Share a house with cute kitties and a super-friendly doggo named Popoke ("Walnut"). We offer a sanctuary for thoughtful and artistic people seeking privacy and a healthy amount of isolation. The Kalavan Retreat Center features books, musical instruments, wifi, and comfortable places to reflect and work with welcoming residents. Here, we revel in the opportunity to get away from the world and its conditioning so that we can focus on becoming the type of people we want to be. The Kalavan Retreat Center was founded by American-Armenian author Gregory V. Diehl in 2024 after moving here in 2019 to contribute to the village's cultural and economic evolution. We are a social initiative dedicated to the realization of a single, powerful idea: You are not the person the world told you to be. Through educational workshops, lifestyle freedom, and Zen-inspired coaching, we invite visitors to Kalavan village to get away from the "real world," where they can step outside conditioned identities and remember their original face before they were born. We are currently accepting international residents for short or long stays who are focused on their personal development and want to live and grow among like-minded others. With the soon-to-be-completed paved road, getting to Kalavan from Dilijan will be faster and easier than it's ever been before.

Hi. I'm Gregory Diehl. I have a pretty unusual story about my life and how I ended up in Kalavan village. I welcome you to check out my business and personal development books, including the one I wrote based on my experiences living in Kalavan called Everyone Is an Entrepreneur (Ամեն ոք ձեռներեց է) or my personal website. You can also read my interview for Repat Armenia about how and why I moved to Armenia and Kalavan or watch the Boon TV "People of Action" documentary piece about us. From the time I was 18 years old, all through my 20s, I traveled around the world as a nomad. Often living out of a suitcase, sometimes staying in cities in apartments for months at a time, taking jobs wherever I could and learning a lot about myself and the world as I made my way to more than 50 countries. By the time I was 30, about five years ago, I had decided it was time for me to change my lifestyle a bit, to become more sedentary, to settle down in one place to maybe semi-retire somewhere I could feel comfortable becoming a pillar of a growing community, where I could be appreciated for my presence, and where I could really feel like I belonged. The whole time that I'd been traveling up to that point was very much the opposite. It was about rampant exploration, seeing as much of the world and learning as much as I could from the novelty of each experience. The idea of committing to one place with people who really wanted me to be around was very attractive to me.

Kalavan stands out for its sense of separation from society. The population is quite small, featuring fewer than 150 residents. This lends to its sense of isolation from the cities and towns of Armenia. Kalavan is located less than an hour from Dilijan and Ijevan (about 2.5 hours from Yerevan) in the direction of Chambarak. It is the last village at the end of about 20 minutes of unpaved road, just after Dprabak and Barepat. Its 1,600-meter elevation means that it remains significantly cooler than Yerevan throughout the year. While summer is warm, it’s not unbearable, and air conditioning is not required.