Travel Guide Stepanavan

Nestled at 1,360 m above sea level, in the valley of the Dzoraget River, surrounded by fir-covered mountains, Stepanavan is a quiet town about 30 km north-west of Vanadzor. It is said to have been founded in the 12th century by a prince of the Jalalian dynasty of Karabagh, who would have had his summer residence there, and who would have given it his name "Jalaloghli" (son of Jalal in Turkish), under which the town was known until the beginning of the 20th century. No traces of this past have been preserved, except for the Sourp Sarkis Church in the centre of the town. Renamed Stepanavan in 1923 after the famous Bolshevik revolutionary Stepan Chahoumian, to whom a curious museum is dedicated, it was deeply marked by Soviet urbanism and then damaged by the 1988 earthquake. No monumental interest therefore, but the site is superb and the region has kept many vestiges of medieval architecture The Pushkin Pass, at 2,030 m a.s.l. on the Bazoum range, is the crossing point for Stepanavan. It is so named because on June 11, 1829, the Russian poet Pushkin, on his way to Erzeroum, met there the funeral procession bringing back to Russia the remains of another Russian poet and diplomat, Griboedov, lynched in Teheran for having signed the treaty by which Persia ceded Armenia to Russia. In his Journey to Erzeroum, Pushkin gives us his impressions of this region which impressed him greatly.