Armavir is the flattest and warmest region of Armenia. Here the mountains part, and beneath the biblical Ararat the Ararat plain lies open: black volcanic earth cut by irrigation canals, vineyards to the horizon, apricot and peach orchards. This is the country's main granary and winery — the place where the Armenian year begins with blossom and ends at the wine press.
But this plain is not just a field. In Vagharshapat, which the whole world knows as Echmiadzin, beats the spiritual heart of Armenia: here is the residence of the Catholicos of All Armenians and the oldest Christian cathedral, of the 4th century, founded, by tradition, on a site shown by Christ himself. Nearby are the churches of St. Hripsime and St. Gayane, and a little to the east, among the fields, rise the round ruins of Zvartnots, a collapsed 7th-century temple whose daring three-tiered rotunda was centuries ahead of its time.
Beneath the plain lies another memory. Near the village of Metsamor archaeologists unearthed a Bronze Age settlement — workshops, an observatory, smelters more than five thousand years old; today the name Metsamor is also borne by Armenia's only nuclear power plant. And to the west the plain is closed off by the Arax — the border river, beyond which Turkey begins and that very Ararat, left on the other side, can be seen.
«Echmiadzin is not a temple amid the plain. It is the center around which the plain found its meaning.»
On this page — the settlements of the province (with weather on click), the main monuments, routes and chronicle. Echmiadzin Cathedral, Zvartnots, Sardarapat, Metsamor — four seasons of one plain.
