Armenia: Nine Attractions and Natural Wonders

The first Christian nation, built in stone

Armenia became the first state in the world to adopt Christianity as its official religion, in 301, and the evidence is all over the landscape: several hundred medieval monasteries and churches, many of them in spectacular positions — on cliff edges, in gorges, on the shores of a high blue lake. The country is small, mountainous, and landlocked, and most of its sights are within a two-hour drive of the capital, Yerevan.

The nine below are the essential ones. A hire car or a driver makes them easy; marshrutka minibuses reach the bigger towns. May–June and September–October are the best months.

1. Geghard Monastery

Geghard, east of Yerevan up a steep-sided gorge, is among the most atmospheric monasteries in the country. Founded, by tradition, by Gregory the Illuminator at a sacred spring in a cave, it has a main church built in 1215; the rest is hewn out of the solid cliff — chapels, a hall with a spring, and tombs, all cut from the living rock, with light falling through openings in the vaults.

Its name means "spear," after a relic said to be the lance that pierced Christ, kept here for centuries and now in the Echmiadzin treasury. Together with the Upper Azat Valley it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000, and the acoustics of its upper rock-cut chamber are extraordinary.

2. The Temple of Garni

On a promontory above the Azat gorge, on the way to Geghard, stands a small classical temple with a colonnade of Ionic columns — conventionally dated to the 1st century AD and identified as a temple to the sun god Mihr, though some scholars see it as a tomb. It survived the conversion to Christianity, perhaps as a royal summer house, collapsed in an earthquake in 1679, and was rebuilt from its own fallen stones in 1969–75.

Below the temple, a side road leads to the "Symphony of Stones," cliffs of basalt columns carved out by the Goght River.

3. Tatev Monastery and the Wings of Tatev

Tatev, in the mountainous south of the country, is a 9th-century monastery on a basalt plateau at the edge of the deep Vorotan gorge. In the 14th and 15th centuries it hosted one of the most important Armenian medieval universities, and its courtyard holds the Gavazan, a 10th-century upright stone pendulum that has survived centuries of earthquakes.

Getting there is half the attraction: the "Wings of Tatev" cable car, opened in 2010, runs 5.7 kilometres across the gorge from the village of Halidzor in about 12 minutes. It holds the record, as Wikipedia puts it, for the "longest non-stop double track cable car", and Guinness recognised it in 2010 as the longest non-stop reversible aerial tramway.

4. Noravank Monastery

Noravank sits at the head of a narrow gorge whose brick-red cliffs seem to glow in late-afternoon light. Its two-storey church, Surb Astvatsatsin, completed in 1339 as the last work of the sculptor Momik, is famous for its outdoor staircase: narrow stone treads cantilevered from the facade, leading to the upper level.

The site is about 122 kilometres from Yerevan and is often combined with the Areni-1 cave nearby, where archaeologists found the world's earliest known shoe and the earliest known winery, around 6,000 years old.

5. Haghpat and Sanahin

Above the Debed river in the far north, in Lori, two monasteries in plain view of each other — Haghpat and Sanahin — were among the leading centres of learning in the medieval Armenian world, with important libraries and schools of manuscript illumination and stone carving. Haghpat was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996, and Sanahin was added to the listing in 2000.

They are usually visited together, on the way between Yerevan and Tbilisi, along with the carved khachkars (cross-stones) and Soviet-era mining towns that share the same green gorge.

6. Echmiadzin

The town of Vagharshapat (Etchmiadzin), just west of Yerevan, is the spiritual capital of Armenia. Its cathedral, first built in the early 4th century — between 301 and 303 by tradition — and much rebuilt since, is the mother church of the Armenian Apostolic Church and the seat of the Catholicos. The treasury holds relics including the spear long kept at Geghard.

Two more churches in the town, Saint Hripsime (618) and Saint Gayane (630), are 7th-century masterpieces, and the ruined round cathedral of Zvartnots stands a short drive back toward Yerevan. All are part of one UNESCO listing, inscribed in 2000.

7. Khor Virap

Khor Virap sits on a small hill on the flat plain about 30 kilometres south of Yerevan, about 100 metres from the closed Turkish border, with one of the finest views of Mount Ararat in the country — the 5,137-metre volcano that is Armenia's principal national symbol even though it has been part of Turkey since 1921.

The monastery marks the pit where Gregory the Illuminator was said to have been held before curing and converting King Trdat III, the act that made Armenia Christian. Visitors can climb down a long ladder into the cell. Sunrise, with Ararat catching the light, is a fine time to visit.

8. The Cascade, Yerevan

The Cascade is a vast flight of stone steps, fountains, and terraces climbing the hillside on the northern edge of central Yerevan. Begun in 1980, halted after the 1988 earthquake and the Soviet collapse, and largely completed in the 2000s (its upper part is still unfinished), it now houses the Cafesjian Museum of Art, opened in 2009, with a modern sculpture collection spilling down the terraces and across the garden at its foot.

The climb (or the escalators inside) gives the view over the pink-stone city to Ararat. The neighbourhood around the base is Yerevan's liveliest for cafés and restaurants.

9. Republic Square and central Yerevan

Yerevan was largely rebuilt to the general plan of 1924 by the architect Alexander Tamanian, using the local volcanic tufa in shades of pink, ochre, and grey. Its heart is Republic Square, an oval ringed by five major neoclassical buildings in pink and yellow tuff, with musical fountains in front of the History Museum.

Within walking distance are the Matenadaran, a museum and repository holding the largest collection of Armenian manuscripts in existence; the History Museum; and the sombre Armenian Genocide memorial and museum on the hill of Tsitsernakaberd. Yerevan is a café city, and easy to spend a couple of days in.

Armenia is compact and hospitable, and a week based in Yerevan with day trips — plus one overnight in the north or south — covers almost everything on this list.