Who is Garo Kotchounian?

My name is Garabet Kotchounian, and everyone calls me Garo. The name was my grandfather’s, which is how it works in an Armenian family: the first son carries the name of his father’s father, so our house has always had a Kevork and a Garo in it. I was born in Aleppo, I grew up in Beirut, and I have lived in Nicosia, Cyprus, since 2006. I am married to Araz Tavitian Kotchounian, and we have two children, Lala and Kevork.

How I got here

I left school at thirteen and went to work as a vehicle painter. That did not end my education; it moved it to the evenings. I took night courses in English, and I fell for electronics and computers early enough to be studying programming and graphic design in 1996, when almost nobody around me owned a machine. My first laptop was a monochrome Toshiba with no hard disk, which booted from a floppy that held less than a megabyte, and I loved it.

When internet cafes spread through the city I ran the computers in several of them, and I taught myself to design and build websites. For years that stayed a hobby rather than a living. In 2013 my family went through a crisis in which we lost everything we owned, and that was the push. In December of that year Araz and I started Aypoupen, out of a plain love for the Armenian people and the country, and it opened more doors than anything I had done before.

What I do now

I am a business consultant. I run Psithyron, a marketing and web agency in Nicosia, and I still write code, which I keep at kotchounian.dev.

Aypoupen is where Araz and I write about Armenia and Armenians, at home and across the diaspora. In August 2026 I travelled through Armenia, and the pieces and films from that trip are gathered on the road trip page.

Where to find me

If you are planning a trip to Armenia, start here. For everything else, the contact page reaches Araz and me directly.