Aparan, a small town 55 kilometers north of Yerevan, was hit particularly hard. Local authorities said that strong winds preceded by a hailstorm ripped the roofs of over 20 apartment blocks, 90 private houses and two dozen administrative buildings and brought down 70 electric poles and more than 100 trees, injuring five people.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Hovik Poghosian, a middle-aged local resident.
The Armenian Interior Ministry said it deployed 200 rescue workers in Aparan on Monday to clean up after the extensive damage. The community was still without electricity in the afternoon. Local officials said power supply will be restored later in the day.
The municipal administration said it has already started restoring blown-off roofs. Some local residents were doing that on their own.
“The main thing is that nobody was killed,” one woman told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “We’ll manage everything.”
In the adjacent Shirak province, powerful hailstorms inflicted severe damage on agricultural fields of more than a dozen villages.
“We have no crops to take home, everything is 100 percent destroyed,” said Mushegh Sahakian, a farmer running one of those communities, Voskehask.
Armenia - An agricultural field in Voskehask village severely damaged by hail, June 16, 2025.
Sahakian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that he invested last fall 7 million drams ($18,000) in wheat, barley and other crops grown on his 25 hectares of land. He said he will have virtually nothing to harvest this year.
“Ninety-nine percent of my crop is damaged,” said Hayk Danielian, another Voskehat farmer cultivating around 100 hectares of land.
Danielian claimed to have invested at least 40 million drams during the last planting season. He said he borrowed most of that money from a bank.
Danielian also pointed out that he and other villagers spurned agricultural insurance last year because it did not cover hail or wind damage. In the words of the village chief, Sunday’s hailstorm was so violent that hail cannons stationed around Voskehask proved powerless against it.
Meanwhile, the governor of Shirak, Davit Arushanian, said that local authorities have already begun calculating damage caused by the natural disaster. The provincial administration will submit their findings to the Armenian government, Arushanian said, adding that he does not know whether the affected rural communities will receive any compensation.