Hyeland Project Attempts to Create Armenian Settlement in Rural Tennessee

He proposed creating a digital network-state, declaring “What if instead of coordinating on network security, we coordinated on physical security, or social security, or medical security, or cultural security, or not even security at all — maybe you would want to coordinate in other ways. We can do so in a way without giving up autonomy, without losing control, with having a tremendous amount of voice in determining how things play out, and having the ability to exit. And to exist means to leave the network without everything falling apart.”

Last December, Chorluyan published a 35-page on the decentralized decision-making architecture of such a network state which uses cryptographic identifiers for membership (“You Will Own Everything and Be Free: A Federated Fractal Network-State Architecture,” Journal of Special Jurisdictions, Vol. 5 No. 1, 2024, pp. 174-208). A network-state, unlike a nation-state, does not have contiguous geographic territory, according to Chorluyan’s paper, and may espouse different operational philosophies, for example stressing equity or property rights. In his conference talk, he said that the Armenians already possess the components of a network state, with many of the organizations represented in Nashville potential service providers for this future entity.

He said, “What I hope to accomplish, me personally, not necessarily in the Hyeland Project — but I hope the Hyeland Project is a magnet for people who want to share my vision — [is] that we will build a greenfield [meaning construction on previously undeveloped land] community, and it will be called a network community here in Tennessee and we will be the vanguard that uses this technology.”

Trying to make his idea more understandable to those present, he said, “The closest thing I can describe is like an HOA [homeowners association], but instead of it being an HOA fee, you are being paid a dividend, based on how much you invested in it – so your percentage ownership of the town, and obviously the revenue it has produced.”

For example, if the town raises money and builds a hotel, it will be leased out and it will then make money for the town. “So you go from the paradigm that you are a resident in your town and you are being taxed to being now an owner in your town,” Chorluyan said.

He said that he was opposed to the World Economic Forum, and instead likes property rights and wants to own his own community.

Naira Ayvazyan, originally from Armavir, Armenia, has a bachelor’s degree in graphic design from Portland State University (2007) and worked in a variety of different fields, including as a product manager for several companies, but from 2023 stepped away from the tech world to work in residential real estate, architecture and design. She has a YouTube channel called Nairaville focusing on building, construction and real estate. She got involved in the Hyeland Project seriously from February 2024.

In her talk, she said that though she lived at one point in New York City, she wanted to find peace and quiet in rural living. She moved to Portland, Ore., Texas, and then Tennessee. After travels to Italy and Armenia, she said that she returned to Tennessee, where she thought the Upper Cumberland area reminded her of Dilijan, Armenia, with its four seasons, while Tenneessee had the kind of freedom rights and responsible budgeting she was looking for.

Ayvazyan said she knows similar Armenians who moved from California to random states where they felt alone and isolated, so they moved back to an Armenian community. When she met Chorluyan in Tennessee, she said, “We realized that we are looking for the exact same thing and we realized also that we searched the web and we could not find any Armenian community in any community in rural America in general.”

Ayvazyan declared that the Hyeland Project aimed to close that gap, by allowing Armenians who are seeking rural peace and homesteading to find one another. Chorluyan identified the Free State Project in New Hampshire and the two of them used this as a model. The Free State Project is a political migration libertarian movement founded in 2001 and based on decentralized decision making. It got over 20,000 like-minded libertarians to move to that state in order to promote their approach to society.

She said that as the Hyeland community grows in Tennessee, “there are just endless possibilities of what kind of partnerships can form, as small and important as family, to business partnerships, to building small cities, to the bigger opportunities.”

Ayvazyan said that she always wanted to build a village, which would be a type of retreat with full sustainability (off-grid). She said, “It can bring people, who were born and raised here [presumably meaning the US], to be able to learn about food, understand nutrition, as well as health, stress, and so on.”

In this future Tennessee Armenian settlement, Ayvazyan said, “One thing that I really want to do some day is find a nice hilltop in Tennessee that looks exactly like Dilijan and build a medieval-style Armenian church. My plan is not going to church but what I want to do with the basement of that church. And I really want to start translating our [Armenian] literature, translating our history, translating the history about us from our neighboring neighbors from history because there is so much that is lost, in deep in the archives.”

Anecdotally, it did not seem that many of the participants in the Nashville conference were ready to move to Upper Cumberland or adopt the technolibertarian approach to life, but perhaps that was not the true intended target audience.

Chorluyan at the end of the March weekend in Nashville, announced that he and Ayvazyan would like to have an event in late summer or early fall completely different from this conference. He urged: “Try to experience an Armenian city, a popup Armenian city, at a campground in Tennessee.”