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The Stones That
Remember Prayer
EASTERN YEREVAN
A walk through a city that is almost gone... the vanished churches and mosques of old Yerevan, where today you'll find a school, an opera house and a cinema.
FROM THE AUTHOR
This is the first piece in the series “The Stones Remember Yerevan” - about a city that is almost gone. In each part we go looking for what vanished: buildings that were torn down, rebuilt beyond recognition, or hidden behind newer facades. Part one is the churches and mosques of old, eastern Yerevan. Part two is the Yerevan of Alexander Tamanian, the architect who redrew the city. The next parts follow individual houses and their fates.
To see why today's Yerevan looks so unlike the old one, picture the city of a century ago. It was an Eastern town: quarters of clay and brick, crooked lanes, flat roofs, inner courtyards drowning in gardens, the murmur of springs and irrigation channels. Church domes and mosque minarets shaped its skyline, and temples stood at the edge of the Hrazdan gorge. Armenians, Persians, Azerbaijanis, and Russians lived side by side.
Almost none of that Yerevan survives, and not for any single reason. Earthquakes took part of it. Soviet rule and its war on religion took more. In the 1930s, churches and mosques were demolished across the city. Then there was the idea of a brand-new city. It was the conviction of the age that an old, dusty, low-built Eastern town should give way to a modern European capital. And, in the 1920s Alexander Tamanian set out to redesign Yerevan almost from scratch, with radial avenues, a central square and an opera house. The new plan was laid over the old, and much of the old simply disappeared beneath it.
This walk follows what was erased and the few stones that still remember the city that came before.
1
ABOVE THE HRAZDAN GORGE
Saint Sarkis Church
21 Israyelyan St · Surb Sargis
Above the Hrazdan.
The high cliff where a major religious center stood for three centuries.
Photo by L. Harutyunyan
A major religious center of the 17th–19th centuries stood here on the high cliff above the Hrazdan, with several churches, a school and the residence of the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Like almost everything in town, it was badly damaged by the catastrophic earthquake of 1679.
What you see now was essentially rebuilt in the Soviet era, to a 1972 design by architect Rafael Israelyan. Beside it stands a graceful late-modernist bell tower by Romeo Julakyan. Through every reconstruction, the altar was left untouched.
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2
KOZERN HILL
Saint John Church (Surb Hovhannes)
9 Hovhannes Kozern St
The Akhpars' church.
The present building dates from the 1980s.
In the 1960s the sound of its cracked bell carried across the gorge. Locals knew it as “the akhpars' church.” Akhpar was the word for Western Armenians who repatriated after World War II and were first settled on the city's edges, including Kond hill and around Proshyan Street.
The present building dates from the 1980s. Rafael Israelyan designed the radical rebuild; his son Areg Israelyan built it. Before that, a large basilica from 1710 stood here, raised after the earthquake.
The Irish traveler Henry Lynch, writing in the late 19th century, described Surb Hovhannes as four walls under a metal roof, with a wooden bell tower painted green and a view down to the Zangu (Hrazdan).
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3
THE OLD GARDENS OF THE CENTER
Saint Zoravor & the Vanished Gethsemane Chapel
9 Ghazar Parpetsi St · Surb Zoravar
Surb Zoravor.
From Surb Hovhannes the route leads to Surb Zoravor Church. Steps away is a chapel holding the relics of Saint Ananias, one of Christ's seventy (or seventy-two) apostles. Lynch described Surb Zoravor as a building hidden among old gardens and walnut trees, with a portal richly worked in carved panels.
A ghost beneath the Opera
A five-to-seven-minute walk away, where the Opera House now stands, once rose the Gethsemane Chapel. It was demolished to build the future National Opera and Ballet Theatre. Alexander Tamanian wanted to rebuild it elsewhere, but it never happened: a new site manager ordered its stones used for a workers' housing block on Byron Street. A single fragment survives, on display in the courtyard of the Katoghike and Saint Anna churches.
The one surviving fragment, now on display.
The chapel before demolition.
A SMALL MEMORIAL
In 2007 a khachkar (cross-stone) was placed inside the Alexander Spendiaryan Opera and Ballet Theatre in memory of the Gethsemane Chapel.
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4
SAYAT-NOVA STREET
Katoghike & the Word
“Yerevan” in Stone
Sayat-Nova St
Katoghike.
The tiny medieval church, boxed in by the Academy of Sciences buildings.
