At the third meeting of the Armenian Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport’s expert commission in 2025, the home of the distinguished prose writer Hrant Matevossian in Ahnidzor, Lori, was granted the status of a monument of local significance. The house is dated to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
A house has a memory. A house has a history. The Matevossian house in Ahnidzor, recently granted monument status, has received more than recognition on paper. Journalists came to Ahnidzor the other day to cross the threshold of the family home once more and listen to Davit Matevossian, Director of the Hrant Matevossian Cultural Foundation. He spoke about the work already completed and about the house as an idea that must now bring people together: to restore the village, bring the house to life and turn memory into action.
One half of the barn beside Uncle Avetik’s house belonged to the Matevossians; the other half belonged to the buffaloes. When little Hrant was a year old, a buffalo almost trampled his cradle before his mother Arus’s eyes. Arus rebelled: “We are building a house.” With help from many people, the house was quite literally built by two pairs of hands: Arus’s and Ignat’s.
Ignat Matevossian was not only a farmer but also a craftsman: a professional carpenter and a skilled mason. All the house’s wooden details—the ceiling, columns and window shutters—are his handiwork. Even the village’s old houses were, to some extent, built by his hands.
At first, the Matevossians had just one room, which held the entire meaning of “home”. Two more rooms were later added, the last built in 1972. The house took its complete form in 1970–71. In the late 1980s, Hrant Matevossian and his younger brother began working together on its restoration.
Through great effort, the house was restored to the form we see today. The idea of the house was so powerful that it gave rise not only to the house museum but also to the Hrant Matevossian Foundation. This became the basis for the Hrant Matevossian Cultural Centre in Yerevan, which is not yet operating fully but already exists as a place of possibility.
The idea of the house is also the axis around which Ahnidzor’s identity as a cultural centre is now taking shape. Its significance is beginning to have a real effect on the community. The guest house opened in Ahnidzor and new civic initiatives—the Motkor Development Foundation, the Ahnidzor Development Foundation and the Pakhra NGO—were all born of this idea and aim to work together to breathe new life into the area. Pakhra, in particular, works on environmental programmes and an animal breeding programme.
This civic awakening in Ahnidzor is linked to a vision of renewal for the whole world of Motkor, rather than a single village: the part of Lori that lives so distinctly in Hrant Matevossian’s words and in the memory of its people.
Preserving this historical and cultural heritage requires the villages to be revived. A comprehensive cultural and socioeconomic concept has therefore been developed, with the house museum intended to serve as its focal attraction. It must become both a place of remembrance and an active centre, like Tumanyan’s house museum in Dsegh, which, with varying degrees of success, is a stimulus for the village’s renewal today.
These villages of Lori face the same threat: the loss of people, forests, animals and their entire character. To preserve their historical and cultural heritage, the villages themselves must be revived.
The idea of “home” underpins a cultural and socioeconomic concept for the community’s renewal. The Matevossian house museum must become its focal attraction and this world’s lifeline. For, as Davit Matevossian says, our lifeline is our cultural identity. The Matevossian house museum must become its tangible testimony, proof of our existence.