The names “Yerevan Wine Days,” “Yerevan Music Night” and “Silk Note Festival,” evoke fond memories of past festival celebrations before the pandemic and create excitement for the upcoming spring-summer season in 2023 when Yerevan will host both old and new festivals in a lively and sunny atmosphere.
Festivals are indeed significant elements of Armenia’s cultural flavor. They not only enrich the mundane routine of our citizens and pull them out of their houses but also play the role of attracting thousands of tourists to get acquainted with Armenian culture.
But what challenges stand in the way of festival organization in Armenia? How has the cultural tourism industry changed after major events like the pandemic, the 2020 Artsakh War, and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war that provoked the massive flow of Russian and Ukrainian tourists to our homeland?
The director of the “Areni Wine Festival” Foundation and the co-founder and creative director of the Eventtoura company, Nune Manukyan, says that the festival organization sector has yet to recover.Â
She explains that many people haven’t overcome their fears to start visiting the local cultural events, but the recently-arrived tourists are quite active in that regard. One can see proof of that just by dropping by the “International Jazz Day Yerevan” or the “Gastro Fest” in Dilijan.
Promoting local tourism, in general, impacts the development of the Armenian economic sector, and such festival-organizing companies as Eventoura contribute to this indirect investment in our economy. According to Manukyan, surveys estimate that “40% of the tourists that come to Armenia spend at least 1200 dollars there.”Â
Founded in 2018, Eventtoura is a company that organizes festivals, conferences, and other large-scale events, some of which, like “Yerevan Wine Days,” “Yerevan Gastro Day,” or “Yerevan’s Music Night” became the beloved cultural events of the year for some of our people. The company collaborates with international tourism agencies and journalists to promote local tourism, inspire Armenian producers and make the uniqueness of the Armenian culture recognizable all over the world.
“Initially, the mission of the festival was to popularize Yerevan as a cradle of wine-making and to attract tourists interested in combined tours in the Caucasus,” says Manukyan. She emphasizes that from the beginning, the organization of the festivals targeted developing external tourism in the country.
“The Armenian culture, wine and food and, of course, the welcoming attitude and the hospitality of the Armenian people.” Those are the main features that Manukyan thinks draw the attention of foreign travel lovers and tempt them to visit our homeland.Â
Eventtoura’s co-founder also mentions that there has been a notable trend among the tourists visiting Armenia: Once visiting cultural events in Yerevan, they revisit Armenia afterwards or recommend it to their friends and acquaintances.
However, organizing festivals like “Yerevan Wine Days,” which hosted over 30.000 visitors in 2018 and 2019, doesn’t come without difficulties.
Manukyan points out that the major problem Eventoura faced during its activity was breaking the city authorities’ and the public’s stereotypes about organizing cultural events in Yerevan.Â
“One way or another, you’re causing discomfort to the city during festival days. It can be connected to transportation or noise. So we needed to break this stereotype for the citizens to realize that these festivals are organized for their own good.”
Besides changing our citizens’ attitudes towards the hustle around festival organizations, Eventtoura will also bring new cultural events that will impact tourism in Armenia.Â
One of them will be the “Beer Days” festival held in Gyumri, which will not only help the discoverers of the Armenian culture to witness the historic beauty of former Alexandropol but also support decentralized tourism in the country.
The recently created concert festival, “Haya,” which organizes concerts of such prominent artists like 50 Cent, Zaz, and Led Zeppelin Symphonic Orchestra in Armenia, also intended to consider regions as the central location for the concerts.
However, as the festival’s art director, Nona Isajanyan, informs, the plan didn’t work out due to the lack of technical resources necessary for organizing concerts with high capacity. That left the organizers putting off this idea until the following year and decided to hold the festival in Yerevan until then.Â
Isajanyan pointed out that besides the lack of convenient locations accommodating a large number of listeners, concert venues in Armenia also fail to provide “technical facilities like high-quality sound and light effects.” Because of this, the “Haya” festival will invite foreign skilled professionals to provide the stage equipment.
Despite all the problems, Isajanyan is sure that the concert will perform its mission well and attract a lot of tourists from Georgia, Russia, Iran, and elsewhere and have its investment in the Armenian economy. The festival also aims to set the infrastructure for organizing large-scale events in Armenia and grow the culture of visiting concerts.
“The Haya festival is unique in the sense that it is going to be held in the Coachella format and in that it will introduce the audience to classical music, rock and rap, which will also reflect its idea of combining the new and the old,” notes the art-director.
Isajanyan also mentions that while the festival’s final artist lineup is getting clarified and the concerts of such performers as Sting and Stevie Wonder are being negotiated for the next year, it has already been confirmed that the “Coachella” festival’s marketing manager is going to be present at Haya and participate in the organizing process.
Whether these festivals will revive the cultural tourism sphere and take festival organization in Armenia to the next level is a question yet to be answered. One thing is certain – the spring-summer season will indeed be a busy time both for the locals and for the tourists.
