Discover Armenia through historic places, landscapes, monasteries, museums and food. Everything here links into the archive, so you can read about a site before you stand in front of it.
Where to begin
Six sites that between them cover most of what the country is known for: a classical temple, two monasteries, a fortress, a manuscript collection and a mountain lake.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
On the map
See where Armat's featured places are located across Armenia. Select a marker to read what a site is before you go and see it.
Select a place on the map to see what it is.
By kind of site
The same four groups the places listing filters by. Each one opens the full listing with that filter applied.
At the table
Four dishes of four different kinds — a bread, a main dish, food from the grill and a sweet — each explained as cooking rather than as a menu.
Cuisine
The thin flatbread baked against the wall of a clay tonir, inscribed by UNESCO in 2014 for the way it is made, shared and used in Armenian life — and inscribed again in 2016 for five other countries.
7 min read
Cuisine
Vine leaves and hollowed vegetables filled with rice, herbs and often meat — a dish made across the whole region, and one of the clearest examples of why this section does not assign dishes to a single owner.
7 min read
Cuisine
Meat grilled over open embers, and the social occasion built around it: who lights the fire, who tends it, and how it differs from the communal meal of a madagh.
6 min read
Cuisine
A sweet pastry built around khoriz — flour worked into butter and sugar — made in a different shape and marked with a different pattern in nearly every village that bakes it.
6 min read
Context
Four articles that explain what the places above are evidence of. Each is already linked from the sites it belongs with.
History
Armenia is traditionally recognised as the first state to adopt Christianity as its official religion, a decision that reshaped its law, art and identity.
10 min read
History
Urartu was a powerful highland kingdom around Lake Van whose fortresses, canals and cuneiform records shaped the later history of the Armenian Highlands.
12 min read
History
Around 405 the scholar and monk Mesrop Mashtots created an alphabet that gave Armenian its own written voice and reshaped the nation's culture.
9 min read
History
The Artaxiad king who expanded Armenia into the strongest state of the Near East, founded Tigranocerta, and met the Roman legions of Lucullus and Pompey.
10 min read
