ArmeniaՀայաստան

Before the Armenians, the Armenian Highlands were ruled by Urartu, a kingdom centred on Lake Van (now in Türkiye) from the ninth to the sixth century BCE. In 782 BCE King Argishti I founded the fortress of Erebuni on a hill in what is now southern Yerevan; its cuneiform foundation stone is why the city counts its age from that year.

Armenian-speaking people appear in the region by the sixth century BCE, recorded in Persian inscriptions as a satrapy. Under the Artaxiad and later Arsacid dynasties Armenia was a buffer between Rome and Persia. Tigranes the Great, in the first century BCE, briefly built an empire from the Caspian to the Mediterranean before Rome cut it back.

The Greco-Roman temple at Garni, rebuilt after the 1679 earthquake, is the one standing monument from pagan Armenia. Nearby, the Azat river gorge exposes the hexagonal basalt columns called the Symphony of Stones.

Armenian tradition holds that St Gregory the Illuminator, imprisoned in a pit at Khor Virap for thirteen years, cured King Tiridates III, who then made Christianity the state religion in 301 — earlier than Rome. Echmiadzin Cathedral, near Yerevan, was founded soon after and remains the seat of the Catholicos of All Armenians.

To translate the Bible and hold the faith against Persian pressure, the monk Mesrop Mashtots created a 36-letter alphabet in 405 (two letters were added later). Within decades a literature of history, theology and translation followed. The Matenadaran in Yerevan keeps about 23,000 manuscripts and fragments.

In 451 at the battle of Avarayr, Armenians under Vartan Mamikonian lost militarily to Sasanian Persia but kept the right to remain Christian. The Armenian Apostolic Church then separated from Byzantine and Roman churches over the Council of Chalcedon, and has its own calendar of feasts — Christmas falls on 6 January.

Armenian church architecture is built from tuff and basalt in compact forms: a central dome on a drum with a conical roof, thick walls and small windows. The seventh-century churches of Zvartnots (now in ruins) and St Hripsime set patterns that influenced builders across the Caucasus and, some argue, early Romanesque Europe.

The monasteries of the tenth to thirteenth centuries — Haghpat and Sanahin in Lori, Geghard cut into the rock, Noravank in its red gorge, Tatev on its cliff — were centres of learning with libraries, scriptoria and schools. Their gavits (entrance halls) and bell towers show how far Armenian stonemasons pushed decorative carving.

The khachkar, a carved stone slab with a cross growing from a rosette or tree of life, is Armenia's signature art. No two are alike; thousands stand in churchyards and fields. The largest surviving cluster, at Noratus by Lake Sevan, holds hundreds. UNESCO lists khachkar craftsmanship as intangible heritage.

For centuries most Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, in eastern Anatolia and cities like Constantinople. Massacres in the 1890s killed tens of thousands. In 1915, during the First World War, the Ottoman government arrested Armenian leaders in Constantinople on 24 April and then deported and killed Armenians across Anatolia; historians estimate that around one million or more died, through massacres and death marches into the Syrian desert.

Armenia and many states and scholars call these events genocide; the Turkish state rejects the term. The dispute still shapes diplomacy and the closed border. On 24 April each year hundreds of thousands walk to the Tsitsernakaberd memorial in Yerevan to lay flowers at the eternal flame.

Survivors scattered to the Middle East, France, the United States and beyond. The diaspora — perhaps 7–8 million people — funds schools, churches and investment in Armenia, and its cooking and music have come back to Yerevan, notably through Syrian Armenians who resettled after 2012.

After two brief years of independence (1918–1920), the First Republic fell to the Red Army. In the Soviet era Alexander Tamanyan redesigned Yerevan with a ring of boulevards and buildings in pink tuff, including Republic Square and the Opera. Industry, science and education grew; so did the brandy trade.

In 1988 the Karabakh movement began, demanding the transfer of the mainly Armenian autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh from Soviet Azerbaijan to Armenia. Pogroms against Armenians in Sumgait and Baku, and expulsions of Azerbaijanis from Armenia, followed.

On 7 December 1988 an earthquake destroyed Spitak and much of Gyumri (then Leninakan), killing about 25,000 people. Parts of Gyumri remained in temporary housing for decades. Independence followed in 1991 amid war, blockade and energy shortages remembered as the 'cold and dark years'.

The first Karabakh war (1988–1994) ended with Armenian forces controlling Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding districts; hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis were displaced. For almost three decades a self-declared republic, Artsakh, existed there, dependent on Armenia.

In 2020 Azerbaijan, backed by Türkiye and using drones, retook the surrounding districts and part of Karabakh in 44 days. After a nine-month blockade, a one-day offensive in September 2023 ended Artsakh; almost the entire Armenian population, over 100,000 people, fled to Armenia, and the entity was dissolved. In August 2025 Armenia and Azerbaijan initialled a US-brokered peace framework including a transit route through southern Armenia; borders and ratification were still under discussion (check).

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who came to power in the peaceful 2018 Velvet Revolution, has turned away from Russia, freezing participation in its military alliance and seeking closer ties with the EU. Yerevan's economy boomed after 2022 as Russians and IT firms relocated. Visitors find a lively capital and a society absorbing refugees and loss.