Millennium upon millennium, the volcanoes erupted lava. As it cooled it
solidified and covered the earth with a shell of stone. Mountains, gorges, turbulent rivers, waterfalls, and lakes surrounded by
grim, forbidding rocks, were the cradle of the Armenian people.
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| Travel to ancient Armenia! |
They built dwellings, fortresses and temples of stone. They planted and
grew vines, trees and grain in stone. Stone accompanies the Armenian through
life, it is linked with the whole history of Armenia. It is both the fortune
and misfortune of the people.
On the outskirts of Goris. high up in the Zangezur mountains, the rocks
have been shaped into fantastic statues by the sun, the rains and the winds.
Legend has it that when Tamerlane approached these parts with his horsemen, he
stopped in astonishment, taking these statues for a strange, invincible army.
And the hitherto intrepid conqueror retreated from Goris.
Nature suggested the forms to the Armenian architects, and sketched the
rough draft which they elaborated in detail, developing an inimitable architectural
style. Look at the tapering rocks of Gegard and Goris, look at the perfectly
flat tops of Lori, and look at the flowing contours of the Gegami mountains.
Surely it is from here that the modern Armenian architects acquired their
perfection of line and design, and their amazing sense of proportion and
rhythm. Present-day architects are as skilled as their celebrated predecessors
in blending their buildings with the landscape. They also have a way of
combining the traditions of ancient architecture with the features of the
modern age.
Armenia is one of the world’s most
fascinating museums. There are more than four thousand unique stone monuments
on its relatively small territory – cromlechs and dolmens from the Bronze Age. Urartu
fortresses and heathen temples, early – Christian churches, medieval monastery
schools and castles crowning the mountain tops.
Rejas Films production presents a documentary film "My Armenia" in english
Solid walls built from smoothly hewn enormous basalt slabs rise on both
sides of the Garni fortress gates. The walls run down to the edge of the
precipice where the steep unscaleable cliffs take over the protection of the
fortress from enemy invasion – Nature's own wise solution to the problem of
defence.
This is how Muratsan, the Armenian classic, described
the fortress centuries later:
"The scenery around ihe plateau, crowned with the fortress, was
majestic and forbidding. Towering rocks, strangely shaped cliffs, frightening
chasms, deep gorges, arrogantly crenellated, beautiful mountains stretched away
to the horizon, in front of the fortress, a frothing stream hurtled down from a
great height to Row into the Azat River. On the northern side, in addition to
the semicircular walls and towers, the fortress was protected by the
overhanging cliffs which merged with Mt. Geg in the distance From the east and
the west it was well-defended by its walls and towers made from smoothly hewn
basalt slabs, secured with lead and iron. On the southeastern hill, practically
on the boundary line of the fortress, loomed the sombre crenellated edifices of
the royal palace, and also Trdat's magnificent summer palace whose porticoes
were supported by twenty-four tall Ionic columns. The statues and the high,
carved vaults of the palace – creations of Roman art – were still intact..."
What will the traveller see today?
A spreading walnut tree casts its shadow on the
ground, vines on the stones, late cucumbers are ripening on their neat
beds, apricot trees have donned their vivid autumn finery, and through their
crowns one can glimpse Ihe arm of a crane and hear the purring of a motor. What
a peaceful scene to find in this fortress which had once been besieged by
hordes of invaders!
But let us follow the sound of the purring motor, and see what is there.
Basalt capitals, friezes, broken cornices, pieces of pediments are lying on the ground. They are fragments of the Sun temple, built in the
first century A. D. and destroyed
in the earthquake
of 1679. Each stone has been cleaned of the dust of centuries, and numbered. Now they will be laid in place, for restoration
work on the ancient temple has begun.
The ruins of the Sun temple are so spellbinding that you cannot tear
your fascinated gaze away. You stand there, enchanted and speechless, gazing at
the remains of ravished beamy… The purring of the motor makes a discordant sound, crashing into the tranquillising silence
of eternity.
Till stone steps lead to a basalt platform on which two broad slabs, with the
carved figures of the Atlases, have survived. The majestic and forbidding
view, described by Muratsan, opens from this platform. You fancy that you are standing on a
sunlit peninsula, and that to the left, to the right, and
in front of you there is an angry sea, ready to crash down on you. But the
waves have become petrified, and the sea is motionless. Everything around you
is swathed in shadow – the mountains, the
forest not far away, the ravines, and the black ribbon of the Azat deep down in the
abyss. Only the rocky peninsula with the ruins of the heathen temple is ablaze
with the inextinguishable light of the sun.
Not far away from here, there is a monastery hidden
from view in the mountains where the sunrays do not penetrate, and all is in
shadow.
