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.