get messy. A composer meets a painter. A writer shares dinner with a musician. Someone comes to rest, stays for three weeks and begins a project they had not planned to make.

The town became valuable not simply because famous artists visited it, but because they kept encountering one another here.

Cinema got its own house

By the late Soviet period, music no longer had the retreat business to itself.

A separate Cinematographers’ Creativity House was developed in Dilijan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It belonged to the same Soviet system: purpose-built environments where cultural professionals could work and spend extended periods outside their everyday routines.

By then, Dilijan’s reputation as a workplace for the cultural intelligentsia had literally become architectural. Cinema also gave the town one of its most persistent pieces of popular mythology.

The 1977 Soviet comedy “Mimino” made Rubik Khachikyan, played by Frunzik Mkrtchyan, a proud son of Dilijan, and turned his boast about the local water into a line generations of viewers still associate with the town. The film was not actually a Dilijan movie, the connection comes through its character. But in 2011, Dilijan made that fictional relationship physical by installing a monument to Rubik, Valiko and Volokhov in the city centre.

Today screen culture has taken another form. Dilijan-based Ditaran works with immersive media, 360-degree fulldome films, projection mapping and exhibitions. It is a technological leap from the Soviet filmmakers’ retreat, but the basic premise – making visual culture in a small mountain town – remains familiar.

After the USSR, the idea escaped from the cottages

The collapse of the Soviet Union badly affected creativity houses across the region. Funding disappeared, buildings deteriorated and Dilijan’s cultural ecosystem inevitably changed. But the more interesting story is how the format of creativity changed with it.

In 2016, the Dilijan Arts Observatory brought artists, designers, musicians, cultural historians and environmental researchers to town for several weeks of interdisciplinary work. Instead of placing everyone in idyllic cottages, organisers made the former Soviet Impuls electronics factory their headquarters.

Participants explored local craft, music, architecture, food, botany and Soviet heritage. Dilijan itself became the subject: not a picturesque background, but something to study, question and work with.

There is a satisfying symmetry here. During the Soviet era, the state created special places where cultural workers could escape ordinary production. Decades later, artists entered an abandoned space of Soviet production – a factory – and turned it into a cultural laboratory.

Dilijan had moved from retreat to research site.

The residency moved into the neighbourhood

That idea continues to evolve. In 2025, Dilijan Space and UWC Dilijan developed the “Common Senses” artist residency around a different question: what happens if visiting artists work not simply in Dilijan, but with its neighbourhoods and residents?

Artists researched local histories, met inhabitants and developed public works responding to different parts of town. Dilijan Space reflects the same approach. Its exhibitions combine historical artefacts, photographs, architecture and multimedia with projects about the city’s possible futures. It treats Dilijan less as a finished heritage object and more as an ongoing experiment.

That is an important shift from the classic artist colony. You no longer need to leave the city behind to become creative. The city – its buildings, memories, abandoned factories and changing neighbourhoods – can itself become the material.

The composers now have neighbours with laptops

The most visible change is that Dilijan’s creative vocabulary has expanded beyond the traditional arts.

TUMO opened its Dilijan centre in 2013, bringing teenagers into creative technology through animation, filmmaking, music, design and other digital disciplines.

A few years later, Fab Lab Dilijan added digital fabrication, 3D printing and prototyping, connecting artists with engineers, educators, scientists and developers. Its ambition is straightforward: to help turn Dilijan into a “maker city”.

The same logic is appearing in more everyday forms. Coworking spaces such as Toon Armeni sell the possibility of working remotely while living next to the forest. New cultural developments propose artist studios, residency spaces and outdoor work areas.

A century ago, someone arriving in Dilijan with unfinished work might have carried sheet music or a manuscript. Now it could just as easily be a laptop.

So why Dilijan?

It is tempting to give the forest all the credit. The landscape clearly matters. Dilijan had already become a resort before its major cultural institutions appeared: wooded mountains, cooler summers and enough distance from urban routine to make ordinary time feel slightly suspended.

But beautiful scenery alone does not create a creative town. Infrastructure does.

Mariam Tumanyan offered a house and a social circle. The Soviet system offered cottages and concert halls. The Arts Observatory offered an abandoned factory and an international network. TUMO offers technology and mentors. Fab Lab offers tools. Residencies offer time. Coworkings offer desks – and other people avoiding their desks.

The technology changes, but the formula remains remarkably stable: give people enough distance to think. Give them somewhere to work. Then make sure interesting people keep bumping into one another.

That may be Dilijan’s most durable cultural inheritance. The town was never simply a beautiful place that happened to attract artists. For more than a century, it has repeatedly built reasons for them to stay.

A woman walks through a dark forest, calling for her missing son.

“Dili, jan! Dili, jan!”

Her voice disappears among the trees, but the words remain. According to Dilijan’s best-known legend, this desperate call eventually became the name of the town.

