Cultural Armenia

The bell starts in the bell tower at 9 am and the deacons walk in procession through the courtyard of the Mother Cathedral of Holy Etchmiadzin, the oldest cathedral in the world. The original church was built here on this exact spot in 301 AD, the year King Trdat III declared Armenia the first Christian nation on Earth. The cathedral has been rebuilt three times, plundered by Shah Abbas of Persia in 1604, and renovated under every catholicos since the 4th century. It still serves as the spiritual headquarters of the worldwide Armenian Apostolic Church. Behind the cathedral, in the climate-controlled treasury, is the lance Saint Longinus is said to have used to pierce the side of Christ. Five hundred metres up the road, in the ruined Zvartnots cathedral built in 643 and toppled by an earthquake in the 10th century, swallows nest in the crowns of the surviving Corinthian columns. UNESCO listed the whole complex in 2000.

Armenia's cultural depth is genuinely overwhelming for its size. The country occupies 30,000 square kilometres (slightly larger than Belgium) yet contains: the world's first Christian state (since 301 AD), the world's oldest continuous winemaking culture (6,100 years at Areni-1), the unique 39-letter Armenian alphabet invented by Mesrop Mashtots in 405 AD specifically to translate the Bible, three sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List, the third-largest collection of medieval manuscripts on Earth at the Matenadaran (over 23,000 manuscripts), the oldest known leather shoe (5,500 years, from Areni-1 cave), and the most distinctive stone-carving tradition in the Christian world — the khachkar or “cross-stone”, also a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage item. The country has been on or near every major trade route between East and West for three thousand years, and the cultural layers run deep: Urartian fortresses from the 8th century BC, Greco-Roman temples, Byzantine and medieval Armenian churches, Persian-influenced miniature painting, Soviet socialist-realist sculpture and modernist architecture, and a fast-moving contemporary art scene.

The architecture of culture has been heavily invested in. The country has six major museums on the central squares of Yerevan alone — the History Museum of Armenia, the National Gallery, the Matenadaran institute of ancient manuscripts, the Cafesjian Centre for the Arts, the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute and the Erebuni Historical and Archaeological Museum-Reserve — plus dozens of house museums for the country's leading composers (Aram Khachaturian, Komitas), painters (Martiros Saryan), writers (Yeghishe Charents) and film-makers (Sergei Parajanov). Entrance prices are gentle by European standards: $4.0 for an adult ticket to most state museums; the Armenian Genocide Museum is free.

The world's first Christian state — cathedrals and monasteries

King Trdat III declared Armenia the first Christian state in 301 AD, twelve years before the Roman Empire issued the Edict of Milan and 79 years before the conversion of Emperor Theodosius. Saint Gregory the Illuminator, the country's patron saint, was released after thirteen years in the pit of the Khor Virap monastery and baptised the king and his nobles in the Arax river. The Mother Cathedral of Holy Etchmiadzin (Vagharshapat, Armavir province, 20 km west of Yerevan) was built within a few years on the spot where Gregory had a vision of Christ descending from heaven and striking the earth with a golden hammer — Echmiadzin means “the place where the Only-Begotten descended.”

The 1,700 years since have produced one of the densest concentrations of medieval Christian architecture in the world. Stone churches and monastery complexes are scattered across the country — over 4,000 documented sites — with the densest concentrations in the canyons of Lori (Haghpat and Sanahin, both 10th century, both UNESCO-listed), Tavush (Haghartsin and Goshavank in Dilijan National Park), Syunik (Tatev, 9th century, on the canyon rim) and Vayots Dzor (Noravank on its red-sandstone cliff). The architectural language is consistent across all of them: cone-shaped drum-and-cupola roofs on a cruciform plan, smooth-cut tuff or basalt blocks, deeply incised relief carving on the exterior walls, and the unique Armenian khachkar cross-stones lining the courtyards.

The khachkar is the country's signature cultural artefact — a free-standing stone slab carved with an interlaced cross-and-sun motif, often surrounded by intricate geometric ornament and the donor's inscription. Over 40,000 medieval khachkars survive in the country, the densest concentration at the Noratus cemetery on the western shore of Lake Sevan (over 900 khachkars in one field, the “Armenian Stonehenge”). UNESCO listed the carving tradition as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010. Modern stone carvers in the village of Vayk in Vayots Dzor still produce new khachkars on commission using the same techniques.

The Greco-Roman Garni temple (1st century AD, the Caucasus's only surviving pre-Christian temple, dedicated to the sun god Mihr), the rock-cut Geghard monastery (UNESCO, 13th century, carved into the basalt cliff at the head of the Azat canyon), and the medieval university monastery of Tatev (9th century, the cliff-top theological school that was the country's intellectual centre for 400 years) are the architectural highlights and tend to anchor most cultural tours.

