Gyumri

The site has been settled since antiquity — Urartian and earlier material has been found in the ravines around it — and a town called Kumayri existed here before the Russian Empire arrived. The decisive change came in 1837, when the Russians, having taken the region from Persia, built a fortress here and renamed the town Alexandropol after the tsar's wife. As the empire's main garrison near the Ottoman frontier it grew quickly, with barracks, a fort of black stone on the hill, a railway from Tiflis, and a merchant and craft quarter of tuff houses built by Armenian masons in a style that mixed Russian, Ottoman and local forms.

By the early twentieth century Alexandropol was the largest city in what is now Armenia, a centre of trade, crafts, printing and theatre. The First World War, the 1915 genocide and the collapse of the empires brought waves of refugees from the west, famine and occupation; a treaty signed here in 1920 preceded the region's absorption into the Soviet Union. Renamed Leninakan in 1924, the city was industrialised as a textile and food-processing centre, and its population passed 200,000 by the 1980s.

On 7 December 1988 an earthquake centred near Spitak destroyed much of northern Armenia. Between 25,000 and 50,000 people were killed across the region, a large part of Leninakan's Soviet-era housing collapsed, and the city lost a great deal of its population. Renamed Gyumri in 1992, it spent years in temporary shelters and has rebuilt slowly, with the Kumayri quarter's old stone houses proving more resilient than the concrete blocks around them.

Gyumri is regarded across Armenia as the country's city of art and of jokes. It produced painters, sculptors — among them Sergey Merkurov — writers, actors and a long line of ashugh minstrel singers, and its museums are mostly the houses of such families. The local dialect is broad, the humour famously deadpan, and Gyumri stories and comic characters are a national genre; the city is often described as the place that laughs at everything, including itself.

Craft is the other tradition. The tuff-cutting masons who built the old quarter, the blacksmiths, coppersmiths, cobblers and carpet weavers of Alexandropol, gave the city a workshop culture that survives in small studios and in the restoration work on the historic district. Since the 2000s a centre for contemporary art and the city's biennial have added new work to that inheritance.

The earthquake shapes everything else. Memorials stand in the parks, the anniversary is kept each December, and families still speak of before and after. Emigration followed the disaster and continues, so the diaspora connection is personal here rather than abstract. Church life is strong, with services at the two churches on Vardanants Square, and the usual Armenian rules apply to visitors: dress modestly, keep quiet during services and ask before photographing people.

About 110,000 people live in Gyumri, well down from the figure before 1988 and still slowly falling. The population divides between the old stone quarter and the central streets, where most of the shops, cafés and offices are, and the wide northern and eastern districts of Soviet blocks and post-earthquake housing. Rehousing the last families from temporary shelters put up after the disaster took decades and remains a point of local politics.

The economy is smaller than the city's size suggests. Soviet textile and food plants closed or shrank, and work now comes from trade, construction, food processing, education, hospitals, the railway, tourism in the historic district, a growing technology and design sector supported by diaspora foundations, and the Russian military base on the city's edge. Wages are below those in Yerevan, and seasonal work in Russia is a mainstay for many households.

Daily life is unhurried and centred on the pedestrian street and the market. Winter dominates the calendar: heating, snow clearance and the cost of fuel are the practical concerns from November to March, while summer brings returning relatives, weddings, outdoor tables and concerts in the fortress. Depopulation, the state of the historic buildings and the lack of well-paid work are the questions that recur.

Shirak is a cold, high province and its cooking is correspondingly solid. Khashlama, beef or lamb simmered slowly with onions and sometimes beer, is a regional standard, as are thick soups, boiled and stuffed dishes and plenty of bread. Khorovats, grilled skewered meat, is eaten here as everywhere in Armenia, and winter brings khash, cow's feet simmered overnight and eaten in the early morning with garlic, salt and dried lavash — a meal treated as a social ritual.

Dairy and bread dominate the everyday table: matsun yoghurt, string cheese, curd cheese, and lavash baked in a tonir oven. The plateau grows wheat, potatoes and hardy vegetables rather than the fruit of the warmer valleys, so preserved food matters — pickles, dried herbs, cured meats such as basturma and the spiced sausage sujukh, and jams eaten with tea.

Gyumri's sweets have their own reputation. Poloz mukuk, a chewy honey-and-walnut confection, is associated with the city, and the bakeries make gata, a dense pastry with a sweet flour filling, in local shapes. Beer brewed in the city is sold across Armenia and appears in the local cooking, and brandy, vodka distilled from fruit, and strong coffee served in small cups round out the drinking.