Dilijan National Park is a forest of oak, beech and hornbeam in the northern hills of Armenia, a country otherwise dry, bare and brown. Inside it the slopes are green to the ridges and springs run in every gully. Armenians call the town at its centre their Switzerland, and have taken its waters since Soviet days. The forest hides things. Haghartsin, a monastery built and rebuilt between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, sits where the woods climb the slope behind it, its grey domes showing just above the treetops. You walk between three churches, a vaulted gavit and the old refectory, with mist sliding down the wooded hills around them. In autumn the oak and beech above burn copper and gold, though the turn lasts a week or two, and if you miss it the snow has shut the high trails.
The park is walked on the Transcaucasian Trail, whose stretch here runs about twenty kilometres from the town over the ridge to Parz Lake, then down through forest and hayfields to Goshavank. Most walkers split it, thirteen kilometres one day and seven the next. It is blazed the whole way, so it is one of the few walks in Armenia you can do without a guide. Above the treeline the woods give way to rolling pasture folded between the soft summits of the Lesser Caucasus, thick with wildflowers in June and July. Behind you, ridge after forested ridge fades into the haze. Goshavank at the far end is named for Mkhitar Gosh, the twelfth-century monk who compiled the first Armenian law code here; it was still governing Armenian communities as far away as Poland six hundred years later. Beside its Saint Gregory church stands a cross-stone cut in 1291, worked so deeply that Armenians call it the needle-carved. The water that grew all this ended up famous for a joke. In a 1977 Soviet comedy a man from Dilijan insists his spring is the second best in the world, after San Francisco's. A bronze of the film's heroes now stands in town beside a running tap.