A Tour of the Most Famous Armenian Churches - WSJ.com

A Tour of the Most Famous Armenian Churches - WSJ.com

The cracked streets and crumbling buildings of Kars, Turkey, bear feeble witness to better days long past. But it's also the last stop on the journey to Ani, the magnificent abandoned Armenian capital, which sits in the province of Kars, on the Turkish side of the Armenian border.

To historians, Armenia is a borderland between East and West, on which the tide of cultural division has washed back and forth since the days of Rome and Persia. To theologians, the country is a window through time; this oldest national church is a witness to a Christian tradition both ancient and unique. To students of early-Christian history, it's both.

Since Ani's heyday in the 10th and 11th centuries, Seljuk, Georgian, Mongol and Timurid armies have breached its walls. Now the city is empty, ruins on a barren and treeless plain, with no visitors apart from a young group of Turkish soldiers joyriding through the site.

The imposing Church of the Holy Mother of God casts a long shadow. It was completed at the turn of the second millennium by the architect Trdat, following his return from building the great dome of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.

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Elbrecht/Armenian Studies/California State University

Ani's Church of the Holy Mother of God

Trip Planner

Yerevan is a good base from which to explore the rest of the country; Armenia is a small nation, and many places can be reached on day trips.

One place to stay is the handsome Marriott Hotel, Yerevan, on Republic Square, with rooms starting at around $200 a night.

For something light to eat or an afternoon drink, try Marco Polo, at 1 Abovian St. For dinner,Dolmama's, at 10 Pushkin Ave., is well known for traditional lamb dishes.

HyurService (www.hyurservice.com) is a source for daily tours from Yerevan throughout Armenia. For group tours from the U.S., one option is the Fund for Armenian Relief Society's Hayastani Kitak society (www.farusa.org/hks), which offers a two-week tour beginning July 7.

The blind arcading pattern and inscriptions in Armenian that cover the church's external walls are reflected throughout the site—on the elegant Church of the Redeemer, built to house a fragment of the True Cross, and the Church of the Holy Apostles. To the southwest stands the Minuchir mosque and, on the promontory beyond it, the citadel. To the east flows the Akhurian river, past the monastery of the Virgin and the brightly frescoed church of St. Gregory of Tigran Honents. In the north, Ani's huge walls and towers puncture the skyline, glowing red in evening light.

Flanked by the border fence, Armenia is a stone's throw across the Akhurian, yet unreachable. Turkey closed the border in 1993, a demonstration of support for Azerbaijan in its conflict with Armenian separatists in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. The Turks appear to show little interest in Ani. Yet across the border in Armenia, Ani and her churches, some of the last vestiges of Armenia's grand past, are deeply ingrained in the country's national conscience.

Armenia, however, has wonders of its own, worth the detour around the closed border. The trip, through the country of Georgia, goes by bus, van and taxi north into the foothills of the lesser Caucasus mountains, east through herds of cattle driven by weather-beaten cowboys and finally, at night, south to Yerevan, the Armenian capital, flickering gold in the Ararat valley basin.

Armenia adopted Christianity in A.D. 301, and it's no surprise that the most striking aspect of this church today is the antiquity of its religious monuments. In Avan, now a suburb of Yerevan, stands the chapel of St. Asdvadzadzin, which was probably built in the fifth century and remains mostly intact less a roof. This is by no means remarkable in Armenia.

There are no signposts for the chapel and no entrance fee; it stands among allotment gardens and fruit trees, accessible to all who manage to find the tiny path that leads to it. The foundations of Etchmiadzin Cathedral, the Mother Church of Armenian Christianity, are even older, dating to the turn of the fourth century.

Among other memorable churches seen in a several-week visit through Armenia, there's the heavily inscribed church at Kosh with a breathtaking vista of Mount Ararat—a symbol of Armenian identity painfully close but located beyond the border in Turkey. Elsewhere in Armenia, the reliefs carved into the walls of the cave-chapel of Geghard Monastery, the original repository of the lance that pierced Christ's side until it was moved to Etchmiadzin; the immense and starkly beautiful Hripsime cathedral; and the 32-sided cathedral of Zvartnots, now in ruins, are all marvels of art and engineering, each alone worth the trip.

Guler/Armenian Studies/California State University

Geghart Monastery

Three chapels, in Yeghvard, Kosh and Avan, have been ignored in hundreds of pages of a catalog of Armenian architecture. In Kos I unearthed fragments of inscriptions from the rubble among the graves of the adjacent cemetery, and in Pemsazen I tripped over a large rock in the meadow surrounding a church that, when cleared of grass, revealed a somber bearded face carved in relief.

This world is quickly changing. The rebuilding programs of the Armenian Apostolic church are extensive and, for some architectural experts, overzealous. Throughout the country, fallen domes and collapsed arches have been incorporated in restored churches. For the Armenian church, ruined buildings are unused, but certainly not unusable, and so long as there are people to worship in them, they will be reborn as they once were.

Yet to focus only on ancient relics is to miss the most captivating aspect of the Armenian church. During Sunday service in the restored monastery of Saghmosavank, Armenian chant filled the church. Through the heavy curtains separating antechamber from congregation the priest could be seen, drenched in a single ray of sunlight from a window high overhead which pierced the heavy incense to illuminate an intricate red and gold cloak falling from his shoulders to the floor. The shroud that separated the congregation from the divine was on that day the thinnest of gossamer.

Armenia's worshippers come from every part of society. In Hripsime church, a young man with a shaved head lit tapers next to an ancient man and a young woman holding her baby on her hip. Through invasion and occupation, the church has helped Armenians keep their identity, and this unique relationship is revitalizing and encouraging to behold.