Yerevan & Ararat Views

About this pack

A 6-day mid-range trip to Yerevan, Armenia, taking in Yerevan Cascade, Republic Square, Mount Ararat views and Etchmiadzin Cathedral.

Inside the Yerevan & Ararat Views trip

Yerevan & Ararat Views begins at the Cascade, the monumental staircase complex known in Armenian as the Kasked, which climbs from the city centre toward the elevated Kanaker-Zeytun district as part of the urban planning axis architect Alexander Tamanyan laid out in his 1920s master plan for Yerevan. Tamanyan's original idea of linking the centre to the northern hills through terraces, waterfalls and flower beds was judged too ambitious to fund at the time; only in the early 1970s did architects Jim Torosyan, Sargis Gurzadyan and Aslan Mkhitaryan revive it as a multifunctional public space combining architecture, nature and art, adding exhibition halls, hidden escalators and a sculpture garden. Construction began in 1980 but stalled after the 1988 earthquake, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the First Nagorno-Karabakh War; the finished complex runs some 302 metres over five terraces and between 555 and 572 steps depending on the side, faced in milky white tuff and travertine and decorated with Armenian khachkar motifs, grapevines and pomegranates, and today houses the Cafesjian Museum of Art within its terraces.

From the Cascade the route leads to Republic Square, Yerevan's central civic space, known locally simply as Hraparak. Designed by Tamanyan in 1924 as part of his general plan for the city, the square combines an oval roundabout with a trapezoid section holding a musical fountain, framed by five neoclassical buildings — the Government House, the History Museum, the National Gallery, the Armenia Marriott Hotel and two former ministry buildings — faced in pink and yellow tuff over a basalt base, with construction running from the 1920s through to the National Gallery's completion in 1977. Known as Lenin Square through the Soviet period, with a 7-metre copper statue of the Soviet leader standing at its centre from 1940, the square was renamed after Armenian independence once the statue was removed in 1991, and it went on to serve as the main site of the 2018 Velvet Revolution demonstrations.

Rising beyond the city, and visible from vantage points around Yerevan, is Mount Ararat, a snow-capped dormant compound volcano whose Greater peak reaches 5,137 metres, the highest point in both Turkey and the Armenian highlands, alongside the smaller 3,896-metre Little Ararat. Though it lies outside modern Armenia's borders — the mountain sits within Turkey, near a near-quadripoint with Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan's Nakhchivan exclave — Ararat remains Armenia's principal national symbol, appearing on the country's coat of arms alongside Noah's Ark, a link with the biblical "mountains of Ararat" that the mountain acquired only in medieval European usage. The first recorded attempts on its summit date to the Middle Ages, and Friedrich Parrot, together with Armenian scholar Khachatur Abovian and four companions, completed the first recorded ascent in 1829.

The journey's final stop, Etchmiadzin Cathedral, stands in the city known dually as Etchmiadzin and Vagharshapat and is widely regarded as the oldest cathedral in the world, traditionally dated to between 301 and 303 AD. It was built by Armenia's patron saint, Gregory the Illuminator, on the site of a pagan temple following King Tiridates III's adoption of Christianity as a state religion — making Armenia the first country to do so — and church tradition holds that Gregory chose the spot after a vision of Christ descending and striking the earth with a golden hammer, giving the cathedral its name, which translates roughly as "the descent of the Only-Begotten."

The cathedral was severely damaged in a Persian invasion around 363 AD and rebuilt from its foundations in 483–484 by Vahan Mamikonian, the marzban or governor of Persian Armenia, taking on the cruciform plan that largely defines it today; it served as the seat of the Catholicos, head of the Armenian Church, from its foundation until the later fifth century and was restored to that role again in 1441, a position it still holds as the administrative headquarters of the Armenian Apostolic Church. In 1604 it was plundered by Shah Abbas I of Persia, who removed relics and stones in an attempt to draw Armenians toward a new religious centre at New Julfa near Isfahan, and it underwent further renovation across the 17th and 18th centuries — a long history that, together with the Cascade's Soviet-era ambition, Republic Square's civic drama and Ararat's ancient symbolism, frames this route through Yerevan and its surrounding highlands.

• Yerevan Cascade — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Republic Square, Yerevan — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Mount Ararat — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Etchmiadzin Cathedral — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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