Hovhannes Shiraz House-Museum

House-museum of Gyumri's most beloved poet, in the old city quarter

Hovhannes Shiraz (1914–1984) is considered one of the great Armenian lyric poets of the 20th century, and Gyumri was his city. The house-museum occupies the home where he lived and worked for much of his life, in one of the old tufa-walled streets of the Kumayri historic district. The rooms have been preserved as they were, with his manuscripts, books, and personal effects on display.

For visitors who cannot read Armenian, the poetry itself is inaccessible — but the museum gives a vivid picture of what literary life looked like in a Soviet provincial city, and the building itself is a good example of the old Gyumri domestic architecture that survived the earthquake.

things to do museum
A story
Hovhannes Shiraz chose his pen name from the Shiraz rose — the symbol of Persia — as a gesture of kinship with Persian lyric poetry. Despite writing entirely in Armenian and spending most of his life in the Soviet Union, he became so popular that the city of Gyumri claimed him as its own. When the Communist Party censors banned some of his poems as "nationalist," Gyumri's poets and intellectuals circulated them in handwritten copies.