7 ideal things to do in Yerevan

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked May 10, 2025

The manuscripts at the Matenadaran
The top of Mashtots AvenueMorning, before you take on the Cascade
Mesrop Mashtots invented the Armenian alphabet in 405 and his statue sits on the steps outside, teaching. Inside is the largest collection of Armenian manuscripts anywhere — gospels, medicine, astronomy, law — built into the hillside and listed by UNESCO as documentary heritage. What lands is not one particular book but the arithmetic of it: a small, repeatedly invaded country that has kept its own written record continuously, in a script nobody else on earth uses.
Climb the Cascade at the end of the day
Kentron, above the Tamanyan Street sculpture gardenLate afternoon into dusk
The Cascade is a monumental limestone staircase running up the hillside, with the Cafesjian collection spread across its terraces and gardens — Botero's enormous cat down at the bottom, and escalators inside the structure for when the steps have made their point, which for me was somewhere around the fourth landing. Yerevan spreads out below and on a clear day Ararat stands behind it. In Split we have a hill with a view. It did not occur to us to put a museum inside it.
Tsitsernakaberd, the genocide memorial and museum
On the hill west of the centre, above the Hrazdan gorgeGo in the morning, and plan nothing demanding afterwards
Go up here early, and go before you do anything else in this country. Basalt slabs lean inward around an eternal flame; a split stone needle stands beside them. The museum underneath is sober, carefully made and unbearable in the way it is supposed to be. Nearly every Armenian you meet has a family route out of 1915 somewhere in their history. This is not a sight to tick off. It is the explanation for a great deal of everything else.
The Sergei Parajanov Museum
Dzoragyugh, on the lip of the Hrazdan gorgeAny afternoon
Parajanov made a handful of films and spent years in Soviet prisons, and while he was inside he made collages out of whatever came to hand — foil from milk-bottle tops, thread, buttons, dried flowers. The house above the gorge holds hundreds of them, plus the drawings, the dolls and the hats. It is funny, cluttered and quietly furious. It took me twenty minutes to work out what I was looking at and two hours to leave.
The Vernissage craft market
Aram and Buzand streets, a short walk from Republic SquareLate morning
Aram Street fills with trestle tables for a few hundred metres: carpets, silver, wood-carved backgammon boards, Soviet camera lenses, obsidian, and one stretch of frankly menacing antique tools. The carpet sellers are patient and will unroll for half an hour with no expectation attached. I went in intending to buy nothing and came out with a backgammon board that had to be checked into the hold on the way home.
Garni and Geghard in one afternoon
Kotayk, between thirty minutes and an hour east of the cityTake Geghard second, for the late light in the rock chapels
Half an hour east stands a Hellenistic colonnaded temple above the Azat gorge, flattened by an earthquake in 1679 and rebuilt in the 1970s out of its own fallen stones, which is a very Armenian solution to a very Armenian problem. Twenty minutes further on, Geghard is cut directly into the cliff: chambers hollowed from solid rock, a spring running inside, and an acoustic that somebody will demonstrate for you if a singer happens to be there. Hire a driver and do both.
Khor Virap, and the mountain you cannot get to
The Ararat plain, about 40 km south, at the closed Turkish borderClear mornings in spring or autumn; summer haze hides the mountain
Ararat has been inside Turkey since the 1920s, and this monastery on the plain is where Armenians go to look at it. There is a pit here you climb down into on an iron ladder, where Gregory the Illuminator was held for thirteen years before the king converted and the country became the first Christian state in 301. Beyond the vines is the fence, and then the border. Nobody explains why this stings. You work it out from where everybody is standing and which way they are facing.

The long version

Yerevan: the pink city under Ararat

Yerevan is, in some lights, simply a small Soviet-modernist capital in the South Caucasus. In other lights, it is the cultural heart of one of the world's oldest continuous Christian civilisations and a country still working through the unresolved memory of 1915.

Read the full essay →