Aypoupen

Aypoupen started in December 2013. Garo and Araz Kotchounian began it for an ordinary reason: they loved the Armenian people and they loved the country, and there was no single place that kept up with what Armenians were doing around the world.

What began as an affection became a habit, and the habit became the thing we do. Twelve years and 159 published pieces later, it is still the same work — finding what deserves to be better known, and writing it down properly.

What we do

We spotlight Armenians, in the diaspora and at home, and we spotlight Armenia itself. That means going to places rather than writing about them from a desk: towns, villages, workshops, kitchens, the parts of the country that never make the coach itinerary.

From that, we build trips. Small, exclusive, and built around experiences rather than checklists — the craft, the food, the people who will actually sit down with you. Culture is the point; the monastery is where you happen to be standing while you get it.

A great deal of what is best here is simply hard to find if you are searching in English. Closing that gap is most of what we are for.

Garo

Garabet Kotchounian — Garo, which is how everyone knows him, and his grandfather’s name. Born in Aleppo, raised in Beirut, living in Nicosia, Cyprus since 2006.

He left school at thirteen and started work as a vehicle painter, took night courses in English, and fell for electronics and computers early enough to be studying programming and graphic design in 1996, when almost nobody around him owned a machine. He still writes code, and keeps that side of things at kotchounian.dev.

He is a business consultant, and runs Psithyron, a marketing and web agency in Cyprus. A growing part of that work is helping businesses inside Armenia — guesthouses, hotels, tour operators, the tourism and hospitality trade — reach visitors from Europe and the United States who cannot currently find them.

Araz

Araz Tavitian Kotchounian co-founded Aypoupen and has written 77 of the pieces in the archive. She and Garo are married and have two children, Lala and Kevork.

Get in touch

For a trip, or for help getting somewhere in Armenia that is hard to reach, start here. For marketing for a business, that work belongs at Psithyron rather than on this site.