From Lusavan to Charentsavan: Toponymic Myth-Making and the Textual Construction of a Soviet Industrial City

In this study, Charentsavan (Kotayk province, Armenia) is considered a bottom-up Soviet industrial city, whose material infrastructure and symbolic identity were created simultaneously through industrialization, mass housing construction, and cultural myth-making. The study explores how the “new city” arose and what makes Charentsavan noteworthy not only in the Armenian context. The research adopts a micro-historical and semiotic approach. The city is considered a semiotic object. The toponymy (Lusavan/Charentsavan), naming practices, and urban narratives were analyzed as tools of symbolic construction. The empirical basis includes archival visual materials documenting Soviet-era construction and everyday urban spaces. Furthermore, literary and essayistic texts in Armenian were studied, particularly the anthology Gangraher Tghayi Kaghaky: Aknarkner Yev Banasteghtsut’yunner [Curly Boy’s City: Essays and Poems] (1987), as well as the collection of memoirs (2007). This corpus of texts was read using Peirce’s discursive analysis and semiotics, which is based on the relationship between the representative, the interpretant, and the object. Additionally, a demographic analysis of the context was conducted. Industrial data was used to reconstruct the logic of rapid urban growth and housing construction. The analysis revealed that Soviet Charentsavan was shaped by a planned industrial and urban structure, including factories, transportation, and residential areas, as well as a mythological foundation. This is evident in the 1967 renaming of Lusavan in honor of the rehabilitated poet Yeghishe Charents. This toponymic shift altered the ideological codes of modernity, labor, and collective memory, uniting a diverse population under an industrial civic identity. By providing English-speaking researchers with a Soviet Armenian corpus of scientifically based, propagandistic texts about the city, the study broadens the comparative discussion about Soviet mass housing and urban heritage. Thus, this study demonstrates how industrial projects create sustainable symbols of the city, beyond just architectural forms.