Kotayk is small but the most "metropolitan" of the mountain provinces: it wraps around Yerevan in a ring, and almost every route out of the city leads here first. Here are the coniferous slopes of Tsaghkadzor, the basalt columns above the Azat, and monasteries carved straight into the rock — all within an hour's drive of Republic Square.
Above the gorge of the Azat River stands Garni — the only surviving Greco-Roman pagan temple in Armenia, from the 1st century. Below it, in the very narrows, nature has laid out a wall of regular hexagonal basalt columns — the "Symphony of Stones." A little higher along the trail hides Geghard: a monastery half hewn into the mountain massif, under UNESCO protection.
The north of the province is industry and water: the Hrazdan with its cascade of hydropower plants, the factory town of Charentsavan, the mineral springs of Bjni and Arzni. And Tsaghkadzor, with the Kecharis monastery and a cable car, turns in winter into the country's main ski resort, and in summer into cool pine air for those fleeing the Yerevan heat.
«At Garni the stone sings, at Geghard it is silent. And both are heard equally far away.»
On this page — the province's settlements (with weather on click), the main landmarks, routes, and chronicle. Garni, Geghard, Kecharis — a temple, a cave, and a mountain, three different ways of being closer to the sky.
