Yerevan (Armenia) Is Not Your New Berlin. Which Is Excellent News.
Direct flights, red tourism, pink stone, excellent coffee, cheap roses and the uncomfortable business of discovering a place that was never waiting for you to make it interesting.
There is a precise moment in the life of every city when it stops being a place and becomes a travel headline. It usually happens shortly after the arrival of a direct flight, a few flattering articles, a handful of good coffee shops, and at least one photographer discovering that the evening light falls very nicely on buildings locals have been walking past for decades without feeling the urgent need to call them “underrated”.
Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, now finds itself dangerously close to that moment. London has a direct flight. Tbilisi has had its turn in the soft-focus travel imagination. The South Caucasus is being rebranded from “complicated region you vaguely remember from the news” into “excellent long weekend with character”. And somewhere, inevitably, a man in a linen shirt is preparing to call Yerevan “the next Berlin”, because travel writing has apparently not yet recovered from the invention of Berlin.
It is not the next Berlin. It is not the new Tbilisi either, nor the alternative Lisbon, nor the affordable Paris of the Caucasus, nor any other lazy comparison that allows a city to be understood only by pretending it is a cheaper version of somewhere already over-discussed. Yerevan is Yerevan: pink volcanic stone, Soviet boulevards, ancient churches, young people in very good trainers, serious history, excellent cafés, a lot of flowers, some very generous plates of food, and the occasional Lada looking as though it has survived not only the twentieth century but also several opinions about it.
That, frankly, is quite enough.
The latest hook is “red tourism”, a term that makes the whole thing sound either academic or faintly contagious. In practice, it means travellers visiting former Soviet spaces not simply for sunshine, restaurants and a photogenic old town, but for the architectural, political and emotional leftovers of the USSR: metro stations, apartment blocks, monuments, mosaics, medals, badges, statues, military memorabilia and markets where history sits in boxes waiting to be bought by someone with a tote bag and a very developed sense of irony.
Yerevan is a particularly rich stage for this. At Vernissage market, where one can find carpets, ceramics, woodwork, jewellery and enough objects to furnish several lives more interesting than one’s own, some visitors ignore the obvious souvenirs and go straight for Soviet pins, old medals, party badges and suspiciously durable cigarette packets from a world that has officially vanished but has not exactly tidied up after itself. They examine these relics with the reverence usually reserved for natural wine menus, as though one more enamel badge might finally unlock the secret of the twentieth century.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this curiosity. In fact, curiosity is preferable to the more common tourist condition of arriving somewhere, photographing two façades, mispronouncing lunch, and leaving with firm views on national identity. Soviet history is part of Yerevan’s urban fabric. You see it not only in museums, but in the scale of the avenues, the mass of the apartment blocks, the stern optimism of certain public buildings, and the monumental tendency to make architecture look as though it has been designed by a committee that believed stairs could improve your character.
The problem begins when curiosity becomes costume. Former Soviet cities are not mood boards for people who want a more politically complex version of vintage shopping. A Communist Party pin is not a personality. A USSR T-shirt is not a travel philosophy. And walking around a place where people lived through the system wearing its symbols as aesthetic shorthand may produce, at the very least, a social interaction less warm than the guidebook promised.
The best version of red tourism is not nostalgia. It is not cosplay. It is not the strange Western habit of visiting other people’s historical trauma and asking whether it comes in a nicer colour. It is a way of looking carefully at the physical remains of a system that shaped lives, cities, families, ambitions and silences. The worst version is a stag weekend for people who read half a Wikipedia page on brutalism and now feel unusually qualified to explain memory to locals.
Yerevan deserves better than that. So does Armenia.
Because Soviet history is only one layer here, and not even the oldest, deepest or most painful. Armenia was the first state to adopt Christianity as its official religion, and the country’s churches and monasteries are not decorative background for a drone shot, but part of a continuous national and spiritual story. The Armenian Genocide is not a historical footnote to be nodded at politely between coffee and dinner, but a wound that still lives in families, politics and memory. The more recent conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh has left its own marks, visible not only in geopolitics but in art, conversation and public mourning. This is a small country with a very large history, which is precisely why it should not be reduced to a charming Soviet aftertaste with good beer.
And yet, the great relief of Yerevan is that it does not feel trapped inside its past. This is not one of those cities that has been pickled for tourists, stripped of real life, and then sold back to visitors in tasteful portions. Yerevan is very much in motion. The city has the strange and appealing contradiction of a place where ancient religious memory, post-Soviet infrastructure, diaspora energy, tech optimism and café culture all seem to be happening at the same time, sometimes on the same street, occasionally at the same table.
