Op-Ed – From Florence to Dilijan: Shaping Hospitality as Lived Experience

The first time I came to Dilijan, I happened to be leading the opening of Café #2. In so many ways, it was a rewarding professional experience.

I come from Moscow, a place of constant rush, a city that never sleeps. So I had imagined a mountain town as a pretty, quiet place you visit for recreation.

I now live here permanently.

As part of my work leading a nonprofit organisation, I strive to create better opportunities for both the people and the town. One of our important goals is to help people stay here and build their lives and careers in Dilijan.

One initiative serving that purpose was bringing a hospitality school from Florence to Dilijan; a curious, but important, endeavour in today’s world. It is quite easy to imagine the question: Why an Italian school? And why in Dilijan?

The answer is simpler than can be imagined. Armenians have a word, hyurasirutyun, which dictionaries translate as “hospitality.” But when you break the word apart, it means something closer to “love of the guest.”

In an Armenian home, you are seated and fed before anyone asks why you came.

I’ve experienced this in village kitchens around Dilijan more times than can be imagined. Yet every time I leave, I find myself wanting to make sure that these village kitchens, with their warmth, generosity, and traditions, become part of the lived experience of everyday visitors. And I would certainly want our students to leave Dilijan with a qualification that any hotel or restaurant in the world would appreciate.

Dilijan sits at 1,500 metres above sea level, inside a national park and about ninety minutes from the capital’s airport. According to local lore, composers came here to write in the 1960s. Armenian families have spent their summers here for generations. Since 2014, UWC Dilijan has brought teenagers from seventy countries into the town.

Green Rock, and Green Rock Foundation as an extension of Green Rock, is building around that living, breathing ecosystem.

Green Rock opened a co-living house, PPLS, and a community hub, Villa 3, back in June. In July, just a month later, the groundbreaking ceremony for the first Hyatt Regency in Armenia took place. By 2028 or 2029, these projects will need up to 800 people who know how to look after guests properly.

We wanted to train them here, in the town where many of them will work in the future. For that, I looked into twenty hospitality schools and visited every one of them before I found what we were looking for.

Apicius International School of Hospitality in Florence had been teaching hospitality at university level since 1997. They said yes to our timeline: September 2025, just a year away, with the building only in the drawing.

The school opened on time.

The new building was completed a year later, just a few weeks ago, in September, with three floors, all the equipment and a new cohort of students.

Here is my take: Florence may bring the methodology, but Dilijan brings the soul, so to speak.

Students spend about four-fifths of their time in practice from their earliest weeks, working in real business under their teachers’ guidance. There is a café in town, CEMI by Apicius, where they cook and serve paying guests. I go there probably more often than I should. After the first year, students can choose to continue their studies in Yerevan or Florence, ultimately earning a certificate recognised in Italy and internationally. Nine students from the first intake are now in Florence, while over 30 new students have just started their studies in Dilijan.

Green Rock funds ten full scholarships each year for students to study in Dilijan and then continue in Florence. Tuition is remarkably affordable at €4,000 per year. The same school in Italy offers the same education, and the certificate costs between €9,000 and €10,000. The scholarships ensure that someone from a village near Dilijan has the same opportunity as an applicant from the Gulf countries. In the school’s opening year, applications came from twelve countries, a point we are particularly proud of.

At the opening, Mareta Gevorkyan, co-founder of Green Rock and Green Rock Foundation, said what many of the parents in the room already knew: “There was a time when getting a good education meant leaving Dilijan.”

A student can now earn a qualification that can take them anywhere in the world and still walk home for dinner. That brings me immense joy.

Vazgen Gevorkyan, our other co-founder, talks about the school the way he talks about a road or a hotel.

“Infrastructure is the buildings, and it is also the people who surround them,” he says. “A school teaches a town how to use everything else we build. Whatever we open in Dilijan will depend on the people this school sends out.”

Ask Mareta why Dilijan in this placemaking exercise, and her response is: “Dilijan is a treasure to be cherished. The effervescent mountains and forests were here long before us and will be here long after. Our imperative is responsible and accessible growth for the mountain town, and a place this beautiful deserves the investment to match.”

For a reader sitting in a Gulf country, the allure is more than just a hospitality education. The flight is a little over three hours. More importantly, the people who will welcome you in Dilijan are being trained in the very town where the hotel will eventually stand.

After the Apicius opening and the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra concert in the open air that evening, both happening on the same day, quite melodically, I thought we would finally rest.

We did not.

The kitchens were busy again on Monday.

So come for the cool summers and stay for a lunch cooked by a Dilijani local.

I will probably be at the next table.

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READ MORE: Op-Ed: How Dilijan is Becoming Armenia’s Regional Tourism Centre