Sevan Writers’ House: The Armenian Soviet Retreat That’s Now A Crappy Hotel
/Perched on a rocky shelf of land beside Armenia’s vast Lake Sevan is a writer’s retreat from Communist times that’s now a hotel. It’s seen better days. Much better days
Head to Armenia’s Lake Sevan, and on a peninsula along its northwestern shore you’ll find a concrete slab of a building that wouldn’t look out of place on Tracy Island from Thunderbirds.
This is the Sevan Writers’ House. Once, this lakeside modernist building was a haven for Soviet writers and poets. Now, as I discovered for myself, it’s a pretty dismal hotel.
Arriving from Tbilisi
I caught a marshrutka bus from Tbilisi (in Georgia) to the town of Sevan, and from there I took a taxi to the Sevan Peninsula, three miles north.
This mile-long finger of land was once an island, but that changed after Stalin had the lake drained by 20 metres as part of an industrialisation project in the 1930s.
The peninsula is a popular destination with daytripping tourists as it’s home to the ninth-century Sevanavank monastery complex - but I don’t think many people, besides vacationing Armenians, actually stay here. And this being off-season, there were no vacationing Armenians there. Not one.
In the entrance room I met Aiga, one of the two ladies who run the hotel.
She didn’t speak English, but we slowly established that I’d booked a room online; that I was staying for three nights; and that, yes, I would like breakfast in the morning (an extra 2000 dram).
The other lady, Wera, took me to my room. It led directly out to one of the two terraces adjoining the hotel part of the Writers House.
I looked around. The view across the lake was dazzlingly beautiful, but it didn’t quite distract me from the ominous-looking cracks that forked across the floor of the veranda.
Wera kept pointing upwards and saying the same thing to me in Armenian. Eventually, she started speaking to a woman who was sat reading on a balcony above me.
‘Her Russian is bad,’ the woman called down, ‘but I think she’s asking if you would prefer one of the rooms on this floor? One with a balcony?’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, do you like your balcony?’
‘I think it might fall down at any moment,’ she said, ‘but sure. It’s okay.’
I decided to stick with the room I had.
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The history
At this point, I was a bit too starstruck to worry too much about the hotel’s shortcomings. I was staying in a hotel, after all, that counts Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir among its previous guests.
I first came across the Sevan Writers’ House in a Calvert Journal article by Owen Hatherley, who delves into the building’s strange, fractured history.
It was conceived in the early 1930s by the Writers’ Union of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, who wanted to create a ‘creativity house’, a kind state-sponsored artists’ retreat. Many such institutions were built across the U.S.S.R. at this time.
The Writers’ Union commissioned two young avante-garde architects, Gevorg Kochar and Mikael Mazmanyan, for the project.
Kochar and Mazmanyan completed the staggered, four-floor hotel building in 1935, and it soon after opened its doors to visiting writers, artists and intellectuals. Then, two years later, both men fell foul of Stalin’s purges, and they were exiled to a gulag in the Arctic Circle.
PHOTOGRAPHS ON DISPLAY IN THE SEVAN WRITERS HOUSE
After Stalin’s death in 1953, both architects soon were released from exile - and in 1962, Kochar was invited to design a canteen wing that would append the guesthouse he had co-designed almost three decades before.
Modernist architecture had evolved in the years that Kochar had spent as a political prisoner: he had new ideas, materials and technology at this disposal.
The new building he created is, to my mind, a kind of miracle of architecture - at least, architecture of this kind, which rarely looks anything but imposing, arrogant and out-of-place.
Somehow, this cantilevered concrete box sits in complete harmony with the lakeside landscape, and in total sympathy with Sevanavank, a religious complex that’s 1,100 years its elder. Maybe you have to see it up close: it just works here.
As I wandered around the Writers’ House, I thought about Kochar, here in the early 1960s.
What was it like to be have been an idealistic young architect, to watch your utopian ideas curdle under Stalin, to endure the trauma of imprisonment… and then to return over 25 years later to finish the job?
