Khor Virap is one of Armenia’s treasures. It’s an old monastery that has extreme religious importance to the Armenian people, but it’s also stunningly located in front of the massive Mt. Ararat, the traditional resting place of Noah’s ark. […]
Echmiadzin is more or less the Armenian Orthodox version of the Vatican City. It’s where the most important churches are, and it’s where the head of the Armenian church is. Echmiadzin Cathedral is the oldest state-built church in the world, and it dates from the 4th—yes, 4th—century. It’s one of several ancient churches in the city. […]
You know the scenes with the knight at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? Indy goes inside a rock-hewn church and the inside is all dark and lit by candles. That’s exactly what Geghard—a monastery in the hills southeast of Yerevan, Armenia—reminded me of. […]
When researching what to see and do in Yerevan, I was surprised to find out that there was a Roman temple just 15 miles away. […]
It was time. My two months in Tbilisi had come to an end and it was time for me to leave Georgia and head to Armenia. […]
While I was walking from one church to another in Mtskheta, I was approached by a taxi driver. He offered to take me up the mountain to Jvari Monastery (something I needed to find a taxi for anyway), and I accepted. While we were making our way up the mountain, he talked about how he drives tourists all over Georgia, and he started rattling off place names. One of them was Ananuri. […]
The Russian word for the Caucasus is Kavkaz (Кавказ). It’s a beautiful word, and it has an almost mythical ring to it—like Xanadu or Timbuktu. It’s one of those places that causes people’s eyes to glaze over when they talk about it, the way men’s eyes do in movies when they’re talking wistfully about a beautiful woman they once knew. […]
Mtskheta is a small town in Georgia about 15 miles north of Tbilisi, and it has played—and continues to play—an extremely important role in Georgian history. […]
Joseph Stalin, the ruthless and long-reigning head of the Soviet Union, was not Russian—he was Georgian. He died more than 60 years ago, and he is arguably the most famous Georgian ever. A couple days ago, I visited his home town of Gori, Georgia, where he lived for the first 16 years of his life. […]
When you say that something is pre-Christian in Georgia, you’re talking about something with serious age. Georgia was the second country to adopt Christianity as the state religion (in 337; the first country was Armenia in 301), and orthodox tradition states that the apostles Simon and Andrew first brought Christianity to what is now Georgia back in the 1st century AD. […]