It is a beautiful explanation – perhaps too beautiful. The story has everything a good legend needs: forbidden love, loss, a grieving mother and the deep forests of Dilijan. It also has one serious problem: no early document tells it.

The true origin of the name “Dilijan” is still uncertain. What survives is a mixture of folklore, historical records, personal names and later theories. Some parts can be documented. Others belong entirely to the world of storytelling.

The legend of the shepherd Dili

The most popular version begins with a young shepherd named Dili. He falls in love with the daughter of a wealthy lord, forgetting (or choosing to ignore) the difference in social status between them.

When the girl’s father discovers the relationship, he decides to get rid of the shepherd. In some versions, Dili is taken into the forest and killed. In others, he is deliberately abandoned among the mountains, where no one will be able to find him. Dili’s mother searches for her only son for days, walking through the forest and crying: “Dili, jan! Dili, jan!”

In Armenian speech, “jan” is a common warm term of affection added after a person’s name. Depending on the context, it can be understood as “dear” or “beloved”. It is still commonly used when speaking to family members, friends and people one feels close to.

The phrase therefore sounds completely natural. A mother calling “Dili, jan” is emotionally and linguistically believable. According to the legend, her repeated cry echoed through the valley for so long that the surrounding place became known as Dilijan.

A story that changes with every teller

There is no single fixed version of the legend. The central figure may be a shepherd or simply a local young man. Sometimes it is his mother who searches for him, in other retellings, it is his father or other relatives. One story blames the powerful father of Dili’s beloved, while another says that Dili became lost and was killed by wolves.

The details change, but the emotional structure remains the same: someone named Dili disappears, and someone who loves him continues to call his name. The changing versions do not make the legend meaningless. They simply show that it is folklore rather than a verified historical account.

What the written record actually says

The documents are far less romantic.

One of the earliest clearly verifiable written forms of the town’s name appears in the travel account of the French traveller Jean Chardin. During his journey through the Caucasus towards Persia in 1672-1673, Chardin passed through a settlement that he recorded as “Dely-Jan”. He described it as a village of approximately 300 houses, situated beside the river that is now known as the Aghstev. The description suggests that it was already a substantial settlement rather than a recently named stopping point.

Chardin’s account is important because it confirms that a recognisable form of the name was in use by the seventeenth century. But it does not explain where the name came from.

A sixteenth-century clue: was Dilijan originally a person’s name?

Another theory connects the town not with a spoken phrase, but with a real personal name. In an 1895 historical and geographical study, Armenian historian Mesrop Smbatyants reported information about a man named “Melik Dilijan”, described as the grandson of Hovhannes and the son of Ter-Matevos. According to the text cited by later historians, he moved from Gavar to Ghshlagh with his family and built a bridge there in 1544.

A village could have been named after a landowner, local leader, founder or influential family. Such a development would not be unusual. However, there is no surviving document that directly says: “This settlement was named after this man.” The personal-name theory is therefore more historically grounded than the romantic legend, but it is still a theory rather than a final answer.

Was there once a place called “Little Dili”?

Modern histories of Dilijan often refer to a medieval settlement called Puchur Dili, or ‘Little Dili’, and attribute the name to Kirakos Gandzaketsi. If this identification is correct, it could mean that a name related to Dili was already attached to the area during the Middle Ages – long before Chardin’s visit and before the sixteenth-century personal name recorded by Smbatyants.

The difficulty is that the exact passage is not consistently provided in popular retellings, making the claim hard to verify from readily accessible editions of Gandzaketsi’s work. It is better treated as an interesting historical possibility, not as an established first mention of Dilijan.

The same caution applies to attempts to identify modern Dilijan directly with historical “Hovk”, an area associated with royal summer residences and hunting grounds. The wider territory may have formed part of historical Hovk, but there is no clear evidence that the present town itself once carried that name.

Stagecoaches, sweet speech and other popular explanations

Another popular story links Dilijan with the French word “diligence”, meaning a stagecoach. Some local retellings connect it with European missionaries travelling through the Aghstev Valley in the seventeenth century. No documentary evidence shows that they named (or renamed) the settlement, however, so the resemblance is best treated as folk etymology rather than historical explanation.

Another popular interpretation claims that “Dili jan” means something like “sweet tongue” and refers to the pleasant speech or dialect of local residents. This explanation is closer to wordplay than academic etymology. It may express local pride, but it does not establish the historical origin of the name.

These theories are examples of folk etymology: people hear familiar words inside an old or unclear name and create a story that explains them.

So where did the name Dilijan come from?

The exact answer remains unknown.

By the seventeenth century, a recognisable form of the name was already being used for a large settlement. Historical references also suggest that Dilijan may previously have existed as a personal or family name. An even earlier connection with a medieval “Little Dili” is possible, although it requires stronger primary-source confirmation.

The most famous “Dili, jan” story belongs to folklore. There is no historical evidence that a grieving mother’s call literally created the town’s name.

