Vayots Dzor offers a wide range of delicious traditional and homemade Armenian food, wines and vodkas. While visiting Vayots Dzor, you may notice the many orchards that decorate the Armenian countryside, which are also an important contributor to the rich cuisine of Armenia. If you step into the backyard of any household in Vayots Dzor, you’ll find a backyard orchard filled with delicious fruits, vegetables, and greens. Vineyards fill a large portion of backyards, with grape vines growing along the earth or hanging from trellises.
Surprisingly, families only consume a small portion of the delectable harvest grown in their backyards. The rest, once ripe, is exchanged for other goods. Families are so particular about not touching their crops until they are completely ripe that an old joke in Malishka village states, “One day two neighbors decide to exchange their dogs so that they can’t enter their own backyards!” The allure of fresh fruit and vegetables in your own backyard proves too tempting for most, resulting in clever preventative measures.
No matter which place you decide to visit in Vayots Dzor, it is almost certain you will find Armenia’s most well-known bread. Lavash, the most popular bread in Vayots Dzor, is a long, thin flatbread that can stretch up to one and a half meters long. Lavash is at the center of every meal and requires a great deal of collaboration between three to five friends, neighbors or relatives to produce. Women work together, chatting and singing while effortlessly kneading, rolling and thinning the dough in preparation for its grand entrance into the tonir. The tonir is a special cylindrical subterranean oven. To bake lavash in the tonir, the baker quickly bends into the oven and smacks a ‘baking pillow,’ with the thinned out dough placed on top, against the tonir’s wall, removing the leavened bread thirty seconds to a minute later. Baking pillows are passed on through the generations and are a symbol of immense pride for their owners. The oval-shaped pillow is elegantly covered with a special, hand-made pillowcase. The cleanliness of the white pillowcase and the intricacy of its sewn pieces and patterns are an opportunity for women to showcase their handiwork.
Fruits and homemade wines produced in a backyard (Photo by Sossi Madzounian, My Armenia Program, Smithsonian Institution and USAID)
Women baking lavash (Photo by Sossi Madzounian, My Armenia Program, Smithsonian Institution and USAID)
The woman tasked with navigating the baking pillow into the tonir has to bend over several times in the production of a single lavash bread. Baking 250 to 280 lavash in one day can force her to bend upwards of a thousand times. If you get a chance to see lavash-making in action, you won’t believe how quickly and precisely the dough moves between each woman in the production line.
Restaurants and Eating Options