Travel and Tourism in Armenia

Yerevan: The Pink City

Yerevan is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. The site has been occupied since at least the 8th century BC, when the Urartian king Argishti I built the fortress of Erebuni in 782 BC, and the name Yerevan derives directly from that ancient Urartian name. A city of approximately 1.1 million people, Yerevan is dramatically larger than any other Armenian city and accounts for roughly a third of the country's total population. It has a character unlike any other city in the region: simultaneously ancient and deeply Soviet in its urban form, with a contemporary layer of cafes, restaurants, galleries, and nightlife that has been growing rapidly in the 21st century.

The nickname Pink City comes from the volcanic tuff stone used in so many of its buildings. Tuff is a porous volcanic rock that occurs in several colors across Armenia, and the buildings of Yerevan are constructed primarily from the pink, beige, and apricot-colored varieties quarried in the surrounding region. In the right light, particularly at sunrise or sunset, the entire city takes on a warm glow that is genuinely beautiful, the stone seeming to absorb and hold the light in a way that harder materials would not. The pinkish-warm palette of the city gives it a visual coherence unusual among cities of its age and history.

Republic Square sits at the heart of Yerevan, surrounded by the grand Soviet-era government buildings and the National History Museum and National Gallery. These buildings, designed primarily by the architect Alexander Tamanian in the 1920s and 1930s, use a vocabulary of Armenian architectural forms, arched windows, stone facades, ornamental details derived from medieval Armenian churches, combined with the monumental scale favored by Soviet urban planning. The result is surprisingly harmonious, a city center that feels neither purely Soviet nor purely traditional but distinctly Yerevan. In the evenings, the musical fountains in Republic Square draw large crowds who sit on the surrounding benches and watch the water choreography, while the cafes and restaurants in the surrounding arcades fill with the sound of conversation and clinking glasses.

The Cascade is the most dramatic single architectural feature of Yerevan, a giant stairway cut into the hillside above the city center, connecting the lower city to the higher neighborhoods above. The Cascade project was conceived in the 1970s but remained incomplete until the post-Soviet period, when the American-Armenian philanthropist Gerard Cafesjian provided the funding necessary to complete the upper sections and develop the surrounding cultural complex. The Cafesjian Center for the Arts, housed within the escalator-equipped interior of the Cascade, displays an outstanding collection of 20th-century sculpture and glass, including works by Fernando Botero whose rotund bronze figures can be found on the terraces of the Cascade's exterior. The terraces of the Cascade, with their gardens, sculptures, and sitting areas, are among the most popular public spaces in Yerevan, and from the top of the Cascade, on a clear day, Ararat fills the southern horizon with its extraordinary presence.

The Vernissage weekend market, held every weekend near Republic Square, is one of the great urban markets of the Caucasus. Vendors spread their goods across a wide outdoor market that spills along several city blocks, selling handmade carpets, khachkars in every size, Soviet-era military medals and memorabilia, paintings by Armenian artists ranging from talented to mediocre, lacework and embroidery, musical instruments including duduk reed instruments, traditional ceramics, dried fruit and spice, and a miscellany of objects that gives the market a pleasantly chaotic energy. Bargaining is expected, prices are reasonable, and the quality of the better craft items is genuinely high.

The Matenadaran stands at the top of Mashtots Avenue on a terrace approached by a broad stairway flanked by statues of great figures in Armenian literary and scholarly history. The building was designed by Mark Grigoryan and opened in 1959 to house the collection of ancient manuscripts that had previously been kept at Echmiadzin. The collection includes approximately 17,000 manuscripts in Armenian, Greek, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and other languages, and approximately 500,000 archival documents. Among the most celebrated items in the collection are the Gospel of Mughni from 1060 AD, one of the oldest surviving illustrated Armenian manuscripts, and the Mshakavank Gospel from 1287 AD, illuminated by the master artist Sargis Pidzak. The museum displays rotating selections from the collection in galleries that give the visitor a sense of the extraordinary richness and visual beauty of the Armenian manuscript tradition. Even visitors with no particular knowledge of Armenian history or religion typically find themselves moved by the beauty of these objects and by the awareness of what it meant that human beings preserved them through centuries of fire, invasion, and catastrophe.

The Armenian Genocide Memorial and Museum at Tsitsernakaberd stands on a hillside to the northwest of the city center. The memorial complex, described in more detail elsewhere in this article, draws hundreds of thousands of visitors throughout the year and millions on April 24. The museum adjacent to the memorial has been expanded and modernized in recent decades and now presents the history of the genocide with documentary rigor and emotional honesty that makes a visit both informative and deeply affecting. The outdoor memorial itself, with its eternal flame and its circle of inclined basalt slabs, can be visited at any hour, and the walk along the Memorial Wall inscribed with the names of destroyed Armenian communities in historical Anatolia is one that many visitors find they walk slowly and in silence.

