Anipemza
Quiet border village and an ancient basilica

What is this place

Anipemza is a small village in Armenia's Shirak Province, right on the bank of the Akhurian River, facing the ruins of ancient Ani across the closed Turkish border. About 260 people live here today, and its greatest treasure is the early Christian, ancient Yereruyk Basilica.

The village sits on a stony plateau at around 1,430 metres, beside the Akhurian River that forms the sealed frontier between Armenia and Turkey. From this bank you can clearly see the ruins of medieval Ani on the far side of the gorge. Anipemza takes its name from the nearby pumice and tuff quarries: mining the pale, porous stone was long the main livelihood here, and fine dust from the mills often hung over the houses.

The village carries a difficult twentieth-century history. From 1926 the new settlement became a home for children orphaned by the Armenian Genocide of 1915, and later, in the Soviet years, it served as a place of exile and forced labour. Today it is a quiet border community where people raise livestock and work seasonally at the nearby quarries; a hospital building, a library and a cultural centre survive from Soviet times.

The main reason to come to Anipemza is the Yereruyk Basilica, one of the earliest monuments of Armenian church architecture. Its construction is dated to the 4th-6th centuries, and the name Yereruyk, meaning trembling, comes from folk tradition: seen from afar, the massive church on its tall piers seems to shimmer and quiver above the plateau. Badly damaged by earthquake, this ancient basilica has been added to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List, and for the traveller it is a rare encounter with deep antiquity amid the stark expanses of Shirak.