Armenia

Yerevan's grand oval centrepiece was laid out in the Soviet period to plans by the architect Alexander Tamanian, and it is framed by monumental buildings in rosy and ochre tuff, the soft volcanic stone that gives the city its warm glow and its nickname, "the pink city". The Government House, the History Museum of Armenia and the National Gallery share the square, and a large musical fountain plays in the evenings during the warmer months, drawing families and couples until late. From here, broad avenues lead north towards Northern Avenue, a modern pedestrian boulevard, and the Opera House.

TipThe History Museum is the best single introduction to the country, from Bronze Age finds to medieval manuscripts. Visit it on your first day to make sense of everything that follows.

A short walk east of Republic Square, the Vernissage is an open-air market strung along a park, liveliest at weekends. Stalls sell carpets and rugs, carved wood, obsidian jewellery, chess and backgammon sets (nardi is a national passion), Soviet-era badges and cameras, ceramics, paintings and pomegranate-themed everything. It is part flea market and part craft fair, and a pleasant place to wander even if you buy nothing.

TipOld carpets and some antiques need an export certificate to leave the country; reputable dealers can arrange the paperwork, so ask before you pay.

At the top of Mashtots Avenue, guarded by a seated statue of Mesrop Mashtots, the inventor of the Armenian alphabet, the Matenadaran is one of the world's great manuscript libraries. Its collection runs to many thousands of manuscripts and fragments, and the exhibition halls display the finest of them: illuminated Gospels glowing with gold, lapis and vermilion, medieval treatises on medicine, astronomy and philosophy, and texts in Greek, Persian, Arabic and other languages that survive here when originals elsewhere were lost. Even with no interest in books, the miniatures are breathtaking.

TipThe museum opens from Tuesday to Saturday and closes on Sundays, Mondays and public holidays. An English-language guided tour is well worth booking.

A colossal white limestone stairway climbs the hillside north of the centre, with terraces, fountains and sculptures at every level. It was begun in the Soviet era and completed with the help of the Cafesjian Center for the Arts, whose collection fills the garden at its foot with large modern sculptures, including works by Fernando Botero, and continues inside, where escalators climb the hill beneath the steps. From the top, the whole of Yerevan spreads out below, with Ararat beyond on clear days. The streets at the base are lined with cafés and bars.

TipClimb, or ride the indoor escalators, in the late afternoon and stay for sunset; mornings usually give the clearest view of Ararat.

On a hill above the Hrazdan gorge, the national memorial to the victims of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 to 1923 is a place of quiet reflection. Twelve inward-leaning basalt slabs encircle an eternal flame, sunk below ground level so that visitors descend towards it, and a tall split stele beside it symbolises the survival and rebirth of the nation. A long memorial wall carries the names of towns and villages where massacres took place. The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, built into the hillside nearby, documents the deportations and killings with photographs, documents and survivors' testimony. Every 24 April, hundreds of thousands of people walk here to lay flowers around the flame.

TipDress and behave as you would at any memorial: speak quietly, and if you wish, bring flowers to lay at the flame, as Armenians do. Check the museum's website for current opening days before going.

Armenian brandy, known simply as Ararat at home and long celebrated across the former Soviet Union, has been distilled in Yerevan since the late nineteenth century. The handsome factory on a bluff above the Hrazdan river, near the Victory Bridge, offers guided tours of its cellars and museum, where barrels laid down for notable occasions are kept, ending with a tasting of aged brandies. The story of Churchill's supposed fondness for the drink is part of every tour.

TipTours run at set times and fill up in summer, so reserve a day or two ahead, and eat beforehand if you choose a tasting with older brandies.

About forty minutes east of Yerevan, the Temple of Garni is the only standing Greco-Roman colonnaded building in the former Soviet world. Built in the first century AD, apparently for the sun god Mihr, it stands at the edge of a triangular promontory above a deep gorge. An earthquake toppled it in 1679, and it was reassembled from its original stones in the 1970s. Around it are the remains of a royal summer palace and a Roman bathhouse with a mosaic floor of sea gods and fish.

