Travel Guide Kapan

If the Tatev Monastery had enough influence in the Middle Ages to attract Frankish painters from the far West to create their frescoes, as the chronicles of the time remind us, it is for much more prosaic reasons that the French ventured into these remote regions at the beginning of the 20th century, more exactly in the locality of Kapan, about 40 km south of Tatev. It was the rich copper mines in the Zanguézour Mountains that attracted French engineers to this small locality nestled in a steep valley at an altitude of 750 m, where they left some traces of their presence, with establishments built for the mine's employees. But the town only really developed during the Soviet period, and it has kept its appearance