The road to this monastery runs through the valley of the Azat,
meandering along the floor of the gorge past the chaotic conglomeration of
basalt rocks, each of which is a masterpiece of sculpture. Their shapes are so
clear-cut and elaborate that at moments you refuse to believe that Nature and
not an artist has carved them. The rocks high up in front are shaped like a
crenellated fortress wall, to the right you see the domes of ancient churches,
and higher above – the figures of heraldic beasts and birds. What you still do not know is
that inside these basalt rocks you will find man-made works of unique beauty.
The gorge grows narrower and the overhanging cliffs seem to weigh down
upon you more ominously than before. It is a long time till sundown, but a
brooding darkness settles over the gorge.
The Gegard Monastery is, in fact, an architectural complex created in
the 12th-13th centuries. Katogike is the only church built in the usual way
with outside walls and an outside dome. The other three have been hewn out of
the basalt monoliths. What light there is comes through the small round
apertures in the domes. It was from here that the masters began hacking out the
rock, cutting into the basalt and removing the pieces through a narrow hole in
the roof of the future church. Inside the monolith they carved out the domes,
the vaults, the altars, the columns and the arches, adorning them with
an exquisitely designed ornament.
These three churches, which are the size of ordinary churches, evoke a
feeling of reverence for the engineering and architectural genius of their
unknown creators.
Before leaving this fabulous underground kingdom you will throw a coin
into a deep bowl of spring water, glimmering with countless coins dropped
there by those who cаme before you, and make a wish that
you might come here again some day.
Gegard is perhaps the only medieval structure in Armenia which suffered
no damage at the hands of foreign invaders. The underground monastery, securely
protected by the Gegami mountains, became an unassailable stronghold in times
of trouble. Children and old people were hidden here from the enemy, as were
also the precious manuscripts of Armenian scholars and poets. The underground
passages, the outside walls of Katogike and the adjacent rocks are carved with
innumerable crosses (khach-kars) of the most intricate design commemorating
the dead, dedicated to glorious events, or calling for the safely of innocent
people.
Silently you come out into the open, to the noisy, boisterous river
which had tossed enormous rocks on to the banks. You cannot trace its course,
for it disappears at once among the mountains, and you have the feeling that
there is nowhere for the river to go, it is the end of the trail, the end of
the world. And it is here, at the end of the world, that people, vying the
genius of Nature, had created these miraculous monuments.
The crosses, which one encounters everywhere in Armenia, are as unlike
one another as the Armenian monasteries and churches. Each artist, while
retaining the essential features of national architecture, lent his work an
inimitable individuality. Zvartnols – the Church of Vigilance – is
probably the only one that has a twin. It was built in the 7th century, and
fell into ruins towards the end of the 10th. For centuries thereafter the ruins
of the once magnificent three-tiered edifice lay buried in the ground, and
were discovered and studied in 1903 by architect Toros Toramanyan during excavation.
The ancient slabs of dark red tufa lie in the Ararat valley with the sun
heating down upon them. The ornament on them has been perfectly preserved. It
is the unique secular ornament seen on Armenian churches composed of vine
leaves and pomegranates. There is also a bas-relief depicting a bearded man
with a shovel in his hands – this is Ovanes, the chief architect of the church.
Zvartnots collapsed in the 10th century, and its twin
– the Church of St. Gregory was born in the Nth on the banks of the
Akhuryan in Ani, the capital of the Bagratide dynasty.
In Echmiadzin, just a few kilometres away from Zvartnots stands a very
old Armenian cathedral built in 303 A. D. The church underwent several reconstructions,
time and again it fell into ruins and was restored and renovated, but
nevertheless it has retained its original features.
Also in Echmiadzin, you will find the churches of Ripsime, Gayaneh and
Shogakat. According to legend, they were built in commemoration of these three
virgin-martyrs who preached Christianity in Armenia at the end of the 3rd
century.
Even a very
brief description of all the churches and fortresses, built on Armenian soil
would take a lot of space and time. All I shall say is that the craftsmen who
built the stone churches, fortresses and palaces, themselves lived in hovels of
which hardly a trace remains. Little did they dream that the time would come
when their remote descendants would reverently cherish their creations and
continue their traditions.
The history of Christianity in Armenia was the topic of a TV documentary that aired on National Geographic TV on December 12, 2010.
There have been many towns in Armenia. And many capitals too. But
there has never been and never will be another town or another capital like
Yerevan. The people have put their soul into
it. their genius. After their interminable sequence of misfortunes
and trials, the people created Yerevan for the present and coming generations with faith in the security of the future. The
city made more progress in the fifty Soviet years than in the foregoing
twenty-seven centuries.
There is a stone which may be called the birth certificate of Yerevan. A
mere twenty years ago. a basalt stone was found on Arin-Berd, a hill in the
southeastern part of the modern city,
bearing a cuneiform Urartu inscription, made in 782 В. С. announcing that: "By the majesty of God Khaldi, Argishii the
son of Menua built this mighty fortress and called the city Erebuni..."
