Yerevan tourist information
Yerevan Armenia
In 1827, Yerevan was a town of 1736 low mud-brick houses, 851 shops, 10 baths, seven caravansaries, and six public squares, set among gardens likewise walled with mud. Czar Nikolai I found no more endearing description for Yerevan during his one brief visit in 1837 than "a clay pot," and the Russian travel writer Mardovtsiev found little difference in the 1890s: "Clay houses with flat clay roofs, clay streets, clay squares, clay surroundings, in all directions clay and more clay." Yerevan remained a garrison town of 12,500 inhabitants, more than half Muslim, a place of low, flat-roofed houses and lush walled gardens, until the 20th century. Practically nothing of this earlier town remains, except in Kond, tucked between Moscovian Blvd. and the Dvin Hotel on Proshian ("Barbecue") and Paronian Streets. The hill of Kond was a predominantly Armenian neighborhood in Persian times, presided over by the Geghamian family of meliks, Kond is the neighborhood that preserves a taste of the city's oriental past. Set apart for preservation in Soviet times, its winding alleyways and tumbledown houses are now being razed surreptitiously to build orange tuff palaces for Yerevan's post-Soviet gentry. But a careful search still reveals crumbling archways and courtyards of an older Armenia.
The decayed remnants of a four-arched bridge of 1679 stand on the Hrazdan river just below the fortress, now the site of the Yerevan Wine Factory at the bottom of Mashtots Blvd. Built just after the great earthquake at the expense of the wealthy merchant Hoca P'ilavi, this bridge (also known as the Red Bridge from the tuff used) was extensively modified in 1830 by the Russians. There had been a bridge at this site since very early times, the only connection between the city-fortress of Yerevan and the rich farmlands and caravan routes of the Arax valley.
In 1828 there were seven Armenian Apostolic churches in Yerevan with a like number of clergy, serving an Armenian population of perhaps 4000. Four of those churches, two of them tiny, survived the Soviet period; before the grand cathedral church of S. Grigor Lusavorich was built in 2001 just E of Republic Square, only one-tenth of one percent of Yerevan's population could attend services at any given moment.
The oldest surviving church in Yerevan, the Katoghike, stands nestled in a courtyard on the W side of Abovian Street just above Sayat Nova Blvd. Its current form dates to 1936 , when the old cathedral church of Yerevan, a substantial but undistinguished basilica rebuilt in 1693/4, was slated for destruction in the name of urban renewal. The archaeologists won a modest concession from Stalin's architects, that they could oversee the dismantling and record the inscriptions and architectural fragments incorporated in the rubble walls. Lo and behold, as the walls came down it became clear that the central apse, the sanctuary, was in fact an almost intact small Astvatsatsin church with inscriptions from the 13th century. Public and scientific outcry won the newly discovered church a reprieve, and since independence it has resumed its religious function, albeit invisibly from the main streets. In front of the church is a small collection of khachkar and other sculpted fragments from the core of the destroyed basilica.
The 17th c. Poghos-Petros (Peter and Paul) church was not so fortunate, destroyed to build the Moscow Cinema. Likewise the S. Grigor Lusavorich church, begun in 1869 but not finished till 1900, gave way to the widening of Amirian Blvd, and sits underneath the Eghishe Charents school. The Zoravar Church survives concealed behind apartment fronts in the block bounded by Moscovian, Pushkin, Ghazar Parpetsu, and Tumanian streets, a hodgepodge of architecture dating from 1693 (funded by the wealthy Hoja Panos) and rebuilt at various times, including by local dignitary Gabriel Yuzbashi in the late 18th c. and French benefactor Sargis Petrossian in the 1990s. According to ecclesiastical history, it sits near the site of the tomb/shrine of S. Ananias the Apostle.
In 1684, at the request of King Louis XIV to the Shah of Persia, French Jesuits set up a mission in Yerevan, goal of which was to persuade the Katholikos in Ejmiatsin to bring himself and his church into the Catholic fold. Effectiveness of Jesuit diplomacy was reduced by their habit of dying after a few months, but the second of them, Father Roux, became friendly enough with the Katholikos that when he died in 1686 he was buried by the Katholikos in the "magnificent monastery of Yerevan" next to the Armenian bishops and archbishops. When the newly enthroned Shah Hussein banned wine throughout his dominions in 1694, the missionaries mourned the destruction of Yerevan's vintage, "the best wine in the Persian Empire." Local authorities respected the extraterritoriality of the Jesuits, putting seals on the door of the Mission wine cellar in such a way that the door could still be opened. Nothing remains of the Jesuit mission, nor of the "magnificent monastery of Yerevan" that housed their mortal remains. Yerevan now has, not far from the U.S. Embassy, a small scholarly outpost of their spiritual descendants, the Mekhitarist fathers. {Whose headquarters at the San Lazarro island monastery in Venice is full of great art treasures.}
There are dozens of museums in Yerevan, mostly house-museums to writers, painters, and musicians. The entry fee is minimal, and the staff are generally delighted to receive a foreign visitor. If the language barrier can be overcome, the hospitality and taste of a little-known culture will be memorable.
