Goris

The Goris basin has been inhabited for a very long time: the soft volcanic rock of the surrounding slopes was hollowed out for houses, byres and storerooms, and the settlement known as Old Goris or Kores lived in and among those caves for centuries. Medieval Syunik was a princely domain with a strong church presence, and Tatev, on its promontory above the Vorotan gorge to the west, was both a monastery and a university whose scholars shaped Armenian philosophy and manuscript painting in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The modern town is a deliberate creation. After the region passed to the Russian Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century, the administration founded a new town in 1870 and built it out from 1876 to a German architect's plan on the valley floor below the caves, on a rectangular grid with wide streets, plots for gardens and houses built of local stone with tiled roofs. Families moved down from the rock dwellings over the following decades, and Goris became the administrative and market centre of the district, with schools, a printing tradition and a reputation for producing writers, among them Axel Bakunts.

The twentieth century made it a Soviet district town with light industry and a carpet works. After 1991 it sat on the main road linking Armenia with Nagorno-Karabakh and grew in importance as a border and transit town. Following the 2020 war and the departure of the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023, Goris was the main destination for the more than 100,000 people who crossed into Armenia in a week that September, and many have settled in Syunik. The town remains the main centre between Yerevan and the far south.

Goris has an outsized literary reputation for a town of its size. Axel Bakunts, born here in 1899, wrote the stories that fixed this landscape in Armenian literature, and his house is kept as a museum; other writers and academics came from the same streets, and the town is proud of having been a place of schools and printing rather than of trade alone. The stone architecture is the other point of pride, and restoration of the old houses, gates and roofs is a live local concern.

Syunik keeps its own dialect, strongly marked and often good-humouredly imitated elsewhere in Armenia, along with village traditions of beekeeping, distilling fruit vodka and making preserves that fill every household's autumn. Church life centres on the town's nineteenth-century church, and the great monasteries of the province — Tatev above all — are visited for feast days and family occasions as well as by travellers.

The town's position has shaped its temperament. It is a border district that has lived with conflict for three decades, and since 2023 it has absorbed families from Nagorno-Karabakh who arrived with very little. Visitors are received warmly, often with an invitation to eat, but the recent past is heavy, and it is better to let residents choose whether to speak of it. Modest dress in churches, a greeting in the street and asking before taking photographs are the usual courtesies.

About 17,000 people live in Goris, the second largest town of Syunik, though still small enough that the centre empties by mid-evening. Most people live in the grid of stone houses and in the newer blocks and streets along the river and the highway, with gardens, fruit trees and vines behind the walls — a town of household production as much as of wages.

Work comes from administration, since Goris is a district centre with schools, a hospital, a state university and public offices; from trade along the southern highway, including traffic to and from Iran; from tourism built on the cable car, the gorges and the guesthouses; and from farming in the Vorotan valley, where fruit, potatoes and livestock dominate. Mining elsewhere in Syunik and seasonal work in Russia support many families, and remittances matter.

The town's daily rhythm is slow and seasonal, turning on school hours, the market and the harvest. Its recurring concerns are those of a border district: the security situation along roads to the east, the condition of the highway north, depopulation and the search for work for young people, and, since 2023, housing, schooling and jobs for the displaced families who have settled here. Weekends and holidays bring relatives back from Yerevan and abroad.

Goris eats the food of a mountain province where most households still grow and preserve a large part of what they consume. Khorovats, meat grilled over wood or vine cuttings, is the dish for guests and celebrations; soups, boiled meat and dolma of stuffed vine leaves or vegetables are everyday cooking, and greens picked on the slopes in spring are made into pies and stews. Lavash is baked in clay ovens and kept dried through the winter, and matsun yoghurt, string cheese and curd appear at every meal.

Fruit is the region's signature. The valleys grow mulberries, walnuts, grapes, plums, cornelian cherries, apples and quinces, and the autumn is spent boiling jams, drying fruit, pressing juice and distilling home-made vodka, particularly from mulberries — a strong clear spirit offered to visitors and used as a medicine. Honey from hives in the gorges is sold along the roads with the jams and dried herbs.

Everyday food in town is simple: bakeries, a few grills, and guesthouse kitchens that serve whatever the garden has produced. Sweet things mean gata, dried fruit and walnuts rolled in grape must, and tea from mountain herbs rather than elaborate pastry. Armenian brandy and the wines of nearby Vayots Dzor complete a table that is generous out of all proportion to the size of the town.