The History Museum of Armenia on Republic Square holds the country's premier collection of archaeological and historical artifacts, from Urartian bronzes and ceramics through medieval coins and manuscripts to ethnographic collections of traditional Armenian dress, jewelry, and household objects. The National Gallery of Armenia, sharing the same building, holds a substantial collection of Armenian paintings and works by European masters. The collection of Armenian paintings from the 19th and early 20th centuries, including works by Hovhannes Aivazovsky, the celebrated Russian-Armenian seascape painter, and Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky, who signed many works with both names, is particularly strong.

Yerevan's cafe and restaurant culture has evolved remarkably in the 21st century. The city now has a thriving culinary scene ranging from traditional Armenian cooking to international cuisine, with particular strength in the cafe culture that animates the streets from spring through autumn. Armenians drink their coffee strong and often, and the outdoor terraces of the cafes along Northern Avenue and in the neighborhood of Yerevan become intensely social spaces as soon as the weather permits. The bar scene is lively, with cocktail bars and wine bars multiplying in the post-independence period, and craft beer has made significant inroads alongside the traditional culture of Armenian brandy and wine. The night markets and street food culture of Yerevan are particularly enjoyable in summer evenings, when the warmth lingers and the city stays awake late.

The Ararat Brandy Company, housed in a historic building near the Hrazdan River gorge, offers tours and tastings that represent one of the most distinctive gustatory experiences available in Armenia. The Yerevan Brandy Company, as it was known in Soviet times, produces Ararat brandy, a cognac-style spirit that has been made in Armenia since 1887 using grapes from the Ararat Valley. The brandy achieved international fame partly through a story involving Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at the Tehran Conference of 1943, where Churchill reportedly consumed so much Ararat brandy that he subsequently requisitioned 400 bottles for his personal supply. Whether the story is entirely accurate or somewhat embellished in the retelling, it has become a cornerstone of Ararat's marketing, and the bottles bearing Churchill's image are available in every souvenir shop in Yerevan. The factory tour takes visitors through the cellars where oak barrels of aging brandy are stored in long dark rows, and the tasting at the end includes samples of brandies aged from three years to the extraordinary and very expensive 50-year vintage.

Dilijan National Park and Armenian Switzerland

The region around Dilijan in northern Armenia presents a face of the country that surprises many visitors who have formed their image of Armenia from the dramatic but relatively arid landscapes of the Yerevan basin and the south. Dilijan is green. Densely, almost improbably green for a South Caucasus country, with forests of oak, hornbeam, beech, and maple covering the hillsides of the national park, creating an environment that has earned Dilijan the affectionate nickname of Little Switzerland or the Armenian Switzerland among Armenians who prize its cool, forested character as a counterpoint to the drier landscapes of the rest of the country.

Dilijan National Park covers approximately 28,000 hectares and is the most forested protected area in Armenia. The park contains numerous hiking trails that wind through the forest between monasteries, mountain villages, and river valleys, offering some of the best hiking in the country. The air is notably cleaner and fresher than in Yerevan, the streams that run through the park are cold and clear, and the overall ambience is one of peaceful natural beauty that invites slow travel and outdoor exploration.

Within the national park, two monasteries of particular historical and architectural interest reward the visitor who takes the time to walk to them through the forest. Haghartsin Monastery, founded in the 10th century and expanded through the 12th and 13th centuries under Zakarian patronage, sits in a narrow valley surrounded by trees whose branches lean over the monastery walls, creating an atmosphere of absolute seclusion and antiquity. The main complex includes churches of St. Gregory, St. Astvatsatsin, and St. Stepanos, as well as a gavit and refectory. The surrounding forest makes Haghartsin feel uniquely intimate compared to many of Armenia's more dramatically sited monasteries.

Goshavank Monastery, located near the village of Gosh and taking its name from the 12th-century Armenian jurist Mkhitar Gosh who established it, is equally beautiful and somewhat more accessible. Mkhitar Gosh, who compiled the first Armenian legal code, the Datastanagirk, founded the monastery in 1188 after an earlier monastery at Getik was destroyed by earthquake. The complex that developed under his influence became an important educational center, and the khachkars preserved at Goshavank include some of the finest examples of this distinctly Armenian art form, with the intricacy of their carving approaching a kind of impossibility, the stone lace of the crosses almost seeming too fine to have been carved by hand.

The town of Dilijan itself is pleasant, with a restored historic street of traditional Armenian stone buildings now hosting craft workshops, cafes, and small museums, and a growing artistic community that has made Dilijan something of a cultural hub in recent years. The Dilijan International School, established with international support in the 2010s, has brought a cosmopolitan community to the town, adding a further layer to its already attractive character.

