also known as Iron Fountain 

location: 40.81567054315483, 43.84998363278246

architect: Arthur Tarkhanyan

date: 1982

At the northern edge of Gyumri, where the dense urban fabric begins to thin out, among scattered low buildings and open ground, stands a dark metal structure resembling a small abandoned spacecraft. Local residents often call it simply ֆանտանը – “fantanə” , that is a Russian-style pronunciation of the word “fountain” with the Armenian definite article. It is more broadly known as the Friendship Fountain or the Iron Fountain. What now appears as an abandoned object was once the center of a planned public zone near the buildings of the Polytechnic University in Soviet Leninakan, the name Gyumri carried from 1924 to 1990.

The fountain was designed by Artur Tarkhanyan, one of the key figures of Armenian modernism. His name is usually associated with larger and more emblematic projects such as the Tsitsernakaberd Genocide Memorial, Zvartnots Airport, Rossiya Cinema, and the Youth Palace. The fountain in Gyumri belongs to a smaller typology, positioned somewhere between architecture and sculpture, yet aiming to enhance and reorganize urban space. The project also carries a personal dimension: Gyumri was Tarkhanyan’s native city, and the fountain was created during the later period of his career. It was intended to connect the buildings of the Polytechnic Institute with nearby residential houses and to shape a public center for a new educational and residential area.

In the fountain project, everything was extraordinary yet somehow fitting for the polytechnic surroundings: a large black metal structure expanding outward in petal- or wing-like forms, with rods and spherical elements, operating through a recirculating water system. Its otherworldly appearance was a precise geometric system. The composition was based on the division of a circle into 48 parts, repeated vertically in 12 tiers, with each row of elements given its own proportions and dimensions. Tarkhanyan developed full-scale templates for the fountain, which were then executed by local metalworkers and blacksmiths. This combination of strict geometry and manual metalwork helps explain the object’s strange power: it seems at once engineered and organic, industrial and floral. Such a format, however, was entirely new for late Soviet Armenian cities.

In Soviet Armenia, fountains as focal points for public gathering were already being reinterpreted through a modernist lens. A striking example is the fountain by architect Phoenix Darbinyan, known as the Black Fountain or the Large Picturesque Fountain, built in the late 1970s and located in the fifth segment of the Ring Boulevard – the green belt of central Yerevan, constructed between 1962 and 1985. Like Tarkhanyan’s later fountain in Gyumri, Darbinyan’s design departed from classical stone forms, instead presenting an industrially inflected sculptural object made of black metal with numerous pointed and jagged elements, as if assembled from technical parts or tools. Its appearance as a dark, high-tech monument transformed in the presence of water, dissolving into layers of spray and becoming softer and more festive.

Gyumri was also marked by a similar structure near Teryan Street, in the area known as “Lake,” a former site of interconnected urban lakes with boats and public amenities. In the late Soviet period, this area included a water zone with a fountain row attributed to Hakob Jivanyan, the chief architect of Gyumri, also presumably constructed in the late 1970s. Jivanyan’s fountains are much simpler and smaller – six lamp-like blue structures arranged in a row – however, they share a similar language with the fountains by Darbinyan and Tarkhanyan in material and form choice. Such material and design language may seem unusual for fountains even within the late modernist Armenian context. They do not rely on stone mass or concrete monumentality; rather, they draw their force from metal plates, rods, joints, and repeated patterns. This gives them an industrial character, yet the result is not merely technical or brutal: each fountain opens like a flower, where engineering becomes ornamental sculpture.

However, Tarkhanyan’s fountain stood out not only for its striking monumentality but also for its integration into a broader semantic field of Soviet sculptural and architectural objects. As the Friendship Fountain, it belongs to a series of “friendship” monuments across the USSR, which could refer to the friendship of peoples, republics, cities, generations, or socialist allies. The most famous early example was also a fountain – the Friendship of Peoples Fountain at VDNKh in Moscow, opened in 1954. There, unity was expressed through gilded allegorical figures of the Soviet republics and agricultural abundance. In the Caucasus, the Russia–Georgia Friendship Monument near Gudauri offered another late Soviet interpretation of the theme, combining political commemoration with a vivid mosaic narrative set within the dramatic landscape of the Greater Caucasus. The Gyumri fountain belongs to this semantic field but translates the theme into a more abstract and local language; it does not commemorate a specific event of “friendship,” but rather expresses the idea of unity and shared life.

Construction of the fountain in Gyumri began in 1982 and lasted two years. Opened in 1984, the fountain, together with a nearby café, quickly became a social hub. Its active life, however, lasted only four years. The rupture came on 7 December 1988, when the Spitak earthquake devastated northwestern Armenia. Leninakan was among the cities hit hardest. The nearby Polytechnic Institute collapsed, and although the main structure of the fountain survived, the water stopped, and the surrounding urban environment disappeared. The district filled with temporary housing, and some residents have remained there ever since.

This later history profoundly changed the meaning of the fountain. Before 1988, it belonged to the vocabulary of Soviet celebration of youth, progress, and public life. After the earthquake, it became a witness – a sign of Gyumri’s attachment to its interrupted past. Today, the Friendship Fountain no longer functions. Its internal water system has been lost, the metal has rusted, and the surrounding territory remains fragile. A similar fate has befallen the smaller but equally industrial Lake fountains on Teryan Street, which also fell into disrepair after the earthquake. However, the large Iron Fountain may yet await a revival, as the architect’s daughter, Anait Tarkhanyan, has proposed a careful revival of the fountain’s original form while adapting it to contemporary urban use. Thus, its restoration would make it possible to restore not only its function as a major attractor of international tourism, but also its original role in centering and revitalizing local social life.

Sources and Further Reading

Balyan, Karen. Ֆենիքս Դարբինյան. քաղաքին ուրախություն պարգևած ճարտարապետը [Phoenix Darbinyan: The Architect Who Gave Joy to the City]. Yerevan, 2020.

Bronovitskaya, Anna; Markus, Elena; Palmin, Yuri; Balyan, Karen. Ереван: архитектура советского модернизма, 1955–1991 [Yerevan: Architecture of Soviet Modernism, 1955–1991]. Moscow, 2026..

Frangulyan, Eliza. Շատրվա՞ն, թե՞ հուշարձան․ Անահիտ Թարխանյանը Գյումրիի հայտնի «ֆանտանի» նոր նախագիծն է ներկայացրել [Fountain or Monument? Anahit Tarkhanyan Presents a New Project for Gyumri’s Famous “Fantan”] (2019) Shant News

Iron Fountain, at Tarkhanyan Center

Sahakyan, Hrach, and Anahit Minasyan. Անտառի ֆոնտանը [The Fountain of Antaravan] (2019) Urbanista

Sargsyan, Mikael. “Գյումրու երբեմնի գեղեցիկ շատրվանները՝ ժանգի, աղբի ու անտարբերության մեջ” [Gyumri’s Once Beautiful Fountains Amid Rust, Garbage, and Indifference] (2025) Aravot

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text by Elena Lisitsyna