Lori Province
Lori controls Armenia's northern corridor to Georgia, the only open land border, while the 250-year-old Alaverdi copper complex illustrates extractive economy persistence across political regimes.
Lori Province occupies Armenia's northern corridor to Georgia—the country's only fully functional land border and thus critical for bypassing the closed Turkish and Azerbaijani frontiers. The Debed River canyon shapes the province, with the road to Tbilisi threading through gorges that historically served as invasion routes and now function as economic lifelines. When blockades tighten, this single corridor bears the weight of Armenia's external trade.
The province demonstrates the durability of extractive economies across political systems. The Alaverdi copper-molybdenum complex, operating since 1770 under successive Armenian, Russian Imperial, Soviet, and modern regimes, has poisoned the Debed River for centuries while providing employment that no government has found replaceable. The UNESCO World Heritage monasteries of Haghpat and Sanahin, built in the 10th-13th centuries, sit upstream from the industrial pollution—medieval spiritual architecture overlooking modern environmental degradation.