The mineral water springs of the Dilijan region are well known in Armenia and throughout the former Soviet space. Dilijan mineral water, bottled at source and distributed widely, is one of the recognized brands of Armenian mineral water. The region has numerous natural springs that can be visited on hiking routes through the park, and drinking from them is considered both pleasurable and healthful.

Gyumri: The Resilient Second City

Gyumri, Armenia's second largest city with a population of approximately 120,000 people, occupies a position in Armenian culture disproportionate to its size. It was historically one of the most important cities in the Caucasus, known as Alexandropol under Russian rule and as Leninakan during the Soviet period, and it was a center of traditional Armenian crafts, trade, and culture for centuries. The 1988 earthquake destroyed large portions of the city and killed tens of thousands of its inhabitants, setting off a process of decline and slow recovery that continues to this day.

The character of Gyumri is distinctly different from that of Yerevan. Where Yerevan has been largely rebuilt and modernized in the post-Soviet period, Gyumri retains much of its 19th and early 20th-century architectural fabric, the traditional stone houses of the old quarters standing alongside the crumbling Soviet apartment blocks that were damaged in the earthquake and never properly repaired. This gives the city a melancholy authenticity that many travelers find more appealing than the polished modernity of the capital, a sense of a living city that has not yet been processed and packaged for tourism but which retains the marks of its genuine history.

The old quarters of Gyumri, particularly the Kumayri district, preserve fine examples of traditional Armenian urban architecture from the Russian imperial period, with carved stone facades, decorative ironwork, and the particular character of a Caucasian provincial city at the end of the 19th century. The Kars Gate, the Black Fortress built by the Russians in the 1830s as part of the defensive system for the region, and the Church of the Holy Savior, partially destroyed in the earthquake and partially reconstructed, are among the principal monuments. The Dzitoghtsyan Museum of Russian Art and History of the City displays an interesting collection of artifacts related to the city's history under Russian rule.

Gyumri has maintained a reputation throughout Armenian history as the city of humor and wit, the place where the best Armenian jokes are told and the most sardonic comments on national events are made. The Gyumri character, as Armenians describe it, involves a particular combination of toughness, resilience, irony, and warmth that is the product of a city that has been through more than most and which deals with adversity through laughter rather than despair. This cultural character makes interaction with Gyumri residents particularly interesting for visitors who take the time to engage beyond the level of tourist and monument.

The road from Yerevan to Gyumri passes through the Shirak Province, a high plateau at approximately 1,400-1,500 meters elevation that is one of the coldest parts of Armenia in winter and one of the most agriculturally productive in summer, with fields of wheat and barley stretching across a landscape that has the open quality of the steppe. The Shirak region contains several interesting villages and the ruins of several medieval churches and fortresses that see few visitors despite their intrinsic interest.

UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Armenia

Armenia has three UNESCO World Heritage Sites, all inscribed in the period between 1996 and 2000 and all representing the extraordinary legacy of Armenian medieval monastic architecture and the broader cultural landscape in which that architecture was created.

The first UNESCO inscription came in 1996, when the Monasteries of Haghpat and Sanahin in the Debed Canyon were inscribed on the World Heritage List. Both monasteries were significant cultural achievements of the medieval Bagratid and Zakarian periods, and their inscription recognized their outstanding universal value as examples of Armenian ecclesiastical architecture and as centers of medieval learning and artistic production. The inscription was extended in 2000 to ensure comprehensive protection of both sites.

The second inscription, also in 2000, covered the Cathedral and Churches of Echmiadzin and the Archaeological Site of Zvartnots. The inscription recognized the Echmiadzin Cathedral, traditionally regarded as the world's oldest state-built church and the mother church of the Armenian Apostolic tradition, along with the churches of St. Hripsime and St. Gayane from the 7th century. The ruins of Zvartnots Cathedral, an ambitious 7th-century circular structure that collapsed in an earthquake but whose surviving columns and carved elements demonstrate the extraordinary architectural ambition of early Armenian Christianity, were included as the archaeological component of the inscription.

The third inscription, again in 2000, covered the Monastery of Geghard and the Upper Azat Valley. The inscription recognized the unique achievement of a monastery complex partially carved from solid rock, with chambers and churches cut directly into the volcanic cliffs of the Azat River gorge, as well as the exceptional artistic quality of the carved decoration within those rock-cut spaces.

These three UNESCO inscriptions, covering six distinct sites of extraordinary cultural significance, represent international recognition that Armenia's medieval monastic architecture is among the great achievements of world cultural heritage, and they provide a framework for the legal protection and management of these irreplaceable monuments.