Three days in Dilijan: where stony Armenia turns into forest

Sharambeghyan street is the postcard: a short cobbled row of nineteenth century Dilijan houses with balconies and shingled roofs, rebuilt in 1979 by the artist Hovhannes Sharambeyan as a working craft quarter rather than a museum. There are still woodcarvers, potters and a smith along it, and the workshops sell what they make. It takes half an hour to walk and rather longer if you get talking.

The folk art museum is a few minutes away in what was the summer house of Princess Mariam Tumanyan, and it is much better than a town this size should manage: carpets, carved wooden doors, embroidery and ceramics, plus a room of self-taught painters. Armenian carpet weaving and woodwork are the two crafts that survived every occupation, and this is where to look at them properly.

Then eat. Ask for kchuch, which is meat and vegetables slow cooked in a sealed clay pot and served in it, and is the dish Dilijan does better than Yerevan.

Take a driver for the day and start at Haghartsin, seven kilometres northeast and then up a side road through dense forest to a clearing. Three churches, a refectory and a ruined gavit stand together on a shelf of the mountain, built between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, with a walnut tree in the middle that people photograph as much as the buildings. It was in poor condition until a decade of restoration paid for by the ruler of Sharjah, of all people, finished around 2013. Go early: it is the most visited monastery in northern Armenia and the coaches from Yerevan reach it by eleven.

Goshavank is twenty minutes further, in the middle of a working village rather than in a forest, and it is the more interesting of the two. It was founded in 1188 by Mkhitar Gosh, a monk who wrote the first Armenian law code, and it ran as a university. Against the outside wall stands the khachkar that everybody comes for: a cross-stone carved in 1291 in relief so deep and so fine that the stone looks like lace, signed by its maker Poghos, who apparently thought it worth putting his name to. He was right.

Finish at Lake Parz, back on the Dilijan side, a three hundred metre stretch of green water at 1,350 metres with forest to the shoreline and a cafe at one end. There are pedal boats, a zip line and a marked trail back down to the town for anybody who would rather walk than ride.

The best hours in Dilijan cost nothing. From the old mineral water plant at the northwestern end of town, a forest track climbs about three kilometres through beech woods to Jukhtak Vank, which means twin monastery and is exactly that: two small churches of the eleventh or twelfth century standing a few metres apart in a clearing, one of them held together with iron bands to stop it falling down.

A little further along the same ridge, and easy to walk past, is Matosavank, a thirteenth century church now mostly roofless and half swallowed by the trees, with carved cross-stones set into what is left of the walls. There is nobody there. After Haghartsin's coach park it is a useful corrective, and it is what most of the medieval churches scattered across Armenia actually look like.

Walk back down for the bus, or for whichever direction you are heading: Yerevan south through the tunnel, or Vanadzor and the Debed canyon north.