Idea #497 – Observing the remains of russo-armenian buildings of Gyumri in Armenia
Gyumri or Gyumri is the capital and the main city of the marz of Shirak, in the northwest of Armenia. With 147 000 inhabitants, it is the second city the most populated in Armenia, after the capital Yerevan.
At first known under the name of Kumaïri, the hamlet, become “Gyumri”, started its developpment from 1804, when it is integrated into the Russian Empire, after the Russian-Persian war. In 1829, approximately three thousand families of the western Armenian cities of Kars, Erzurum, Dogubeyazit and other places migrate and settle down to Gyumri, who becomes the only city totally populated with Armenian in Oriental Armenia. In 1837, the Russian czar Nicolas Ier makes rename(reappoint) the city Alexandropol, in homage to his wife, princess Charlotte of Prussia, renamed Alexandra Fyodorovna after her conversion in the orthodox Christianity.
In 1840, the city of Alexandropol, which knew a fast development, is an important outpost of the imperial Russian army in Transcaucasia, where bourgeois houses intended for the officers and the storekeepers are established, as well as districts were intended for the privates. Although the city underwent afterward several violent earthquakes – among which one in 1926 and one in 1988 which reaches 6,9 on the Richter scale and which destroyed the city in 60 % – the buildings of this period globally survived. There is more than thousand buildings of the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries in the district of the old town today, says Kumaïri, by making one of the only places of the country where it is possible to visit a typical Armenian city of this period.
Some Pictures
Where is it ?
Alexandropol, Gyumri, Arménie