This section explains places in Armenia the way the rest of the archive explains its subjects: what a site is, when it was built, what happened there, and why it still matters. It is written for readers who want to understand a place, whether or not they are standing in front of it.
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Featured place
A working monastery on a low hill above the Ararat plain, built over the pit where tradition holds Gregory the Illuminator was imprisoned — and standing on the site of Artashat, an ancient Armenian capital.
8 min read · Updated 5 August 2026
All places
The section is new and grows article by article. Each entry explains one place, and links to the history, writers and works it belongs with.
A working monastery on a low hill above the Ararat plain, built over the pit where tradition holds Gregory the Illuminator was imprisoned — and standing on the site of Artashat, an ancient Armenian capital.
The principal church of the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin and the seat of the Catholicos of All Armenians — a place whose tradition reaches back to Armenia's conversion, and whose standing fabric mostly does not.
An Urartian citadel on the hill of Arin Berd in south-eastern Yerevan, built by King Argishti I and named in a cuneiform inscription that the modern city has adopted as its own birth certificate.
The national repository of ancient manuscripts in Yerevan — an archive, a research institute and a museum at once, holding a collection assembled over centuries in monasteries and brought here in the twentieth.
The great high-altitude lake of eastern Armenia — a closed mountain basin with many rivers running in and one running out, whose shoreline was deliberately lowered by nineteen metres in the twentieth century and has been argued back up ever since.
A colonnaded classical building on a promontory above the Azat gorge, the only one of its kind left in Armenia — brought down by an earthquake, and put back up in the twentieth century from the stones that fell.
A medieval monastery at the head of a gorge in the upper Azat valley, half built of masonry and half cut into the cliff behind it — and named after a spear it no longer holds.
