Yerevan, Armenia: Red Churches Beneath the Snow Mountain

We landed at Zvartnots airport in the evening, and the whole city was bathed in a pinkish-orange hue I’d never seen before. I later learned that Yerevan’s most iconic buildings — Republic Square, the Cascade, the National Opera — are almost all built from volcanic tuff, a stone quarried locally. Depending on the light, it shifts from pale pink to deep red and almost violet — the signature color palette of this city.

The Ark Beneath the Mountain

Stand on Republic Square and look southeast on a clear morning, and you can almost always see the snow cap of Mount Ararat (5,137 m). The mountain is now in Turkey, but Armenians claim it as their spiritual icon — legend says Noah’s Ark came to rest there after the Great Flood, and the double peaks of the summit are still engraved on the country’s coat of arms. We spent several days in the city, and the first thing I did every morning was look up to confirm it was still there.

The Red Cascade and Soviet Memory

The Cascade Complex is Yerevan’s most un-Soviet-looking building — begun in 1971, intended as a giant stairway from city center to the hilltop where a monument was to be built. Construction halted after the Soviet collapse, and the unfinished concrete frame has since been turned into an open-air complex of contemporary sculptures and outdoor cafés. The outside is bare limestone; climb to the peak and the whole city opens below you.

Downtown, the Armenian Genocide Memorial (Tsitsernakaberd) reminds visitors of this nation’s heaviest historical wound — the 1915 genocide that took around 1.5 million Armenian lives. It remains the deepest collective memory of this country.

Old Town and New

Yerevan’s old town Kond is the oldest quarter, stone houses cascading up a hillside. Narrow alleys, cats around every corner. In the evening, locals sit in tiny taverns drinking homemade pomegranate wine — the glass raised is a deep red, sweeter than regular wine.

The new parts of the city are very young — the large shopping centers, metro stations, and glass-curtain office buildings around Independence Square were built after 1991 independence. The city moves slowly but steadily, as if it knows where it came from and where it’s going.

The day I left I shot a panoramic of Yerevan at dusk. The mountain was the same mountain, the city was still that pink, except for a single beam of light breaking through a gap in the clouds.

This was my first stop in the Caucasus — Georgia and Azerbaijan were next. But that “warm stones” feeling I got from Yerevan, I never found it in any other city again.