Day Trip to Garni,Geghard Monastery and Lake Sevan

Overview

Seven hours out of Yerevan taking in three sites that happen to make an argument when you see them in one day. Garni is a building that was reassembled from its own rubble. Geghard is a building that was cut out of solid rock rather than built at all. Lake Sevan is where the water moved and left the architecture stranded. Stone, in three different relationships to the people using it.

Garni was put back together from its own pieces

The colonnaded temple above the Azat gorge is Greco-Roman, first century, and looks improbable in the Caucasus because it is the only structure of its kind left standing in the region. It was not standing for most of the last three hundred years. An earthquake in 1679 brought the whole thing down, and the columns, capitals and carved blocks lay scattered across the slope where they fell.

They stayed there. By the 1960s roughly four-fifths of the original masonry was still on site, which is what made the rest possible: from 1969 the architect Alexander Sahinian rebuilt the temple by anastylosis — putting the original stones back in their original positions and cutting new stone only where a piece was missing. The work finished in 1975. Look closely at the columns and you can pick out which blocks are ancient and which are twentieth century.

Geghard was taken out of the cliff

The monastery further up the valley works the opposite way. Its earliest chambers were not constructed; they were excavated, carved directly into the rock face, so that the walls, the columns and the domes above them are all one continuous piece of mountain with the interior removed. Sound behaves strangely in rooms made this way, and singers know it — if a group is performing when you arrive, stay for it.

Sevan, where the water left

The lake sits at nearly two thousand metres and the monastery on its northwestern point was, until the 1930s, on an island. Then Soviet planning diverted the feeding river through a chain of six power stations and out into the Ararat valley for irrigation, and the lake fell about nineteen metres, losing more than a tenth of its surface. The island became a peninsula, and the causeway you walk up to reach the churches is lake bed. The level has been partly recovered since, but not to where it was.

Practical shape

The three sites lie on the same road east and north of the city, so the driving is broken into manageable stretches. Geghard involves steps and uneven rock, and the climb to the churches at Sevan is a long staircase in the open. Weather at the lake is markedly cooler and windier than in Yerevan, whatever the season, and shoulders should be covered inside the churches.