But that does not mean historians have destroyed the legend. They have simply placed it where it belongs: not in the town’s official birth certificate, but in its cultural memory. The documents preserve the name. The legend gives it a voice.

Apicius Armenia is an innovative center for hospitality and culinary education, opened in September 2025 in Dilijan, Armenia.

The project is being realized through the collaboration between the Green Rock Foundation and the Apicius International School of Hospitality, aiming to bring European-standard education in the hospitality sector to Armenia.

The project’s primary goal is to provide high-quality hospitality education at the regional level, based on hands-on learning.

From the first day, students worked on real-world industry challenges, gaining practical knowledge and skills necessary for a successful international career.

For more information: apicius.am

Problem Statement

Dilijan continues to face challenges related to a growing population of stray dogs. Many dogs are unsterilized and unvaccinated, which results in uncontrolled population growth, increased risk of disease, and concerns among residents about safety. Community perceptions are further shaped by misinformation and long-standing myths about sterilization, feeding practices, and dog behavior. At the same time, Dilijan lacks a systematic approach to humane dog management and public education. Despite these challenges, the town has strong potential to become a model for sustainable and humane stray-dog management, thanks to an engaged community, and existing awareness campaigns launched by GRF.

Goal of the Project

To establish a humane, effective, and sustainable model for managing Dilijan’s stray-dog population through sterilization, vaccination, community education, and long-term monitoring, thereby ensuring healthier dogs, a safer environment, and improved coexistence between people and animals.

1. By December 2026, significantly reduce the number of unsterilized street dogs in Dilijan through a continuous sterilization program implemented with veterinary partners.
2. By the end of 2026, ensure a broad vaccination coverage of stray dogs, decreasing risks of infectious diseases affecting animals and the public.
3. Throughout 2026, produce and disseminate a series of educational materials that address myths about dogs, promote safe behavior, encourage responsible ownership, and highlight humane dog-care practices.
4. By mid-2026, develop a small yet functional network of volunteers, responsible owners, and foster families actively supporting the project.
5. Throughout the year, maintain an updated record of sterilized and vaccinated dogs to support an evidence-based, traceable management system.

Project Description

The DiliDog City project will operate through three integrated components.

The first focuses on veterinary interventions, including sterilization, vaccination, deworming, and identification of street dogs. These activities will be carried out in cooperation with trained veterinarians and supported by a clear monitoring system to track each dog’s status.

The second component is a public education campaign designed to address widespread misconceptions and provide practical knowledge. Through videos, posts, interviews, and expert commentary, the campaign will explain why sterilization is humane and necessary, how to interact safely with street dogs, what responsible ownership means, and how fostering and adoption can support a healthier dog community.

The third component emphasizes community engagement. Residents, business owners, and volunteers will be invited to participate in awareness actions, fostering programs, and reporting mechanisms. This approach strengthens local ownership and encourages the community to become an active partner in animal-welfare initiatives.

Expected Results

By the end of 2026, Dilijan will have a more stable and healthier dog population, with a reduction in uncontrolled breeding and disease risks. Residents will have improved knowledge and confidence regarding street-dog behavior and humane treatment, leading to a shift in community attitudes. A core group of trained volunteers and supporters will form the basis for long-term sustainability. The town will benefit from a cleaner, safer, and more balanced environment, while GRF positions Dilijan as a leading model for ethical stray-dog management in Armenia.

Sustainability

The project creates a replicable and long-term model. The educational content remains available online for ongoing public learning, while sterilization and vaccination reduce the need for future large-scale interventions. The volunteer and community network established through the project forms a foundation for future growth, and the structured monitoring system ensures continuity and transparency.

For more information: greenrock.foundation

The 100 Women of Dilijan project aims to identify, document, and showcase the stories, experiences, and contributions of the women of Dilijan to the development of their community.

The project brings together women of different ages, professions, and backgrounds, highlighting their roles in the cultural, educational, social, and economic life of the town. Each story reflects not only an individual journey but also the identity, values, and vision for the future of Dilijan.

The main goal of the project is to increase the visibility of women, encourage mutual support, and create a platform that preserves and shares the living stories of the community. It seeks to strengthen intergenerational connections, foster a sense of belonging, and recognize the important role women play in shaping community life.

The project also addresses the limited representation of women’s achievements and experiences by creating a new format for preserving cultural memory and community heritage. Beyond documenting the present, it creates a valuable archive for future generations.

As part of the initiative, three photo exhibitions will be organized in stages, each featuring groups of 25 participants. The final and largest exhibition will bring together all 100 women, creating a collective portrait of the achievements, stories, and strength of the women of Dilijan.

The 100 Women of Dilijan project reflects the core values of Green Rock Foundation: community development, inclusiveness, preservation of cultural heritage, women’s empowerment, and celebrating the unique identity of Dilijan through human stories.

For more information: greenrock.foundation