Nobody books a flight across the world to watch two people sign a piece of paper. They go because a wedding, at its most honest, is an act of introduction – to a family, a history, a country, a way of being alive that isn’t their own. And they leave, if it does what it is capable of doing, carrying something they did not arrive with.
Take Armenia. For most of the guests who travelled to the mountains of Dilijan for the wedding of Lilli Bagradyans and Sven Grolik – now Bagradyans Grolik – the country had existed, until that weekend, as a place known mainly through grief. A genocide the world took too long to acknowledge. A civilisation more mourned than visited. And although that history cannot and should not be forgotten, it has long obscured something equally true: that Armenia is one of the most extraordinary, creatively vital countries on earth – a place of staggering beauty, ancient culture and a warmth that stops visitors cold. What it actually is rarely makes it through.
By the end of three days in the forest mountains of Dilijan, those guests were making toasts in the shadow of Mount Ararat, dancing beneath the stars to music they had never heard before, sitting in a twelfth-century monastery listening to an all-female choir sing compositions by Komitas Vardapet entirely acappella – music that carries within it both the weight of Armenian history and its extraordinary, stubborn will to survive. Some of them are already planning to return.
This is what weddings have always been capable of. We have simply not given them enough credit for it.
When two people from different cultures fall in love, everyone around them becomes part of that exchange. It is, in the truest sense, a form of diplomacy. The most personal kind. The most effective kind. No government initiative has ever done what a weekend of dancing in someone else’s mountains can do. When you have been inside a culture – truly inside it, through its food and music and rituals and its quality of joy – it lives in you in a way that no amount of reading can replicate.
When Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Nick Jonas married in Rajasthan in 2018, the world watched Hindu and Christian traditions hold each other across several days of ceremony, clothing, music and ritual – a public demonstration of what love between cultures, at its most generous, looks like. When Meghan Markle married into the British royal family in 2018, a Black gospel choir singing in Windsor Castle sent something through the world that no press release could have engineered: the sound of a culture being seen, fully, in a room where it had never been heard before.
These are the visible examples. But the same exchange happens every weekend, in every city, at celebrations that will never make the front page. It happens when a group of friends spend a Saturday afternoon in East London hunting for the right saree to wear to their best friend’s wedding in Delhi and discover, in the process, an entire world of fabric, colour and meaning they had never considered. It happens when a best man spends three weeks learning a traditional dance to perform in front of the whole wedding entourage, getting it wrong and starting again. It happens in the small instructions passed between guests – how to tie this, when to stand, what this moment means – each one an act of initiation into another way of living.
The couples who understand this most completely approach their wedding as a form of authorship – designing an experience with the deliberateness of curators, knowing that what they build for people to move through will change what those people carry when they leave.
When Armenian architect and painter Lilli Bagradyans and German interior designer and entrepreneur Sven Grolik began planning their wedding, Armenia was never really in question. It was where their relationship had taken shape – the destination of their first trip together, and later, the mountains where Sven proposed.
“That first night in Yerevan completely changed my perception of what a city could feel like,” Sven says. “The streets were alive: elderly men playing chess under the lights, children running through fountains, families sitting together around endless tables of food, people drinking Armenian coffee late into the night. There was a warmth and openness that felt incredibly magnetic. I fell in love with Armenia almost instantly.”
Armenia, he says, “became the backdrop to many defining moments of our relationship long before it became the setting of our wedding.”
They structured three days as a journey through the country itself – each day a different layer of a place the world has barely begun to know.
“We didn’t want to create only a wedding weekend. We wanted our guests to encounter Armenia through different lenses: its landscapes, architecture, spirituality, music, hospitality and cultural traditions.” Lilli says.
Armenia holds medieval monasteries and Soviet brutalist structures in extraordinary proximity. Its viniculture predates most of Europe’s by centuries. Its terrain shifts from volcanic plains to forest mountains within hours. Its contemporary art scene is vivid and serious.
The first evening was devoted to the finest grape. Against the silhouette of Mount Ararat, guests tasted regional vintages paired with traditional cuisine, watching lavash pulled from a tonir – the underground clay oven central to Armenian life for centuries. “More than food and drink, we wanted people to experience the deeply communal nature of Armenian hospitality.”
The second day turned to architecture. At the Hay Art Cultural Center – designed by Jim Torosyan, the architect behind Yerevan’s iconic Cascades – a string quartet performed alongside the kanon, one of Armenia’s oldest instruments, before the evening opened into a celebration beneath the building’s monumental concrete circles. “The setting felt almost surreal – somewhere between a contemporary art installation and a forgotten cinematic landscape.”
The ceremony at Haghartsin Monastery was where everything arrived in full. Armenian and German, ancient and modern – the two worlds the couple carries between them – met not in compromise but in conversation. Lilli’s father walked her down the monastery’s stone steps before both her parents placed her hands into Sven’s.
“That moment symbolised not only the joining of two people, but the joining of two families, two histories and two cultures. Rather than compromising traditions, we wanted to create something that honoured both equally.”
Inside, the choir’s voices rose through the stone. “Komitas’ compositions carry so much Armenian history and melancholy within them. Hearing those voices resonate through those walls created an atmosphere that felt almost transcendental.”
At one point, guests from Berlin, South Africa, Australia and New York were dancing traditional Armenian dances together beneath the stars. The floor remained full all night. “It was pure joy, honestly,” the couple say. “Armenian culture has an incredible ability to make people feel included – through music, dancing, food, long communal tables. Watching that happen felt incredibly powerful.”
A country that had existed for many of those guests as a word in a history book had become somewhere they needed to return to. Some already are – for cycling tours through the mountains, for programmes on Soviet modernist architecture, for the drinks, for the food.
“What surprised people was discovering how vibrant, creative and emotionally rich Armenia actually is. They left not only with memories, but with genuine curiosity and connection to the country itself.”
Back in Berlin, the couple now host charity dinners introducing guests to Armenian culture through cuisine and storytelling as an extension of the wedding’s spirit.
“For us, culture becomes most meaningful when it is shared generously.”
This is what a wedding can be, at its most powerful. Not just a declaration between two people. A declaration about the world – about which places deserve to be known, how cultures deserve to be felt and what stories deserve to be told in full rather than reduced to the version that travels easiest.
Every time someone dances at a wedding in a country they were not born in, every time they delight in a dish whose name they cannot pronounce, or sit somewhere far from home and realise how much they had underestimated a destination, something changes in them that does not change back.
Asked what message their wedding sent to the world, Lilli and Sven answered without hesitation.
“Live everything fully – and share it generously with the people you love.”
