The Kalavan Retreat Center is a social and educational initiative, curating influence from the international community to create opportunities for co-habitation, education, and deep personal development in Kalavan village, Armenia. It was founded by American-Armenian Gregory V. Diehl in 2024 after moving here in 2019 to refurbish an old house and contribute to the village's cultural and economic evolution. It's purpose and form have adapted to the reality of the circumstances in Kalavan and Armenia as a whole to serve the highest virtue and accomplish the most good possible under artificially restricted conditions.
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.
One of our main aims at the Kalavan Retreat Center is now to create conditions in which it is healthy and sane to raise children who are not subject to cultural coercion and compulsion, and to all the things we sought to escape by creating the lifestyle we did here, away from mainstream society. The greatest difficulties continue to come...
"Zen" is one of the most notoriously difficult to define words in the history of language, because the very act of doing so seems to take you further away from it. As a lover of coining new terms and definitions, I'll give it my best shot: Zen describes the ability to detach from mental constructs – or at least to...
For almost two years, the Kalavan Retreat Center has been Armenia's unofficial hub for international volunteers. We were one of the only Workaway hosts in this part of the world, and word spread quickly among travelers coming in from Georgia, Turkey, and Iran who were looking for a similar volunteer opportunity to what they found in those...
"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."
―Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
In our first year of hosting international volunteers at the Kalavan Retreat Center, we've had a number of extremely positive and extremely negative experiences. It's been a very interesting social change for me, personally. Before this experiment began, I was largely socially isolated. Now, I have found myself in a position of social leadership...
What convinced me in 2018 to invest my time, money, and energy in Kalavan was the public media narrative being pushed by local politicians that it was a place intent on rapid cultural and economic development. That idea aligned closely with the values I'd been honing from my experiences traveling around the developing world since I was a...