Below the temple, the Azat river has cut through a lava flow to expose towering walls of hexagonal basalt columns, so regular that they resemble the pipes of a vast organ. The formation, nicknamed the Symphony of Stones, is reached by a steep road or footpath down from Garni village; a walk along the river beneath the columns takes an hour or so.

TipLocal drivers with four-wheel-drive vehicles wait in Garni to run visitors down to the gorge and back if you don't want to tackle the steep climb out on foot.

Further up the Azat valley, Geghard is partly built and partly carved out of the cliff. Founded according to tradition in the fourth century around a sacred spring, the present churches date mainly from the thirteenth century, and several of its chambers were hollowed out of the living rock, with domes, columns and carved family crests all cut from the mountain itself. The acoustics are extraordinary, and if a choir or a visiting group begins to sing, the sound seems to come from the stone. Its name refers to the spear said to have pierced Christ's side, once kept here and now in Etchmiadzin. Geghard and the upper Azat valley are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

TipGarni and Geghard combine easily in a half day from Yerevan by taxi or tour; go early to beat the groups, and buy sweet gata bread from the women at the entrance.

In the town of Vagharshapat, a half-hour drive west of Yerevan, Etchmiadzin is the spiritual centre of the Armenian Apostolic Church and the seat of its Catholicos. The Mother Cathedral, founded in the early fourth century and rebuilt several times, is often called the oldest cathedral in the world. Its spacious grounds hold the patriarchal residence, a seminary, modern churches and a treasury with remarkable relics. Nearby stand the churches of Saint Hripsime and Saint Gayane, seventh-century masterpieces named after early Christian martyrs. Together with Zvartnots, they form a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

TipSunday morning liturgy, with its chanting and incense, is the most atmospheric time to visit; dress modestly, with shoulders and knees covered.

On the road between Etchmiadzin and Yerevan, the ruins of Zvartnots, the "cathedral of celestial angels", are all that remain of an ambitious seventh-century round church, three tiers high, that collapsed in an earthquake within a few centuries of its building. Today, columns with carved eagle capitals and basket-weave patterns stand among the foundations against a backdrop of Ararat, and a small museum displays a model of the building as it may have looked.

High on the southern slope of Mount Aragats, Armenia's highest peak, the fortress of Amberd and its small eleventh-century church stand on a triangular promontory at the meeting of two gorges, at about 2,300 metres. The fortress walls, built by the Pahlavuni princes, overlook a vast sweep of country, and the meadows around it are carpeted with flowers in early summer. A day trip from Yerevan can combine Amberd with the Armenian Alphabet Monument, a field of giant carved letters near Aparan, and in midsummer with the high-altitude lake of Kari Lich on Aragats.

TipThe road up is usually open only from late spring to autumn, as snow lingers at this altitude; check conditions locally before setting out.

The most photographed view in Armenia is of this small monastery on a hillock in the Ararat plain, with the double peak of Ararat looming behind it across the Turkish border. Its significance is older than its buildings: it was here that Gregory the Illuminator was held for years in a pit by King Tiridates III before curing the king and converting him, leading to Armenia's adoption of Christianity. Visitors can climb down a steep ladder into the deep pit beneath one of the chapels, and the walk up the neighbouring hill gives the classic view.

TipArarat is clearest in the early morning and most often hidden by haze or cloud in summer afternoons. Khor Virap is very close to the closed Turkish border; stay on the monastery grounds and marked paths and don't photograph border installations.

In the Vayots Dzor province, the village of Areni gives its name to Armenia's most distinctive red grape and to a wine-making tradition of remarkable age. Small wineries and family cellars offer tastings, and an annual wine festival is usually held in the autumn. A short distance away, the Areni-1 cave yielded the remains of what archaeologists describe as one of the oldest known wineries, more than six thousand years old, as well as a famously well-preserved leather shoe of similar age. Parts of the cave are open to visitors.

