Rugby 1 — Lions and Crusaders setting up a scrum (photo Shant Kel Khatcherian)

Armenia & Karabakh International rugby Sports

Rising from the Scrum: Yerevan Beats Limassol to Mark a Decade’s Return for Armenian Rugby

June 3, 2026

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YEREVAN — About 200 people turned out on a sunny Saturday afternoon of May 22 at Pyunik Yerevan’s home soccer ground (where poles had been lashed to the football goalposts to stand in for rugby uprights) for the 4 p.m. kickoff: local Armenians, a knot of Cypriot supporters who’d traveled with the visiting side, French expats, children, proud girlfriends, and a handful of curious onlookers.

What followed was a rout. Yerevan Lions RC beat the Limassol Crusaders 43-12, an upset win for the upstart Armenian team in a friendly exhibition match, the first of its kind played in the Republic of Armenia in over a decade, and one that comes less than seven months after the formal reestablishment of Rugby Union in the country under the Pan-Armenian Rugby Federation.

The Lions’ game bore the fingerprints of its scattered origins. Midway through the second half, an Iranian-Armenian forward fed the ball out of a maul on the Lions’ 10-metre line; a French back, timing his run, took it at pace and went over untouched, a try assembled by two players who’d learned the game a continent apart. Captained by Albert Tatevosyan, an experienced ethnic Armenian rugger from Georgia, the Lions drew on a core of veteran players from India’s storied Armenian College and on diaspora talent from Canada, the United States, France and Iran.

“Both sides played with grit, yet remained respectful throughout the entire match,” reports Referee Garren Jansezian. A librarian at the American University of Armenia by day, this repat from Rhode Island happily dusted off his New England Rugby Referee Society uniform to officiate the match, splitting the responsibility with his colleague from the Cypriot side.

Limassol drew first blood, but the Lions caught up quickly and, from there, controlled the match. The opening half was the tighter, more physical of the two; in the second, several Crusaders (fresh from a holy war of their own against Yerevan’s bars the night before) began to run out of legs, rotating off more and more often as Yerevan pulled clear.

‘It’s in Our Blood’

Team Coach Armen Markarian, himself no stranger to Armenian rugby headlines, brings a career’s worth of knowledge and experience to bear in helming the fledgling team. Markarian, an alumnus of the Armenian College and Philanthropic Academy, played on the Indian national under-19 rugby team, which reportedly fielded 12 Armenian players out of a total 15 on the pitch, making Armenian the de facto language of the Indian national side.

Since moving to Yerevan, Markarian has led efforts to revive the sport in Armenia. He carries with him 140 years of Armenian rugby tradition, rooted in the Armenian College & Philanthropic Academy in Kolkata. The school was established in the early 19th century to educate the children of British India’s Armenian merchant community, and the rugby programme it later developed, one of the Raj’s oldest and most resilient, continues to produce strong Armenian players to this day. For the young pupils the College attracts from India, Iran and Armenia, rugby has become inseparable from the school’s Armenian identity.

“As Armenian students, we woke up together, studied together and then trained together so closely that we knew each other’s moves without speaking,” Argin Ghadimian, also an Armenian College alum who now plays fullback for the Lions, told the Mirror-Spectator. “That’s why we always yell the word ‘ayrun’ [blood] in Armenian at the start of every game, because rugby is in our blood.” Ghadimian, who moved to Armenia as well two years ago, is focused on rooting the game once and for all in the Armenian homeland itself.

(photo Shant Kel Khatcherian)

Repatriating Armenians like Markarian, Jansezian and Ghadimian mark the latest chapter in a half-century-long bid to indigenize rugby in Armenia, one that traces back to a single repat from France.

Rooting Rugby in Armenia

Jacques Haspekian, an Armenian rugby player from Marseille, France, is credited with first importing the sport to Soviet Armenia in the early 1950s. But as he later told the Marseille daily La Provence, rugby’s British elite public-school pedigree turned off Soviet officials in Armenia, who are said to have preferred soccer’s proletarian aesthetic. He packed his bags and took the sport north to Georgia, where its passing resemblance to a local folk game called Lelo made it an instant hit and helped turn the country into one of the world’s rugby powerhouses.

The Armenian Mirror-Spectator

Topics: rugby, Sports

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The sport lingered in Armenia over the years, overshadowed by soccer and by the martial sports in which the country excelled on the world stage; teams inspired by Haspekian held occasional matches against Georgian opponents through the 1960s.

French intervention kept rugby on life support again after the economic hardship of the post-independence 1990s, culminating in the first Armenian Rugby Federation, with Gagik Panikyan as president and at least three clubs forming around it. French-Armenian players formed the core of a new national team that won a number of high-profile European matches. But a roster of French-born players couldn’t sustain the sport without a pipeline of local players to feed it, and rugby lay dormant for another decade. The Rugby Federation of Armenia was suspended from Rugby Europe by 2014 for inactivity. Grassroots attempts to revive it in the mid-2010s were cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic and then the 2020 Azerbaijani invasion of Artsakh, which drew most of the players into the Army.

Rugby Endures

Still, two independent revival efforts sprouted at the start of this decade. Veterans of the earlier iteration, and of the War, began trickling back onto the pitch for open practices, bolstered by an entire roster’s worth of Russian exile players known as Yerevan Legion RC. A few kilometers across town, graduates of India’s Armenian College got back in touch to form the core of the Yerevan Lions RC.

The revived Pan-Armenian Rugby Federation, drawing lessons from the past, is now consolidating the sport across the country. Alongside coaching the Lions Markarian also represents the Federation which has introduced after-school rugby programs at the Anatole-France Lycée, Public School No. 194, and at the university level for students of the French-Armenian University and the American University of Armenia, the start of a farm system meant to feed the next generation of Armenian players. To fund the effort, the league has secured a sponsor in Avo Tevanian, a former Armenian College player who went on to find success with the Sydney-based Avopiling insurance company and the Yerevan biotech firm Vipeco, along with support from the Franco-Armenian Ovalian rugby association.

Raising the Next Generation

The revival also extends to women and girls. A new program, still in its early days, is beginning to take root. “I’ve seen firsthand what rugby does for young women,” says Anglo-Armenian professional rugby player Sirvart Safarian, who leads it, “the confidence it builds, the friendships it forges, the way it changes how a girl sees herself.” Safarian believes Armenian girls and women have that spirit in abundance: “We can’t wait to see them on the pitch.”

Back in downtown Yerevan, the Cypriot and Armenian players (dry blood washed off, broken teeth covered up) are locked arm in arm once again, this time huddled over pints of lager. As the evening wears on, the afternoon’s bruises are forgotten, and the only contest left is who buys the next round.

Both teams post-game (photo Shant Kel Khatcherian)

The Lions aren’t done. They’ve announced a Rugby Day on June 14, open to anyone who wants to try the game, and plan to host sides from Georgia and France later in the season. Fittingly, these are the two countries most entangled in Armenia’s rugby story: the one that gave the sport its modern Armenian roots, and the one that took it in when Armenia first turned it away. Details have yet to be announced.

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