Loud Etudes is an independent literary travel publication—premium travel guides, essays, cultural portraits, and curated local recommendations from places we live in before we write about them. Our work is available online and as city guides in both print and digital editions.

We spend extended time in each city, meeting the people who shape it from the inside. Our recommendations come directly from them—the shopkeepers, artists, and residents who know a place not as a destination, but as a life. We curate only what we have experienced ourselves.

We have reported across the Middle East, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Caucasus, East Asia, and North America. More cities are in progress.

We are based in San Francisco, Vienna, Prague, and Yerevan.

Loud Etudes was founded by sisters Knarik and Katrin.

We grew up in a traditional Armenian household, surrounded by storytellers. We learned early that the most important things are rarely said directly—they live in gestures, silences, and the spaces between words.

We have been looking for those spaces across more than 45 countries, and making room for the stories people used to only whisper. Every story we publish belongs to the people who let us in. We are the ones who stayed long enough to listen and ask.

Travel guides

Produced as print and digital editions, built over months of firsthand research. Each guide is shaped by conversations with locals—residents, craftspeople, chefs, artists—whose knowledge of a place is irreplaceable. The result is a guide that could only have been made by someone who was actually there.


Curated recommendations

Drawn from the people who live there, deepened through our own time in each city. The family restaurant that has fed the same neighborhood for generations. The temple tucked behind a market street, known to the community that tends it. The bakery locals have been returning to for as long as anyone can remember. Places that carry the life of a city in them, and that welcome anyone willing to find them.

Literary essays

Rooted in specific encounters and unrepeatable moments. A conversation that changed how we understood a city. A ritual we were allowed to witness. We write what we were present for—and we share it in the hope that it opens something in the reader, a curiosity, a willingness to arrive thoughtfully.


Cultural portraits

Portraits of trades, rituals, and inherited ways of life we deeply respect. The knowledge that lives in the hands of the people who practice it. Documented faithfully, while it still can be.

We are open to collaboration across forms and industries. We work with publications, hospitality brands, cultural institutions, and travel companies on editorial commissions, bespoke content and guide production, and long-term content partnerships.

Inquiries: hi@loudetudes.com