Yerevan is called the pink city, and this is not a metaphor but geology: almost the entire center is built of volcanic tuff — a stone that at sunset fills with apricot and pink. The city is older than Rome: in 782 BCE the Urartian king Argishti I carved on a basalt slab of the Erebuni fortress a record of its founding. Thus Yerevan became one of the oldest continuously living cities in the world — it is almost twenty-eight centuries old.
The heart of the capital is Republic Square, an oval of pink and cream tuff, where in the evenings the singing fountains dance. From here the streets fan out toward the Cascade — a giant terraced staircase with gardens and the Cafesjian Center for the Arts, toward the Opera, toward the Matenadaran, the repository of ancient manuscripts, which looks down on the city from above. And above all this, if the sky is clear, hangs the twin-peaked Ararat — a mountain beyond the border that Yerevanis consider their own.
Through the city flows the Hrazdan, cutting a deep gorge, and the small Getar. On the western hill stands frozen Tsitsernakaberd — the memorial to the victims of the genocide with its eternal flame and needle stele. And down below another life seethes: Vernissage with its carpets and silver, the covered GUM market (Pak shuka) with mountains of dried fruit, the cafes of Northern Avenue. Yerevan is apricot and brandy, tuff and jazz, antiquity and eternal renovation.
«Yerevan is a city the color of sunrise, hewn from the dawn itself.»
On this page — the districts of the capital (with weather on click), its main monuments, routes, and chronicle. Erebuni, Cascade, Matenadaran, Tsitsernakaberd — each with its own time and its own character.
