Things to do
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Armenian Genocide Memorial
Tsitsernakaberd stands on a hill west of the centre: twelve basalt slabs leaning over an eternal flame, beside a splintered stele. The underground museum below sets out the deportations of 1915 through documents and photographs, with survivor testimony in several languages. Allow an unhurried hour or more, and expect the memorial itself to be quiet even when school groups are visiting.
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Blue Mosque
Persian tilework and a turquoise dome sit behind a wall on Mashtots Avenue, screening a courtyard of pomegranate trees from the traffic. Built in the eighteenth century and restored with Iranian funding in the 1990s, it serves as the one working mosque in the city. Opening hours are limited around prayer, and modest dress is expected inside the courtyard.
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Cascade Complex
A giant limestone stairway climbs the hillside above Yerevan's centre, built in stages from the Soviet era and finished only decades later. Escalators run inside it past galleries of the Cafesjian collection, and the terraces carry Botero and Chagall pieces in the open air. Climbing to the top takes about twenty minutes and repays it with Ararat across the rooftops.
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Garni Temple
Greco-Roman colonnades on a gorge spur mark the one classical temple left standing in the Caucasus, rebuilt from its own fallen stones after an earthquake in the seventeenth century. Below the site, basalt columns of the Symphony of Stones drop into the Azat gorge. Garni pairs naturally with Geghard, and drivers in Yerevan sell the two together as a half day.
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Geghard Monastery
Chambers hacked directly into the cliff make up half of this monastery in the Azat valley, with a spring running inside one rock-cut chapel and khachkars carved into the walls. Acoustics under the domes draw a cappella singers most days. Marshrutkas stop in nearby Goght, short of the gate, so a taxi or a shared driver covers the last stretch.
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History Museum of Armenia
Republic Square's west wing holds the national collection, running from Bronze Age Lchashen wagons and Urartian bronzes up through medieval metalwork and carpets. A leather shoe found in a Vayots Dzor cave, dated to around five and a half thousand years ago, is the object most visitors come for. Labelling in English thins out on the upper floors.
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Khor Virap
Vineyards run up to the walls of this hilltop monastery on the Turkish border, where Gregory the Illuminator was held in a pit for years before Armenia adopted Christianity. A ladder still drops into the cell. Ararat rises directly behind the belfry, which makes the site the country's defining photograph, and haze often hides the peak by late morning.
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Matenadaran
Manuscripts rescued from monasteries across historic Armenia fill a basalt building at the top of Mashtots Avenue, some seventeen thousand of them in the collection. The galleries show a rotating fraction: illuminated gospels, medical and astronomical treatises, and the earliest surviving Armenian script. An hour covers the exhibition, and the guided tours explain the bindings and pigments better than the labels do.
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Republic Square
Alexander Tamanian laid out this oval of pink and ochre tufa as the heart of his 1920s plan, ringed by ministries, the History Museum and a grand hotel. Singing fountains play against the museum facade on summer evenings, drawing crowds well past dark. Traffic circles the edge all day, and the square comes into its own late, after sunset.