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8 unexpected museums, the existence of which you may not have heard, but which are definitely worth a visit.

House-museum of Lusik Aguletsi

Address: Muratsan Street 79

For adults: 1000 AMD, for children: 500 AMD

Open daily from 12:00 to 19:00

The museum started operating in 2013 during the lifetime of the famous ethnographer and artist Lusik Aguletsu, but at that time it was also a place of residence. That is why the museum accepted guests only by prior arrangement. In 2019, after the death of Lusik Agulets, the family moved, and the house became a full-fledged museum.

In the former living room, many exhibits from Lusik Agulets' 40 years of collecting work are waiting for visitors: dishes, pots, lamps, handwritten books, carpets, daggers and other items. And the aroma of lilac and the furniture of the living room make it possible to imagine what kind of transition took place in this room at the time.

Entering the bedroom is heralded by the melody of a 17th-century French jewel box. Here you can see a wide collection of Armenian belts, his wardrobe and dressing table with samples of national costumes. In the next hall, you will be greeted by the sound of an old radio and the sounds of old country music playing from a vinyl record player, filling the room with old clocks, telephones and other instruments.

In the upper hall, you will find transformed figurines of Ashora, Vanatur, New Year, Goddess Anahit and many others, which will tell you what the water-bearing, rain-bearing or sun-bearing deities and other various characters looked like. Lusik Aguletsi worked on the creation of these dolls in 2012-15, creating special transformations of the festive culture.

Communications Museum

Address: Azatutyan Avenue 24/1

Admission is free (with prior registration)

Opened in 2012 in the famous former ArmenTel building, the museum transports visitors back to the days when calls could only be made through an operator who could easily hear your conversation, when an entire apartment building used just one phone, when that very the same phone did not have an off button, and the phone on the street could be tricked by dropping a penny on a string and pulling it back at the end of the conversation. By the way, most of the equipment presented in the museums works, you can call from one phone in the room to another, reproducing the phone experiences of decades ago.

"Shari! I'm coming!" The first electronic text message ever sent in Armenia, written in 1997, had approximately this content. The author of the letter was Grigor Poghpatyan, Minister of Communications at that time, who wanted to play chess with his friend, the General Director of "ArmenTel", Vahram Soghomonyan.

There have been many such episodes and other interesting phenomena in the history of Armenian telecommunications and all of them are stored in the Communication Museum located in that space building. The exhibits of the museum, opened in 2012, take visitors back a hundred years, to the year 1913, when the first telephone station was installed on the second floor of a telegraph office on Amiryan Street, which provided telephone communication to around 200 subscribers.

Railway Museum of Armenia

Address: Yerevan railway station building

On working days starting from 09:00.

Entrance is free.

The museum came to life in 2009, perhaps in the most suitable place for its content, in the Sasuntsi Davit railway station. For starters, you can explore many historical photos of Yerevan station in different years, train drivers in special outfits, other Soviet stations known at the time, etc.

Then we pass by the wooden figures of Gyumri, Vanadzor and other Armenian stations, military trains, passenger and cargo (fish transporting) trains. Other parts of the exhibition include the history of the construction of the current children's railway, photos reflecting the consequences of the war and the Spitak earthquake.

In addition to documents and footage, there are also signs brought from different stations and trains, models of trains and equipment. But the most interesting, of course, are the old, long-stopped wagons, which can be seen up close.

Fritjof Nansen Museum

Address: 4/4 Nansen Street

Admission is free

Fritjof Nansen is a really famous person. The Norwegian is known in the world as a famous polar explorer, in Armenia as one of the first to reach out to the Armenian refugees who survived the Great Genocide. 320 thousand Armenians received citizenship in 52 countries of the world with Nansen passports, were able to establish homes and continue their lives, many were able to repatriate to Soviet Armenia with these documents. So it is not surprising that his memory is preserved in Armenia not only in the form of Nansen's gold commemorative medal and the sculpture located in the Ring Park. In 2014, the Nansen Museum was opened in the second block of Nor Nork, in the park named after Nansen on Nanse Street.

The museum under the jurisdiction of Yerevan Municipality was built on the initiative of philanthropists, honored doctors of the Republic of Armenia Karlen and Sara Yesayan, and the author of the project is architect Albert Sohikyan.

The museum is small, only 40 square meters, but it is able to present the main achievements of the life of a great scientist and a great humanist through Armenian books, films, posters and other materials. It can be seen from them how harmoniously he was able to combine scientific and humanitarian activities. In the museum, a separate section is dedicated to the life and patriotic activities of patrons Karlen and Sara Yesayan.

By the way, in addition to the museum, the Nansen memorial complex also includes the Church of St. Astvatsatsin, the eritsatun-temple with an adjacent rest pavilion, and about three dozen monuments dedicated to famous Armenians and friends of the Armenian people. Of course, Fritjof Nansen's sculpture is also among them.

