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Armenia
Khor Virab Monastery With Mount Ararat in the background
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Garni Temple 1st Century AD
From pre-Christian, pagan times... It's Greek style. It was a time of cross-influence, an exchange of building styles. They had similar gods, just the names were different. For example Venus in Armenia was Anahit. In Armenia there was no marble, so they built it from basalt, which makes it so unique. If you go to Sicily there is a Parthenon, but built from completely different stone... Most of these pagan temples were turned into Christian temples, but this one stayed as it was. It was also destroyed by an earthquake, because there are a lot of serious earthquakes in Armenia, and it wasn't until the eighties that they rebuilt it, piece by piece...
The temple was constructed in the 1st century AD by the King Tiridates I of Armenia and probably funded with money the king received from emperor Nero during his visit to Rome. The temple was most likely dedicated to the Hellenistic god Mithras. The roof is supported by 24 columns with Ionic capitals and Attic basements. Unlike other Greco-Roman temples, it is made of basalt. In 1679 it was destroyed by an earthquake. Most of the original pieces remained at the site until the 20th century, allowing the building to be reconstructed between 1969 and 1979.
Zvartnots Cathedral 641-661
Zvartnots Cathedral 641-661
One of the first Christian temples in Armenia, destroyed by a huge earthquake. This temple is quite unusual for being round ...
Between 643 and 652 the Katholikos Nerses III (nicknamed the builder) built a majestic St. George cathedral at the place where a meeting between king Trdat III and Gregory the Illuminator was supposed to have taken place. In 930 the church was ruined by an earthquake, and remained buried until its rediscovery in the early 20th century.
Later, after the middle ages, the Armenians started building temples and monasteries that were designed to be resistant to earthquakes.
Haghpat Monastery 10th-13th Century:
It's another complex - there is a temple, there was an observatory here in the Middle Ages, cells where monks were isolated. There are four stages of its building. The monks developed it over the years... The site probably dates back to pre-Christian times... When the Turks invaded many of these monasteries were burnt - you can see here that the roof is burnt, but by this time most of the monasteries were built entirely from stone, so that they would survive, no matter what happened. They strengthened these buildings so they could withstand anything, so that they became virtually indestructible. If they had known that there were going to be such things as nuclear bombs, they probably would have built them underground! Both the monks and the buildings were toughened up because they were threatened from all sides.
In the year 301, during the reign of the emperor of the Armenians Tiridates III Arashakuni, Armenia adopts Christianity. It is the first country in the world in which Christianity attains the rank of state religion. Conflict hangs in the air: neighbouring Persia professes Zoroastrianism, hostile to Christianity, and from the south Islam will soon draw near, hostile to both. The epoch of unleashed fanaticisms begins, of religious massacres, sectarianism, schisms, medieval madness. And Armenia enters this epoch. Armenians have their church, which is called the Holy Apostolic Armenian Church. In the centuries-long feud between the Vatican and Byzantium, they occupied a middle ground - somewhat closer, however, to the Vatican. That is why, although they belonged to the group of churches practicing the Greek rite, in Constantinople they were counted among those who had severed themselves - among the heretics even. "Their rite," Runciman reports, "diverged in many particulars from the Greek. They readily offered bloody animal sacrifices, they began the great feast on the Septuagesima, fasted on Saturdays, and above all used unleavened bread in the Eucharist." Because of this bread, on which they heretically insisted, they were contemptuously called "the unleavened." (Imperium 1993, translated by Klara Glowczeska)
Tatev Monastery, 9th-17th century
Places where monks isolated themselves off from the rest of the world... the monastery complexes are built in the most inaccessible places. They are difficult to get to today, so you can imagine what it was like then... You had to get past all these chasms and precipices in order to get to them. Lmbatavank St Stephanos 7th century
Armenia is like one huge piece of tuff. Tuff is a beautiful volcanic rock that comes in many different colours - red, brown, light blue... This is one of the things that make the architecture of Armenia unique.
Armenia holds some 3 billion cubic meters of tuff, an easily cut yet resilient material, and most buildings from the early Christian period forward are made from the orange, red, gold and black varieties of tuff. Other stone in the country include basalt, granite, marble, limestone, perlite, andestie, perlite, limestone, agate, pumice and gypsum. Also cooked up in the country were iron, polymetals, aluminum, molibden, tungsten, diatomite, gold, silver, copper, tin, mercury, barium, sulfur, bentonite, sodium chloride, among other minerals. Semi-precious and precious stones found in Armenia include obsidian, amethyst, andesite, andelusite, emerald, garnet, beryl, turquoise, several grades of quartz, carnelian, aquamarine, lapis lazuli and diamonds.
