Beniamin
A quiet village with a royal past

What is this place

Beniamin is a small village on the Shirak plateau near Gyumri, best known for its archaeological site from the Achaemenid era. Today around 724 people live here at roughly 1,540 metres above sea level.

Beniamin sits on the open highland plain of Shirak, a few kilometres from Gyumri. Until 1945 the village was called Jlokhan (Ճլոխան); its present name honours Major General Beniamin Galstyan, a son of these lands who fell in December 1942 defending Leningrad. At about 1,540 metres the climate is sharp, with snowy winters and a short but vivid mountain summer.

The pride of Beniamin is the Achaemenid-era archaeological complex at the foot of a hill beside the village. Excavations have uncovered the remains of a royal, palatial settlement of the 6th–4th centuries BC: metallurgical workshops once operated here, and the buildings recall the dwellings of the Armenian Highland that Xenophon described in his Anabasis. It is one of the few traces of early Persian influence in Armenia.

Nearby, an ancient burial ground has also been studied, revealing a distinctive local rite in which jewellery was placed in the mouth of the deceased. For the traveller, Beniamin is a calm rural stop near Gyumri, where ordinary village life unfolds directly above layers of very deep history.