Up a narrow gorge of red cliffs from Areni, Noravank is a thirteenth-century monastery whose setting rivals its architecture. Its finest building, the two-storey Church of the Holy Mother of God, was designed by the sculptor and architect Momik and is reached by a narrow cantilevered staircase on its façade. The carved tympana over the doorways, with God the Father, the Virgin and Child and other figures, are among the best medieval reliefs in the country. In the late afternoon the cliffs around the monastery turn a deep orange.

TipCombine Khor Virap, Areni and Noravank in a long day trip from Yerevan, or stop on the way south to Tatev. Noravank and Areni lie near the border with Azerbaijan's Nakhchivan exclave, so stay on the main roads and sites.

In the southern province of Syunik, the monastery of Tatev crowns a spur above the Vorotan gorge. From the ninth century it grew into one of the great medieval centres of learning, with a university, a library and hundreds of monks, and its fortified walls enclose churches, a bell tower, a refectory and an oil press. The most memorable way to arrive is by the Wings of Tatev, a cable car that crosses the gorge from Halidzor in a single span of about 5.7 kilometres, among the longest reversible aerial tramways in the world, floating some 320 metres above the valley floor in a ride of around a quarter of an hour. Below the monastery, a path leads down to the Devil's Bridge, a natural rock arch with warm springs.

TipThe cable car runs at set times and stops in strong wind or for maintenance; check hours and buy tickets on the operator's website, and book ahead in summer and at weekends. Southern Syunik borders Azerbaijan, so read current official advice before planning any further travel beyond Tatev and Goris.

Lake Sevan, at nearly 1,900 metres above sea level, is one of the largest high-altitude freshwater lakes in the world, a huge expanse of blue ringed by bare mountains. On a peninsula at its north-western corner, which was an island until the lake's level was lowered in the Soviet period, the two small dark basalt churches of Sevanavank look out over the water. It is a short climb from the car park, and the view along the lake is lovely. Armenians come to the shore in summer to swim, eat grilled fish and escape the heat of the plain.

TipThe water is cold even in August, and the weather at this altitude changes quickly; bring a warm layer. Ishkhan, the Sevan trout, is the local speciality on lakeside menus.

Over the pass north of Sevan the landscape changes completely. Dilijan sits in a valley of thick oak and beech forest, protected as Dilijan National Park, and it was long a favourite retreat of Soviet artists and composers, earning comparisons with Switzerland. A restored lane of nineteenth-century wooden houses, Sharambeyan Street, holds craft workshops and a guesthouse, and the surrounding forest has hiking trails and the medieval monasteries of Haghartsin and Goshavank within half an hour's drive. It makes a peaceful base between Sevan and the north.

TipUse Dilijan as a base to walk sections of the Transcaucasian Trail, but continue north through Vanadzor rather than on the road via Ijevan to Noyemberyan, which current UK advice warns against.

In the Debed Canyon in the far north, near the old copper-mining town of Alaverdi, Sanahin is a tenth-century monastery complex of churches, galleries, a library and a bell tower, darkened by age and wrapped in moss. Its interiors are a maze of vaulted halls whose floors are paved with tombstones, and the carved khachkars, Armenia's intricate cross-stones, are among the finest in the country. The village is also the birthplace of the Mikoyan brothers, one of whom co-designed the MiG fighter jet, which a small museum commemorates.

Across the gorge from Sanahin and visible from it, Haghpat is a larger and slightly later monastery, founded in the tenth century and once home to a celebrated scriptorium. Its main church, Surb Nshan, is decorated inside with fragments of frescoes, and a famous khachkar known as the Amenaprkich, the All-Saviour, shows the Crucifixion with unusual delicacy. Haghpat and Sanahin were jointly inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996, together representing the flowering of Armenian religious architecture between the tenth and thirteenth centuries.

TipThe Debed Canyon road is the main route to the Georgian border at Bagratashen–Sadakhlo, so Haghpat and Sanahin make a natural last stop before continuing to Tbilisi.