Geghard Monastery 13th century
This temple was hewn from one huge rock. The sculptor dug a hole in the top and hollowed out the temple from the inside. The holy place for them was inside the stone. It was done by monks, not slaves.
Geghard Monastery
Hripsime Church 618
Those walls probably date back to pre-Christian times. This is a very important thing: the Christian temples in Armenia were constructed on spots where there were already temples. They transformed them. They said 'Christianity? Okay, Christianity...' and they transformed the old temples.
Hripsime Temple
Echmiadzin Cathedral 301-480 AD
This is called the mother of all temples, a kind of Vatican for the Armenian Church, and under this cathedral, under the altar, there is a ring of fire for pagan rituals - they didn't destroy it, you see, they maintained it as a holy place. This is completely different to other cases where Christianity wiped out paganism and destroyed its buildings. No, in Armenia they built on top, or alongside of the old faith...Another secret is a fire pit beneath the altar. This is where pagans worshipped fire before Christianity. It is in the small museum in the main cathedral, with the entrance to the right of the altar. There are some religious artifacts in display cases, but you usually need to ask to be shown the fire worshipping pit, at which time a small donation is hinted at. Above the door which descends into the fire pit area is the lance ("Geghard") which is said to have pierced Christ's side.
Detail of Echmiadzin
Vahan:...the symbols... the connections... Aztecs, the Mayans, Buddhists, Hindus, all those religions that you could observe, even though they are completely different from Christianity, in this case you can find everything here...In this layer you can find every kind of symbol, for example the feathered serpent that is found with the Mayans, it's here in what's meant to be a Christian building... And this is a very important thing - all the symbols are logical. If you start with a line it will lead you all the way round the temple because it is logical...
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Detail of Echmiadzin
Vahan:... this is the Armenian equivalent of the pentagram, made from two squares...
Echmiadzin Pillar
... the base. How mystically the sculptors must have viewed this stone, to make a pillar such an unbelievably strong base, when you approach this pillar you feel such an incredible strength...
The Monk's Stone
This is another very, very important thing. A pious monk comes and thinks 'I am going to put my sculpture - my cross, my prayer - here, exactly here, in this place.' But look at the stone he had to work on to put it there! He could have put it a bit to the right - no problem. But no, you can't do things the easy way. He decided on this spot and look how much work it must have cost him, chipping away at that archstone... It's like the way the Mayans built their pyramids - they made things difficult for themselves. In devotion there are no shortcuts.
Symbol of Eternity
... this is the symbol of eternity in Armenia...
Khachkar, Hripsime Temple
This cross - if we look at all the plaitings - all the symbols of the world are in there. You can find the pentagram, the symbols of eternity, the swastika that Hitler stole, and all the kinds of plaitings that the Aztecs used - it's all there. It's a mystical devotion to stone, they worked their fingers to the bone to give stone a mystical significance.
Carving Detail
... It looks as if the sculptor has sewn everything with a needle...
Noraduz, Khachkars - Armenian Tombstones
This is a cemetery, dating back ton the Middle Ages. Each stone is unique, with their own descriptions and prayers, and we can see what they were getting at: immortalizing memory, through the greatest mysticism... And what did Stalin do? Smashed them in half and used them to lay train tracks. Can you imagine how many there must have been?
During the Soviet rule, Nakhichevan, the Armenian province with the Armenian name and the unique Armenian historical and cultural heritage underwent an unprecedented period of "white genocide" and "ethnic cleansing". Predominant there in the 19th century, the Armenians composed 50% of the population in the 20s. From 1936, when the Turks of Azerbaijan became "Azerbaijanis" instead of "Caucasian Tartars", the Soviet historians followed the instructions of the Communist Party leaders and began creating the so-called "history of Azerbaijan". In order to erase any trace of the region's Armenian past, many unique Armenian monuments were destroyed, including khachkars and churches of early Christian period. The land was then extensively peopled with the Turks while the Armenians left on a large scale. According to the census of 1959, the number of Armenians in the region decreased to 1, 5% From 1922 to 1936, Armenia formed part of the Transcaucasian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic, consisting of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. The new Constitution of the USSR adopted in 1936 dissolved the Transcaucasian Republic. Armenia became one of 15 Soviet Socialist Republics. Like the other Republics, Armenia was governed by the Central Committee of the Republican Communist Party. The 1st Secretaries of the Party were appointed from Moscow. In the 30s, just like the other peoples of the Soviet Union, Armenians suffered from a large-scale campaign of political terror launched by Joseph Stalin. The purges touched virtually every Armenian family. Thousands of writers, artists, scientists and political leaders were executed or exiled.
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HAGARTZIN
NORAVANK 13th century
