Alaverdi

Alaverdi (Armenian Ալավերդի ) is a city in the northern Armenian province of Lori, 167 kilometers away from the capital Yerevan, it is the center of Tumanian region and was an important industrial and mining site.

The topography of the city is dominated by the highly rugged mountains and a 300 to 500 m deep gorge on their property flows the rushing mountain river Debed. Already 1192 has been erected on the initiative of the Armenian Queen Waneni the Sanahinbrücke with an arch span of 18 m. It is named after a nearby monastery. After the conquest of the Caucasus by the armies of Tsarist Russia geologists and other scientists came to these remote valleys. The mining entrepreneur Argoutinski - Dolgorukov soon attracted hundreds of Greek miners from the Black Sea coast in the valley, they created so that the foundations of a society based on copper mining region - Alaverdi covered in 1900 already 25 percent of copper demand in zarististischen Russia. At the beginning of the 20th century, the mining settlement enlarged again with British and French support, also a railway line was built in the valley later. In Soviet times, the expansion of the copper smelter for copper and Chemical Combine Alaverdi began. On the mostly unprotected barren and windswept mountain plateaus new districts were created as a block of flats and housing estates built cableways for passenger and material transport. Under pressure from the population was in 1989 for health and environmental reasons, closed the copper and Chemical Combine, but thereby lost the main employer in the region. Even in 1972 the city had 21,624 inhabitants, after independence, this number declined steadily to 16,500 inhabitants in 2009.

The city area is part of the village Sanahin, there is a famous monastery complex, which is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is also the birthplace of the brothers Artem Mikoyan and Mikoyan.

The present inhabitants explain the place name Alaverdi happy with reference to the Arab- Persian blessing "Allah Werdi! " In a local dialect means the place name " Red Stone ".