Gyumri

Gyumri needs 1 day: walking through Vartanants Square and the historic quarter, with 19th-century houses built of hand-carved black volcanic tuff, is the main reason to visit. April-October is best. It's inexpensive by international standards. It's Armenia's second city and a historic artistic and intellectual center of the country, though much of its architecture bears the mark of the 1988 earthquake, one of the most devastating in Armenian history, still remembered in local museums and monuments.