You can move from a church courtyard into a minimalist coffee shop in less time than it takes a Londoner to decide whether the oat milk is ethically aligned with their values. You can see young Armenians speaking about Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Moscow, Paris and Barcelona not as distant fantasies but as parts of a wider Armenian geography, because Armenia’s diaspora is not a demographic detail, it is one of the country’s living engines. You can sit in a café beneath exposed brick and industrial lighting and feel, for one dangerous second, that you are back in east London, until the mountains, the language and the khachapuri-adjacent temptation of the wider region remind you that you are not, mercifully.
This is where Yerevan becomes interesting for a NOMAG reader, because it is exactly the kind of city that will attract the remote-work crowd, the “I’m not a tourist, I’m location-independent” crowd, and the increasingly large group of people who claim to be searching for authenticity while requiring fibre internet, flat whites and a decent place to charge a laptop. Yerevan can provide much of that. It has cafés where people actually work, not just perform productivity. It has prices that are still less absurd than Western Europe’s more exhausted capitals. It has a young, educated, internationally connected population. It has enough visual texture to keep Instagram fed without having to invent a personality crisis every morning.
But let us not perform the usual nomad fantasy, in which a city becomes attractive only once foreigners can rent apartments, open laptops and describe themselves as “part of the local ecosystem” because they have learned the word for thank you and bought a ceramic bowl. Armenia is not waiting to be validated by people who arrive with a MacBook and leave with a thread about hidden gems. Its attractiveness is not a new discovery. It is simply becoming easier to access, which is a very different thing.
The direct London connection matters because flights change psychology. A destination that once required awkward connections or a long transfer from Georgia suddenly becomes plausible for a long weekend, a week, or a longer experiment in living elsewhere. This is how travel maps are redrawn now: not by explorers, but by route planners, low-cost airlines and the algorithmic confidence of people who can book before they fully understand where they are going.
The danger is that Yerevan will be swallowed by the same machine that has already flattened so many places into familiar categories. “Great value.” “Authentic.” “Undiscovered.” “The next big thing.” These words always sound flattering until you remember they are usually the opening notes of a very old song: first come the curious travellers, then the lifestyle press, then the influencers leaning against doors, then the property speculation, then the locals wondering why the city centre suddenly serves brunch in English and costs twice as much.
Yerevan is not there yet, and perhaps it will not go that way. It has too much historical gravity, too much local identity, and too little interest in behaving like a Mediterranean village that has agreed to be rented by the week. But tourism has a talent for making even complicated places look simple. That is its commercial gift and its moral hazard.
What makes Yerevan compelling is precisely that it resists neat packaging. Republic Square can feel grand, ceremonial and almost theatrical, especially at night. The Cascade is part staircase, part monument, part public promenade, part urban gym for people who pretend they were not breathless halfway up. The city’s pink tuff stone gives whole streets a warm, cinematic glow, as if the buildings have been designed to look nostalgic before anything has even happened. The metro has that Soviet dignity of being both functional and slightly dramatic. The markets offer the pleasure of browsing without the polished desperation of places that have been curated to death. And the food, happily, is not designed for people who regard dinner as content.
Then there are the flowers. This may sound like a soft detail, but in Yerevan it is not. Roses are everywhere: outside shops, in kiosks, at airport arrivals, in the hands of people walking at night, in buckets, in windows, on pavements, spilling across the city with a confidence that makes Western florists look emotionally underfunded. Armenia’s flower trade has recently become entangled in politics, with Russian restrictions on Armenian imports adding another layer to the country’s already delicate balancing act between old dependencies and new alignments. Even the roses, in other words, have a geopolitical subplot. Very Armenian. Very inconvenient for anyone hoping for a simple travel piece.
And that is perhaps the point. Yerevan is beautiful, but not easy. Welcoming, but not naïve. Affordable, perhaps, depending on where you come from and how allergic you are to reality, but not cheap in the moral sense of being available for careless consumption. It offers sun, beer houses, jazz clubs, cafés, markets, monasteries within reach, day trips to Garni, Geghard and the Azat Canyon, and enough urban strangeness to make a weekend feel like the beginning of a much longer conversation. But it also asks you to pay attention.
That should not be a deterrent. Quite the opposite. The best cities are not the ones that instantly explain themselves. The best cities make you slightly unsure of your first impression. They make you revise your assumptions. They make you realise that the thing you came to see is only the door, not the room.
So yes, go to Yerevan. Go before every travel supplement discovers the same three angles and declares it “unexpected”. Go for the pink stone and the markets, for the old Soviet shadows and the new Armenian confidence, for the coffee shops and the churches, for the roses and the mountains, for the strange pleasure of a city that feels both ancient and unfinished. Go because it is now easier to reach, but try not to confuse accessibility with possession.
And if you must buy the Soviet badge, at least have the decency not to wear it while explaining history to the person selling it.