This makes Yerevan 2800 years old, and one of the oldest cities in the
world!
Look down upon it from the height of the Kanaker
plateau. The city is brilliantly sunlit. The snow-clad peak of Mt. Ararat seems
to enhance this brilliance, unusual even for the south, acting like an enormous
reflector. The air is so amazingly transparent that distant objects seem
nearer, and the mountains appear molded against the bright blue sky, as though
someone had shaded the contours. The city is pink, yellow, red, white, orange
and silver. These are the basic colors, and then there are the countless,
elusive shades of the tufa, basalt, granite and marble, raised from the bowels
of the earth and turned into houses, schools, libraries, theatres, hospitals, museums, stadiums, bridges and
factories.
Yerevan is probably the only city in the world where the facades of the
houses are never painted. Nature itself has painted the stones as required with
the help of the super-high temperatures of prehistoric volcanic activity.
There are houses in Yerevan built from the stone on which they stand. At
the end of Lenin Prospekt, where once there rose a bare rock, there now stands
the monumental building of Matenadaran – a depository of rare manuscripts and
miniatures. Matenadaran is built from silvery basalt, which also makes its
foundation in which the basement rooms have been hacked out. The statues of
great Armenian scholars, erected at the entrance of Matenadaran, are made of basalt.
The Academy of Sciences in Bareka-mutyun Prospekt is built from Byurakan
tufa of a rare color – dark-red with an ashen shade and shot with black. The
Byurakan Observatory on the Aragats spurs – the largest centre of astrophysics
in our country – Is faced with the same stone. A better site for an observatory
could hardly be found. The air is clean, dry and transparent – never a whiff of
mist. There are many clear nights here, both
in summer and winter. The horizon is all but infinite. It was here, in
the Byurakan Observatory, that Academician Victor Ambartsumyan and his
colleagues made the discoveries which caused a veritable revolution in astronomy.
It has long been the favorite spot
with painters too, for it affords a marvelous view of Mt. Ararat. Little wonder
that one of Martiros Saryan's best pictures was painted here and called: "A View of Ml. Ararat from Byurakan."
But let us return to the city. The streets here are wide and straight,
and the squares are generous in size. There are numerous parks and gardens, and
trees arc planted along the streets. Spots of greenery are everywhere: even the
nearby hills, which had once looked grim and lifeless, are now covered with a
thick, wood.
Yerevan is famous for its magnificent monuments. In the centre of the
city you will find one of the country's best memorials to Lenin. The figure is mounted on в granite
pedestal adorned with exquisite carving. Not far away stands a pink granite
monument to Stepan Shaumyan, a staunch Bolshevik and one of Lenin's
comrades-in-arms In different parts of the city there are statues carved of
stone or cast in bronze immortalizing Armenia's glorious sons – the revolutionary democrat Mikael Nalbandyan: the
founder of the new Armenian
literature, Khachatur Ahovyan: the classics of Armenian poetry, Ovanes Tumanyan and Avetik Isaakyan:
the great poet Sayat-Nova, and the legendary hero David of Sasun.
There are numerous pools and fountains in the city. And there is a
lovely spot on the southern outskirts of Yerevan where, framed in orchards,
lies the Yerevan sea, generously fed by the blue waters: of Lake Sevan.
How to describe this beautiful city in words? All its colors keep
changing in the play of light and shadow,
as do the colors of the
mountains, valleys, forests and lakes everywhere in Armenia.
Let us come down from the Kanaker plateau and take a closer look at the
streets, houses, memorials and fountains. None of the houses are alike. Nor are
the streets and the squares. But they do not clash, for excellent taste
prevails. Traits of national classical
architecture are present in practically all the buildings, and they are well
attuned to the requirements of modem construction. The new. many-storeyed
houses form an ensemble with their older brothers, even though the latter look a bit squat sometimes.
National Armenian ornaments adorn the newly built schools, theatres and
hospitals, and are also carved on stones in the parks. There are a great
number of fountains sprouting cool spring water in the streets of Yerevan, and
practically all of them are ornamented with a pattern depicting a vine, a
pomegranate or a doc. There are also fountains which make people remember
their countrymen who were killed in the war. The idea of building these
memorial-fountains belongs to the old stone-masons who began to erect them on
their own initiative in wartime to commemorate their fellow villagers. The idea
was soon picked up and developed on a large scale. Nowadays, you will find
these unique memorials everywhere – in towns, villages, highways and mountain passes.