Museum of radio engineering

Address: Arshakunyats 5

Admission is free

The museum came to life in 2013, in cooperation with Arkady Ter-Tadevosyan of Commandos. The exhibits were collected thanks to the donations of Rafael Grigoryan, the president of the Mashtots Sports and Technical Organization of the DOSAF Union, and his supporters.

The collection includes many amazing, and in some cases, still working designs. For example, a 1956 TV with a lens full of water, a device for coordinating the path of letter-carrying pigeons from Holland, a white radio from the Hrazdan factory. there used to be such in every house in Yerevan, in the morning it played the national anthem of Soviet Armenia, in the evening it broadcasted classical music.

Other means of communication relate to the Artsakh and Homeland wars and if you're lucky, you'll get a glimpse of how a real Morse code generator works. Line, dotted line, dot and line again, like spy movies and you can hear the clicking of fingers one after the other, and you can imagine what the code is like in these tapes in an envelope in someone's office in the Soviet Union.

Museum of Science and Technology

Engineering city, Bagrevand

Entry is free

The founders of the Museum of Science and Technology, Zhirayr Sevoyan and Aram Salatyan, have been engaged in collection work for many years, have acquired Armenian-made electric automobiles, testers, gauges, as well as household appliances, microelectronics (in other words, such things that we did not even imagine that produced by us), create a whole collection and supplement it all with photos and textual materials about the scientists and factories that created and produced them.

Thus, there is a museum in Yerevan where you can visit and get acquainted with the scientific and technical achievements, inventions, innovations, history of scientific thought of the Armenian people from the industrialization period of the Soviet period to the present day, and learn what Armenians have contributed to the field of world science. Let me say right away that you will have many occasions to be pleasantly surprised.

The collection is divided into two main parts, which are hinted at in the name of the museum: "technique" and "science" are displayed in one hall. "Technique" will be of particular interest to those who love retro things and have fond memories of Soviet-made items, from "Aragats" refrigerators to locally made electric guitars and synthesizers.

ARF History Museum

Address: Mher Mkrtchyan Street 12/1

Entrance is free.

The museum opens its doors every working day from 11:00 to 16:00.

In fact, not only the personal belongings of Dashnaktsutyun party figures are displayed here, but also many of these exhibits summarize the history of the creation of the First Republic. Drow's personal belongings, documents related to the name of Soghomon Tehleryan, banknotes of the First Republic (Armenian rubles), Levon Shant's coffee mugs and other examples.

Everything that can be seen here has been collected and turned into a museum in three stages. The collection works started at the end of the 19th century, with the advice of the famous ARF figure Rostom, until 2006, when most of the exhibits were moved from France to Yerevan. Today, many exhibits are presented in the museum for temporary display, as the display boards are constantly updated, like Soghomon Tehleryan's personal photos and belongings, which appear next to other museum exhibits every year as part of the Museum Night program, and then in the vault.

The last part of the museum includes the display of exhibits of important events related to the first Republic of Armenia. In this section, you can see important documents of the time, photos related to the February Uprising, work outfits of various public and political figures as representatives of Armenia, the flag of the First Republic and many other samples. The history of the first republic was short, but bright and important for Armenia. For the same reason, this museum is important, which should not be viewed from a purely partisan point of view.

Yerevan Medicine Museum

Address, Arshakunyats 44/1 (entrance 4), apartment 43

Admission is free

To visit, you need to make an appointment in advance (tel. +374 93 30 92 37).

It is a whole museum, but it fits only 65 m. in the area, which in turn is located in Arshakunyats avenue. This three-room apartment presents the personal collection of collector Harutyun Minasyan, formed as a result of nearly 30 years of collecting. More precisely, 30 thousand exhibits from the field of Armenian and world medicine.

The first room-exhibition hall conventionally received the name "primitive". In this section, fossil-archaeological samples, medical amputation tools, skeletons, Stone Age tools, dishes, gour, devices for receiving spa water and other things are presented. Mr. Minasyan proudly presents a 5,000-year-old human skull with cranial pathology, found during one of the excavations in the village of Jrahovit, Artashat. Moreover, it was excavated by Mr. Minasyan himself. In this part of the museum, you can get an idea of how the history of medicine developed, when Mr. Minasyan tells you how instruments of amputation were used in ancient times or how internal organs were examined.

In different corners of the living room, you can see real medical desks, neatly arranged medical women's and men's bags, equipment, photos of famous Armenian and foreign doctors, medical university students, and others, personal items donated to the museum by heirs or bought with personal funds of the collector.

On the way to the terrace, you will find name boards used in the 18th and 20th centuries, which indicated the address of this or that doctor's apartment, as well as household items from different times: irons, irons, etc., which were used for medical purposes, perhaps by the same doctors, whose signs are also here.