SEVAN WRITERS’ HOUSE: THE STAIRWELL OF THE HOTEL BUILDING
THE LOWER TERRACE OF THE HOTEL BUILDING
THE GAMES ROOM IN THE HOTEL BUILDING
The hotel
It’s the prestigious history of the Sevan Writers’ House that makes its present state all the more wretched. When I say it was falling apart around me, I’m not exaggerating.
Much of the facade of the canteen building is cracked and splintered; the inner concrete exposed beneath. Plants have taken root. The sides of the hotel building are blotched and grubby; there are broken glass panes in the in the stairwell.
And call me flippant, but I’d say whoever decided to stick a series of vinyl sunny faces with moustaches across the walls of the communal spaces would probably benefit from a spell in a prison camp.
Inside my room, the carpet was stained and the wallpaper peeling. The shower produced barely a dribble of water, which was hot for all of two minutes, once.
At night, the window frames rattled in the fierce winds that came in off the lake. The room had no heating. Lake Sevan is over 2000 metres above sea level, and the temperatures at night drop drastically. Even though it was late summer, I had to sleep in thermalwear.
Aiga and Wera looked after me at mealtimes. Each morning I was treated to a heavy breakfast of bread, cheese, fried eggs, tomatoes, cucumber, apricot jam and tea; in the evening I ate grilled siga fish (from the lake) for dinner.
I needed to work, so I spent two days in the Writers House’s magnificent dining room, typing on my laptop. The sun glittered on the lake. Panes of light crawled across the walls and floor.
The ladies spent most of the daytime sat on the couch, watching TV shows on their phones. Every now and again, they gave me a curious look.
They clearly had no idea what I was doing there - something I was growing increasingly uncertain of myself.
There are just ten rooms at the Writers’ House, and I only saw a few other guests besides the English-speaking Russian woman.
There was a hippyish-looking Russian couple, and another English guy whose presence annoyed me, and I didn’t speak to. (I felt like I was the only curious Englishman permitted to be there.)
They all checked out on my first day. After that, I was alone.
I later met the manager, a bald-headed man called Mr Argat, sat in the entrance room counting stacks of money.
While I worked in the dining room later, he had a long lunch with a group of other middle-aged men under a cloud of cigarette smoke. They played loud Armenian music over the PA system. It vibrated through the parquet floor beneath my feet.
I wanted to find out how he’d come to manage a building of this prestige. I wanted to know if the Armenian Writers’ Union still had any involvement here, or even if the union still existed at all? (It does, I found out later.)
I tried to ask Aiga with the help of Google Translate on my phone, but she just kept spelling out Mr Argat’s name - ‘A-R-G-A-T’ - and nothing more. I decided not to push it.
The future of Sevan Writers’ House
On my final day, as I packed my belongings, I discovered that a horde of ants had got into my rucksack, and into a sealed pack of lokum that I’d bought at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul.
Whatever the language barriers, I knew I should have complained and asked for money off the bill. But the ladies were gone, and only Mr Argat was around. He looked like a ruthless negotiator, and I didn’t have the energy to argue.
I’d been stuck on an isolated, near-deserted peninsula for about 24 hours more than I’d recommend to any sane person - I was ready to get to Yerevan.
If you find yourself in the area, I’d suggest visiting the Writers’ House for afternoon tea in that amazing dining room, but no more. As an architectural relic, it’s a sad curio; as a hotel, it’s barely fit for purpose. The building needs serious refurbishment.
Which is going to happen - or at least is supposed to be happening. In 2016, the Getty Foundation announced it was going to award a $130,000 grant to a team of architectural researchers in Yerevan, who would devise a way of renovating the Writers’ House.
The project was forecast to last four years: at present, there’s no sign of any regeneration at all to be seen. You can read this report from the Getty Foundation for more information (I have contacted them for an update on the current status of the refurbishment project, and I’ll update this post with any new information I receive).
Caught between a grand past and an uncertain future, the Sevan Writers’ House sits in sorry, shabby limbo. Maybe, one day, it will be a writers’ retreat again.
You can certainly see why one was built here in the first place. One thing I can say for certain - that sweeping view across the lake makes a stay here more than worthwhile. MB
If you do plan to stay at the Sevan Writers’ House, head to Booking.com. Prices start at £16/$20/֏9400 per person per night.