On Sayat-Nova Street stands the small medieval church of Katoghike. Before the Soviet era a much larger church of the same name stood here; it was slated for demolition in 1936 as part of the campaign against religion. As the big church came down, a far older little chapel turned out to be built into its structure. The chapel was kept for study, and the Academy of Sciences institutes were raised in front of it, hiding it from the street. Saint Anna's church stands beside it.
On the south facade, just above head height, is an ancient inscription. Look closely and you can read the word “Yerevan.” It records that in 1264 a man named Sahmadin, son of Avetik, bought Yerevan “with its land and water.”
1936. The larger Katoghike comes down.
Photo by A. Kalantar
An ancient inscription on the facade of Katoghike.
WHO WAS SAHMADIN?
Under Mongol rule, local vassal lords governed the land. Sahmadin was one of the these vassal lords who had the right to run the city, collect its taxes, and issue decrees.
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5
ABOVYAN ST · THE "MOSCOW" CINEMA
Poghos-Petros Church
Charles Aznavour Square
Poghos-Petros.
The church was demolished in 1930.
Photo by Ts. Melian
Where the “Moscow” cinema now stands on Abovyan Street rose the ancient church of Poghos-Petros. In 1930 it became the center of a real fight: young communists such as Karo Halabyan demanded its demolition, and Alexander Tamanian, Nikolai Buniatyan and Ashkharbek Kalantar tried to save it. They lost.
Under layers of later paint, 5th-century frescoes came to light. Fragments of the painted stones are now kept in the History Museum of Yerevan and the National Gallery, where you can still see the fresco of the apostle Peter.
According to local legend, the stones of the ruined church went into a public bathhouse, and for years afterward old women still came to its walls to light candles.
The “Moscow” cinema was built over the church's site.
Photo by Konstantinov
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THE OTHER FAITH OF THE SAME QUARTER
The Mosques of Old Yerevan
Yerevan's mosques were mostly Shia, since Shia Islam was the official religion of Iran. Thus, they are often called “Persian.” Sources disagree on how many there were: the traveler Ivan Shopen counted six in the early 19th century, a later city map marked seven, and the Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia put the number of Shia mosques at eight. Only two survive today: a small neighborhood mosque in Kond and the famous Blue Mosque.
Zalkhana Mosque
On what is now Charles Aznavour Square, a church and a mosque once stood almost side by side: the church of Poghos-Petros and the Shaar (Zalkhana) Mosque. That closeness was the signature of a mixed quarter, a place where Armenian Christians and Muslims lived as neighbors, and where the sound of church bells and the call to prayer once carried across the same rooftops. The buildings are gone now. The church was demolished in 1930; the mosque, after years as an exhibition hall, was pulled down in 1955.
The Zalkhana quarter.
The Mosque before demolition.
Blue Mosque of Yerevan
Mashtots Avenue, opposite the former Central Market
The Blue Mosque.
The largest mosque in the city, built in 1766 beside the Gantar bazaar.
In 1766, the sardar Hussein Ali Khan Qajar ordered the Blue Mosque built. It was the largest mosque in the city, set beside the Gantar bazaar.
Once it stopped functioning as a place of worship in the mid-1920s, its wide, shaded courtyard became a gathering place for Armenia's intelligentsia. They took tea by the small rectangular pool, sat in the gazebos, and debated the questions of the day. The mosque is active again today, with a rich library; most of its visitors are tourists and Iranian truck drivers.
The Blue Mosque.
Photo by D. Ermakov
Tapabash (Kond) Mosque
Kond district. Yerevan's one of the oldest buildings
Tapabash.
Built in the 17th century; its prayer halls were long ago partitioned into homes.
Built in the 17th century, this mosque was opened in 1926–27 to refugees who had survived the Genocide. Their descendants still live inside it today, the prayer halls long since partitioned into rooms and apartments. In 1988 one of the halls collapsed, and the residents planted a small garden on the rubble; there is a garden on the roof, too, and patches of the original blue brick remain.
The mosques that didn't survive
Of the city's many mosques, most are simply gone. Besides the Shaar Mosque by the “Moscow” cinema, three more stood across the Getar River in the Damirbulagh district (two pulled down in the 1930s), another in the courtyard of a tower block on Vardanants Street was demolished in 1989, and two more: one Shia (the Sardar's Mosque), one Sunni - stood inside the Yerevan fortress. Today only the Blue Mosque and the small Kond mosque remain.
Sardar (Abbas Mirza) Mosque.
Today only a fragment of one wall remains.
Photo: D. Yermakov
A mosque in the Damirbulagh district.
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