Yerevan has a very formal look, and yet it is a very
cozy sort of town. Everything,
or almost everything, is done here in good taste, and this applies equally to the
development of large new residential areas and small
architectural forms. Street lamps run along the middle of the main thoroughfare
down its entire length, which is both convenient and elegant. Tiny standard
lamps, placed on the ground, very prettily illumine the trees and grass along
the curbs. There are handsome benches at the bus and tramcar stops where people
can sit and rest, hanging their shopping bags on the carved bar specially
provided for the purpose. Painted clay pitchers and large stylized vases are
placed at intervals along the pavement tiles. The interior decoration of most
of the cafes and restaurants is also extremely attractive.
Two mountains are seen to either side of Yerevan – the
majestic biblical Ararat and the four peaked Aragats, once a ferocious
volcano. While Mt. Ararat is Armenia's symbol of beauty and the fertility of
its valley, Mt. Aragats is an important economic potential, being the chief
source of the republic's building material. The spurs of Aragats contain
enormous reserves of pink tufa. It is indeed an amazing rock - it
is light and strong, it will not crumble when nails are hammered into it, and it
can be sown into pieces. Being a porous rock, it absorbs moisture and never
grows damp. It retains warmth and is soundproof. It can be melted down. And it
is amazingly durable, Offhand, can you think
of any other building material endowed with all these qualities.
Walls made from tufa will stand for millenniums. And
if many of Armenia's ancient buildings do lie in ruins, you must not blame it
on their old age but wholly on the destructive instinct of foreign invaders.
Artik, where the industrial extraction of pink tufa
has been practised on a broad scale for several years now, sends off trainloads
of this amazing rock to various parts of Armenia and to other republics of the
Soviet Union. Pink tufa is the adornment of Yerevan and of Armenia's second
largest City – Leninakan; it is used to build up the new industrial
centre Kirovakan, the raining towns Kafan, Alaverdy, Kadjaran, and Dastakert
where copper and molvbdenum are mined, the Arzni and Djermuk spas, and also the
hotels and boarding houses on the shores of Lake Sevan –the largest and the
most alpine lake in the world.
Tufa other than pink is also quarried. There is a
quarry in Azizbekov where the felsitic tufa so closely resembles oakwood that
it can be used for wall panels. In Kolageran it is a reddish mauve color with
cream veins; in Noemberyan the felsite has a golden tint, and in Sevan it is
the colour of a petrified turquoise sea. Apart from the varicolored tifas,
Armenia is rich in basalt, marble, perlite. obsidian, pumice, and nephelite
syenites.
There is an infinite variety of rock in Armenia and,
competently treated, it has become a source of the republic's wealth, Rock
means excellent building material, first-class concrete, heat insulators, pottery,
marvelously clear crystal, semiconductors, and soft, silky yarn. Aluminium is
smelted from the nephelite syenites of which there are huge deposits near Lake
Sevan. The new mining and chemical combine in Razdan uses rock for its raw
material.
Armenia - Tourist guide (The Sleeping Beauty)
And here is how Armenia's poet Amo Sagian speaks of his native stones:
You stones of my true native land.
Armenia's living stones.
From castles, shrines on every hand.
From mountain sentinels on high.
You soar atoft into the sky
You plunge into the depths below
Through thunderstorms and gales that
blow.
Grey, venerable stones.
Stones over all this land of ours...
Who knows from what high castle
towers,
From what stern monastery walls
Your groaning blocks were torn?
I sing your song once more, for all
My verses from your bowels were born.
Stones, doomed to bitter sufferings,
Worn out with evil wanderings.
Stones, broken up so many times,
Reduced to ash so many times,
And saved again (how many times!),
Armenia's sacred stones.
From stone it was that I emerged.
Stone was the living force that surged
Within me. Since primordial lime.
In stone I've woven fancies free,
In stone I've fashioned filigree
Of silken texture fine.
In the last fifty years a miracle of transformation
has been performed in Armenia by the people who, after long centuries of
struggle for the right to live and work in freedom, had at last become the
masters of their country's fortunes. The new generation of Armenians only know
from books and from the stories of the very old people how poor their land was
in the past, what sufferings fell to the lot of their ancestors, how
frightening was the genocide perpetrated by the rulers of the Osmanian Empire
against Armenians, and how the survivors dispersed all over the world.
The Armenian people were on the verge of
extinction, but they refused to be beaten. They found the inner strength and
the will for a revival of their nation, and in the new social conditions achieved
tremendous results in their material and spiritual prosperity. Armenians who
had scattered all over the world began to return to their native land, reborn
after the Great October Revolution, to start a new and better life.
After visiting Soviet Armenia, Rockwell
Kent, the famous American painter and writer, once said that he saw more
miracles in Armenia than anywhere else in the world. He called it a blessed
land, a cradle of talents and great achievements, a small country that had
produced monuments and personalities that could be the adornment and pride of
the entire world.
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