We are in Dsegh: the teapot is boiling, the smell of aromatic mint is spreading in the room. Manik Yeganyan is pouring the tea infusion into the cup, the tea prepared from the herbs she has collected with her hands. She has been collecting wild tea plants and herbs for 30 years.
"I always give teas as a gift, with the words “drink it to be healthy!”. We want to challenge coffee lovers. Our teas are natural and can transform the human body to a good state, helping to live healthy. The nature in Lori is very rich. If we don't recognize the plant, we collect samples, find it in the herb book to discover that it also has medicinal properties. Every plant under our feet, every flower is important for our health," Manik Yeganyan notes.
Manik Yeganyan turned her hobby of collecting herbs and tea plants into a business with the help of her daughter Mariam Yeganyan. The Yeganyan’s family packs and brands linden, cephalaria, thyme, wild meant, peppermint and other plants collected from the mountains and grasslands near Dsegh under the brand name "Loreni" and is trying to enter the big market by making the nature of Lori Region and Dsegh known to tourists. "Living Landscapes for Market Development in Armenia" (LILA), which aims to improve the incomes of farmers, rural businesses in remote areas and the natural livelihoods of the rural population, supported them in bringing the concept to life.
Mariam Yeganyan is noting that the process of collecting and drying teas was a tradition in her family. "We decided to turn it into a business concept, do what we love, collect the plants growing in the area, dry them and sell them”.
Dsegh is a famous touristic destination, but there was no teahouse or café in the village. However, according to Mariam, there is a demand for it. With the support of LILA project they renovated and furnished their house, which previously served as a shop in the village, and today they are ready to present the secrets of collecting, processing and infusing Armenian teas to the tourists visiting the village. "We are planning to organize master classes in our teahouse on the correct use of teas and their importance, Mariam said.
According to Manik Yeganyan the climate change has had a negative impact on the collection of plants. "In recent years, climate change has had its impact on the process of harvesting plants. The rains are frequent, and because of the bad weather we do not manage to go and collect the herbs on time, so plants overmature, and by the time we go to collect them, they are already of poor quality. This year, we had to collect the plants from distant meadows and mountains, since we could not collect tea plants of acceptable quality because of excessive humidity. Usually we dry the collected herbs in a cool place. This year, the humidity was so high that we dried all our tea plants in an electric dryer to get normal, quality tea," she says.
Speaking about the origins of their idea, Mariam Yeganyan states that it comes from the love for nature. "I love our nature very much, we want to show our nature to tourists in this way. Today, people spend a lot of time in their phones and in the virtual world, they see little nature, so we try to reconnect them with the nature," she said.
"Living Landscapes for Market Development in Armenia" (LILA) is a seven-year project financed by the Swiss Government through the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and is implemented by the Caucasian and Armenian offices of WWF in cooperation with "Strategic Development Agency" (SDA) NGO.
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September 03, 2024 at 16:48