The best museum in Yerevan is small and idiosyncratic, the would-be final home of famed Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990). Though an ethnic Armenian (Parajanian), he was born in Tbilisi and spent most of his professional career in Kiev or Tbilisi. He won international fame with "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" and "The Color of Pomegranates," but his career was crippled by imprisonment (for homosexual liaisons) and denial of resources. Under perestroika, Yerevan claimed him as its own, and built him a lovely house overlooking the Hrazdan gorge in an area of ersatz "ethnographic" buildings on the site of the former Dzoragyugh village (just behind and left of the upscale restaurant "Dzoragyugh," commonly but no longer accurately known as the "Mafia Restaurant" due to a leather-clad clientele, a mysteriously reliable electrical supply during the dark nights of 1993-95, and the occasional use of firearms). Alas, Parajanov died before the house was finished, but it became a lovely museum/memorial that also hosts dinners and receptions to raise funds. Parajanov's visual imagination and subversive humor are represented in a series of compositions from broken glass and found objects. His figurines from prison-issue toilet brushes are proof that a totalitarian, materialist bureaucracy need not prevail. Look for "The Childhood of Genghis Khan" and Fellini's letter thanking him for the pair of socks.
The Matenadaran (manuscript library) is the other world-class museum in Yerevan, not for its exhibitions per se, but rather for its status as the eternal (one hopes) repository for Armenia's medieval written culture. A vast gray basalt mass at the top of Mashtots Blvd. (built 1945-57, architect M. Grigorian), the Matenadaran is guarded by the statue of primordial alphabet-giver S. Mashtots (ca. 400) and those of the other main figures of Armenian literature: Movses Khorenatsi (5th -- or maybe 8th -- century "father of Armenian history"); T'oros Roslin (13th c. manuscript illuminator in Hromkla/Rum Qalat near Edessa); Grigor Tatevatsi (theologian of Tatev Monastery, died 1409); Anania Shirakatsi (7th c. mathematician, studied in Trebizond, fixed the Armenian calendar); Mkhitar Gosh (died 1213, cleric and law codifier); and Frik (ca. 1230-1310, poet). There are khachkars and other ancient carved stones in the side porticos. The entry hall has a mosaic of the Battle of Avarayr, and the central stair frescos of Armenian history, all by H. Khachatrian.
English-speaking guides are usually on deck. Beside the exhibit hall (and a small gift shop with excellent hand-painted reproductions of important manuscript miniatures), there are conservation rooms and shelf on shelf of storage (closed except to specialists with advance permission) for the 17000 manuscripts in a dozen languages. Cut deep in the hillside behind, and shielded by double steel blast doors, is a splendid marble tomb designed to preserve the collection against nuclear holocaust. Alas, the execution did not live up to the grandiosity of the conception -- water from a series of underground springs drips through the vaults, making them unusable until a few million dollars are found for a total reworking.
Turning away from the wall of recent martyrs and gazing south, a Western Christian might muse on the 10,000 Martyrs of Mt. Ararat, who are or were still in the Catholic liturgical calendar for June 22. According to a legend that somehow made its way westward to become popular in 14th and 15th century art, 9000 Roman soldiers sent out to the Euphrates frontier with a certain Acacius were led by angelic voices to convert to Christianity. The enraged Roman emperors sent troops against them, another 1000 of whom converted when the stones they threw rebounded vainly from the pious converts. Finally, the 10,000 were subdued and crucified atop Mt. Ararat. A painting of this scene by the late 15th c. Venetian artist Carpaccio shows the persecutors in Turkish garb. Though the legend is too hopelessly garbled to link to any known historical event, and the 10,000 are not part of the Armenian or Orthodox canons, it is tempting to view the cult as the echo of one of several early Armenian cries to the West for help, help that did not come. Purported relics of these martyrs can still be found in various churches of France, Italy and Spain.
We are still far from the point where Armenians and Turks can calmly apportion or accept responsibility for a much more recent and well-documented atrocity, that of 1915. Officially, the Kurdish tribes whose members committed many of the most brutal of the murders and despoliations apologized in the 1930s and have been more-or-less absolved by virtue of current shared grievances against Turkey. Modern Turkey, however, has forgotten the Armenians almost completely, except the prosperous but shrinking Armenian community of Istanbul. Turkish historians, when pressed, deny that there was any systematic policy of extermination, and disavow responsibility for events that took place under the collapsing Ottoman state or the ruling junta of the time (some of whose key members were later murdered by vengeful Armenian nationalists). Turks claim, with some truth, that part of the Armenian plurality in the eastern vilayets had put its hopes in Russia, and that Armenian guerrilla groups were preparing an uprising in the repeatedly betrayed hope that the Russians would carve out a Great Armenia as part of a general dismembering of the Ottoman empire.
It is true that the survival of a Turkish state in Anatolia was not a foregone conclusion in 1915, and hundreds of thousands of Turks also died in desperate battles against the Russian and British Empires. But the response to that challenge, the elimination of an entire population that had inhabited the region for millennia and lived side by side with the Turks as the "loyal millet" for centuries more, had neither moral nor practical justification. Some Armenians were worked to death in labor battalions, some brutally robbed and murdered, others simply left to starve in the desert. The surviving kin of the more than 800,000 Armenians who perished have little patience with the delicate question of whether these varied deaths were systematic enough to meet a strict definition of genocide.
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