On September 21, 2019, Armenian leader Nikol Pachinian presided over the Independence Day celebrations in Gyumri, traditionally held in Yerevan. A strong symbolic gesture, which is supposed to mark the rebirth of the country's second largest city and to encourage tourism. Just a few years ago, Gyumri was a huge construction site bristling with cranes, bearing the scars of the terrible earthquake of 7 December 1988, whose epicentre was a few kilometres to the east, in Spitak, but which had devastated the city then called Leninakan, leaving 25,000 dead and tens of thousands homeless, housed for years in "domik" or containers. Although the city is still marked by this tragedy, most of the victims have been rehoused in houses built with the help of financial institutions and the diaspora, and the city is working to erase the traces of this tragedy. Gyumri, a former garrison town during the tsarist era, has preserved its historic centre, which is the most interesting part of the town; with its churches and streets, now pedestrianised, lined with beautiful buildings with a mixture of Russian and Armenian influences, it had been relatively spared, whereas the Soviet buildings, without charm, several storeys high, had not withstood the earthquake. Thus, paradoxically, with a thousand 18th and 19th century houses, the centre of Gyumri is the most extensive and preserved urban ensemble in Armenia

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Pictures and images Gyumri

Vestiges du séisme de 1988 à Gyumri. Marc Venema - Shutterstock.com
Vue sur Gyumri. VittoriaChe - iStockphoto.com
La ville de Gyumri fut nommée Léninakan pendant l'occupation soviétique. Everett Collection - Shutterstock.com
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