Ararat
ՄասիսThe great twin-peaked mountain of Armenia — home to vishaps in the pagan imagination, resting-place of Noah's ark in the Christian one. Its silhouette is still the visual heart of the nation.
IV. Sacred Geography
The Land Was the First Altar
Սրբազան Հողը
In Hetanism the land itself is holy. Mountains are ancestors, lakes are the sleeping-places of dragons, and the temples were only the finest of a thousand shrines. Much of what stands today, Christian or ruined, still remembers who came first.
The Cliff of the Sun
Garni Temple
Perched above the Azat River gorge, the Temple of Garni is the only Greco-Roman peripteral temple in the former Soviet space, and the only surviving pagan sanctuary in Armenia. Built in the first century CE — traditionally by King Trdat I after his coronation in Rome — its twenty-four Ionic columns of grey basalt frame a small cella that once housed a statue of Mihr, god of the sun.
Where every other temple was pulled down after 301 CE, Garni was spared: the royal family kept it as a summer palace. It stood until 1679, when an earthquake felled it, and was raised again in the twentieth century from its own scattered stones — a resurrection in basalt.
The Speaking Stones
Carahunge — Zorats Karer
On a windswept plateau near Sisian, more than two hundred basalt megaliths stand in a loose ring nearly two kilometres across. Called Zorats Karer — "the army of stones" — and popularly Carahunge, "speaking stones," the site is at least five thousand years old, and eighty of its stones are pierced with smooth-bored holes.
Some archaeologists read Carahunge as a Bronze Age necropolis; others, as a Neolithic observatory whose holes sight the sun's solstices and the movements of the star Sirius. Whatever its function, it is older than any Armenian god now remembered — the deepest layer of the sacred land.
The Elders
Sacred Mountains
Armenian religion is vertical. The gods live on peaks, and the peaks themselves are close to being gods.
Aragats
ԱրագածSister-mountain of Masis; four peaks are said to be four mourning sisters. Long a place of oracles, healing springs, and monastic seclusion.
Nemrut
ՆեմրութSite of the Navasard pilgrimage and a major sanctuary of Barsamin. Its crater lakes were held to be the drinking-basins of the gods.
Continuities
Churches Built on Pagan Sites
When Gregory the Illuminator baptised Armenia in 301 CE, he did not so much replace the old sanctuaries as adopt their addresses. Many of Armenia's oldest churches stand exactly on top of the pagan altars they superseded.
- Etchmiadzin Cathedral — built on the "descent of the Only-Begotten," a site of open-air fire worship. Christ, in Gregory's vision, struck the earth with a golden hammer where the altar of Sandaramet had stood.
- Bagavan — the great sanctuary of Aramazd was converted into a monastery; the perpetual fire became a sanctuary lamp.
- Ashtishat — the triple temple of Vahagn, Anahit and Astghik was demolished and replaced by the church that later became the seat of the Mamikonian catholicoi.
- Erez — the golden statue of Anahit was melted for coin, and a church of the Virgin raised over her foundations. The switch of mother for mother was made deliberately.