The alphabet, the manuscript tradition and the great composers

The Armenian alphabet of 36 (now 39) letters was invented by the monk Mesrop Mashtots in 405 AD specifically to translate the Bible into Armenian. The new script enabled an explosion of literary and theological writing — the “Golden Age” of the 5th century — and the manuscript tradition that grew out of it ran continuously for over a thousand years. The Matenadaran on Mashtots Avenue in central Yerevan (the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts) holds the result: over 23,000 manuscripts, including the world's largest illustrated medieval Armenian manuscript (the 13th-century Mush Homiliary at 27.5 kg), the 7th-century Etchmiadzin Gospels with their ivory cover binding, and works in Greek, Persian, Arabic, Syriac, Latin and other languages that have survived in Armenian translation when the originals were lost.

The Mesropian alphabet is so central to the national identity that a 39-letter giant stone Alphabet Monument was erected in 2005 at Artashavan village near Mount Aragats (designed by sculptor Jim Torosyan) on the 1600th anniversary of the alphabet's creation. Each letter is roughly two metres tall and carved from local basalt, set out in a long line in the Aragats foothills with views over the southern plain.

The country's 20th-century musical reputation rests above all on Aram Khachaturian (1903–1978) — the composer of the Sabre Dance from the ballet Gayane, the Adagio from Spartacus, the Toccata for solo piano that is now a standard concert piece, and three symphonies. His Yerevan house, presented to him by the Soviet Armenian government in 1945, was converted to a museum after his death and now functions both as a memorial collection (manuscripts, family photographs, his personal grand piano) and as a working chamber-music concert hall. Other essential composers preserved in house museums: Komitas Vardapet (the priest-composer who collected and harmonised hundreds of Armenian folk songs in the late 19th century before dying in exile after the 1915 genocide), and the contemporary composers Avet Terterian and Tigran Mansurian.

The country's signature traditional instrument is the duduk, a double-reed apricot-wood flute with a low haunting tone that UNESCO listed as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2008. The instrument is played at every wedding, funeral, and significant national occasion; the Djivan Gasparyan recordings (notably his 1989 album I Will Not Be Sad in This World) brought the duduk to international attention. Live duduk performances run most weekend evenings at small venues in central Yerevan — the Komitas Chamber Music Hall on Isahakyan Street, the Aram Khachaturian house museum, the Cafesjian Center for the Arts.

Genocide memory, Urartian roots and the Soviet century

The 1915 Armenian Genocide — the systematic deportation and killing of around 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire — is the defining trauma of the country's recent history and a constant presence in its cultural life. The Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex, built on a hill west of central Yerevan in 1967 on the 50th anniversary of the massacres, is the country's pilgrimage site — twelve giant basalt slabs leaning inward around the eternal flame, with a 44-metre needle spire of Armenia's national survival rising next to it. The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute was added to the complex in 1995 and is the country's most comprehensive resource on the genocide. Entrance is free, photography is permitted in most galleries, and a serious audio guide in eight languages is included. Every year on 24 April (Genocide Remembrance Day) hundreds of thousands of Armenians march up the hill to lay flowers around the eternal flame.

The country's pre-Christian history runs deep. The Erebuni fortress city at the southern edge of modern Yerevan was founded by the Urartian king Argishti I in 782 BC — 29 years before the founding of Rome — and the surviving cuneiform inscription on a basalt stele in the Erebuni museum, declaring the founding of the city, is in effect the world's oldest birth certificate of a still-inhabited capital city. The Urartian civilisation produced a sophisticated material culture — bronze cauldrons, jewellery, fortified citadels — that the museum displays alongside finds from the related Shengavit early-agricultural site and the Karmir Blur (Teyshebaini) fortress. Combined visit to the museum and the surviving citadel on Arin Berd hill above it takes around 2 hours.

The Soviet period (1920–1991) reshaped the architecture and culture of the country at enormous scale. The Mashtots-Avenue grid and the giant Republic Square (formerly Lenin Square) of central Yerevan are an Alexander Tamanyan-designed example of Stalinist neoclassical urbanism in rose-pink Armenian tuff; the Cascade complex above the city centre is a late-Soviet sculptural staircase begun in 1980 and never quite finished; the giant Mother Armenia statue on the high ground above the centre is a Soviet-era successor to a Stalin statue removed in 1962. The Soviet-trained artists of the 1960s and 70s (Martiros Saryan, Minas Avetisyan, Hakob Hakobyan) created a distinctively Armenian variant of socialist realism whose work fills the National Gallery on Republic Square.

The carpet-weaving tradition, by contrast, runs deeper than any of the above — the country was the source of the term “Armenian rug” in the medieval European spice-trade vocabulary, and the oldest surviving woollen pile rug in the world (the 5th-century-BC Pazyryk carpet, now in the Hermitage in St Petersburg) was almost certainly woven in the Armenian highlands. The Megerian Carpet factory and museum at 9 Madoyan Street in southern Yerevan is the leading place to see live carpet-weaving in the country, with workshops, museum displays, and the chance to commission a custom rug.

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