Yerevan travel guide

Top 10 sights in Yerevan

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

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   1© Well-read MountainMan · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Etchmiadzin Cathedral

   The mother church of Armenian Christianity, founded around 301 when Armenia became the first state to adopt the faith, and generally called the oldest cathedral in the world. Gregory the Illuminator is said to have been shown the site in a vision; the name means where the only-begotten descended.

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2. 

   2© Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Matenadaran

   The manuscript institute, holding some seventeen thousand Armenian codices — the largest such collection anywhere. Among them is the Mush homiliary of 1202, so heavy that two women fleeing the 1915 deportations tore it in half and carried a part each; both halves survived and are now reunited here.

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3. 

   3© Armineaghayan · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Blue Mosque

   An eighteenth-century Persian mosque built when Yerevan was the seat of a khanate, and the only working mosque in Armenia. The Soviets used it as a planetarium; it was restored with Iranian money in the 1990s and its tiled courtyard is the quietest place in the city.

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   4© Katsiaryna Naliuka · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Garni Temple

   A colonnaded temple of the first century AD in the Hellenistic manner, thirty kilometres east of Yerevan — the only Greco-Roman peristyle building in the former Soviet Union. An earthquake threw it down in 1679 and it was reassembled from its own stones between 1969 and 1975.

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5. 

   5© Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

   Republic Square

   Alexander Tamanyan's square, the centre of the city he replanned in the 1920s, built from local tuff in pink and yellow with Armenian ornament cut into neoclassical forms. The fountains in front of the museum are choreographed to music on summer evenings.

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6. 

   6© Mosinyan · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Mother Armenia

   A twenty-two-metre statue of a woman with a sword, put up in 1967 on the plinth where a statue of Stalin had stood until it was quietly removed. The base holds a military museum, and the terrace round it looks over the whole city to Ararat.

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7. 

   7© Aleksey Chalabyan (a.k.a. Xelgen) · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Tsitsernakaberd

   The genocide memorial of 1967, built after a spontaneous demonstration in 1965 forced the Soviet authorities to permit one. Twelve leaning basalt slabs enclose an eternal flame, and a split forty-four-metre stele stands beside them; the museum below it opened in 1995.

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8. 

   8© Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0

   National Gallery of Armenia

   The largest art museum in Armenia, on Republic Square, with eight floors running from medieval miniatures up through Russian and European painting. The Armenian rooms — Saryan, Sureniants, Gorky's family portraits — are the reason to climb them.

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9. 

   9© User:Matthias Süßen · CC BY-SA 4.0

   St. Hripsime

   A church of 618 at Vagharshapat, and one of the oldest Armenian buildings surviving with its original form intact. It stands over the place where Hripsime, a Roman virgin who fled to Armenia, was killed for refusing the king — the event that begins the Armenian conversion story.

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10. 

    10© Liveon001 © Travis K. Witt · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Saint Gayane Church

    A church of about 630 within walking distance of Etchmiadzin cathedral, over the grave of the abbess killed alongside Hripsime. Its arcaded porch was added in the seventeenth century and the interior is almost bare, which is the Armenian norm.

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1. 

   1© Marcin Konsek · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Saint Gregory the Illuminator Cathedral

   The largest Armenian church in the world, consecrated in 2001 for the seventeen hundredth anniversary of Armenia's conversion. Relics of Gregory the Illuminator, returned from Naples for the occasion, are kept in it, and it seats seventeen hundred.

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   2© EvgenyGenkin · CC BY-SA 4.0

   History Museum of Armenia

   The national history museum, founded in 1920 with a collection of four hundred thousand objects. It holds the wooden wagons from Lchashen of the second millennium BC and the leather shoe found in the Areni cave — five and a half thousand years old and the oldest known piece of footwear.

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3. 

   3© Marcin Konsek · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Erebuni Museum

   A history and archaeology museum opened on 19 October 1968 for the 2,750th anniversary of Yerevan. It stands at the foot of Arin Berd hill, where the Urartian fortress of Erebuni has stood since 782 BC; the excavated and restored fortress above serves as its open-air gallery.

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   Katoghike Church, Yerevan

   The oldest surviving church in Yerevan, dating to the thirteenth century. In 1936 the Soviet authorities pulled down the larger church on the site and this small chapel emerged from inside its wall, which is why it survives; it now stands beside a new cathedral built around it.

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   5© Liveon001 ©Travis Witt · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Teishebaini

   An Urartian fortress on a hill outside Yerevan, capital of that kingdom's Transcaucasian provinces, burned and abandoned around 585 BC when the Scythians or Medes destroyed it. The fire baked the mud brick, which preserved the storerooms and their contents exactly.

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   6© Vladimer Shioshvili · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Yerevan TV Tower

   A lattice tower of 1977 on Nork hill, three hundred and eleven metres high and the tallest structure in Armenia. It cannot be climbed but is visible from most of the city, and it stands almost exactly on the axis Tamanyan drew.

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   7© No machine-readable author provided. Elswhs assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Zvartnots

   A town on the plain 10 km west of Yerevan that gives its name to both the country's main airport and the ruined cathedral beside it. That cathedral, a three-tiered rotunda raised in the 640s and thrown down by earthquake, is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

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8. 

   8© Vigen Hakhverdyan · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Saint Sarkis Cathedral

   An Armenian Apostolic cathedral built in 1842 on the left bank of the Hrazdan in Yerevan's Kentron district. It is the seat of the Araratian Pontifical Diocese, the largest diocese of the Armenian church.

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   9© Armineaghayan · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Yerevan Zoo

   The only zoo in Armenia, founded in 1940 on thirty-five hectares below the hills southeast of the city. It works on breeding Caucasian species — bezoar goat, leopard, bearded vulture — and on getting Armenian schoolchildren to care about them.

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10. 

    10© Vigen Hakhverdyan · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Shoghakat Church

    A church of 1694 at Vagharshapat whose name means drop of light, from the beam that is said to have fallen on the martyrs killed nearby. It was built by a prince in the late Safavid period, when new Armenian churches were rarely permitted.

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