Geghard Monastery

Most of what you walk into at Geghard was never built. It was cut — chiselled out of the solid rock of the cliff, from the ceiling downwards, so that columns, arches and domes were left standing as the mountain around them was carried away in baskets. There is no scaffolding in that process and no way to put a stone back. One thirteenth-century architect, Galdzak, signed his name at the base of one of the domes. He spent about forty years here, and he got it right first time, every time.

A spring, a spear, and eight hundred years

The site was holy before it was Christian. A spring rises in a cave here, and it was sacred in pre-Christian times; tradition says St Gregory the Illuminator founded a monastery around it in the fourth century. Its first name was Ayrivank — the Monastery of the Cave.

Nothing of that survives. Arab raids destroyed the first monastery in the ninth century, and in 923 Nasr, an Arab caliph's vice-regent in Armenia, plundered it, burned the buildings and destroyed manuscripts that existed nowhere else. Earthquakes did the rest.

What you see was built in a single burst between 1215 and 1288. The main church went up in 1215 under the brothers Zakare and Ivane Zakarian, the generals who had taken most of Armenia back from the Turks in the service of Queen Tamar of Georgia. Then, around 1240, the monastery was bought by Prince Prosh Khaghbakian, a Zakarid vassal, who turned it into his family's monastery and mausoleum and set about the rock-cutting that made it famous. In the space of about fifty years the Proshyans produced two cave churches, two funerary chambers, a hall for gatherings and study, and a great many cells — and gave the monastery an irrigation system. At its height it was known as the Monastery of the Seven Churches and the Monastery of the Forty Altars.

The name it carries now is younger and comes from a relic. The spear said to have pierced Christ's side at the Crucifixion — geghard — was brought to Armenia by the Apostle Thaddeus in tradition and kept here, and by 1250 documents are calling the place Geghardavank, the Monastery of the Spear. Relics of the Apostles Andrew and John were given in the twelfth century. In one of the cave cells in the thirteenth century lived Mkhitar Ayrivanetsi, one of the significant Armenian historians of his day.

And then it stopped. The monastery fell out of use entirely, and for a period the main church was used to shelter the flocks of Karapapakh nomads through the winter, until monks came back from Etchmiadzin after the Russian conquest.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The walk up

The road ends at a car park and the path up is lined with women selling things worth stopping for: gata sweet bread, sheets of pressed fruit lavash, and sujukh — strings of walnuts dipped over and over in thickened grape juice until they set into something between a sweet and a candle. A group of musicians usually plays a few bars as you pass.

Before the gate, look at the cliff on your right: there are shallow shelves in the rock, and people throw pebbles up at them. If your stone stays on the ledge, your wish is granted. The ground below is covered in the failures.

All the way along, and over the whole rock face of the site, are khachkars — Armenian cross-stones, carved in relief, some free-standing and some cut straight into the cliff, each one raised for a death or a donation. Geghard has hundreds of them.

The Katoghike, the only ordinary building here

Inside the twelfth- and thirteenth-century ramparts — they guard three sides; the cliff guards the fourth — the main church of 1215 is, deliberately, conventional: an equal-armed cross in a square, under a dome on a square base, with small two-storey barrel-vaulted chapels in the corners. It is built against the mountain, and the mountain is not visible even inside it.

Go round to the south portal and take your time. The tympanum is carved with trees hung with pomegranates and leaves twining through grapes; doves sit between the arch and the frame, their heads turned inward to the axis of the door. Above the whole thing, a lion attacking an ox — the prince's power, stated in the usual way. Up on the drum of the cupola the arcading carries birds, human masks, animal heads, rosettes and jars.

The gavit, and a dome borrowed from Islam

West of the church is the gavit — the Armenian narthex, a hall for teaching, meetings and receiving pilgrims — built between 1215 and 1225, half free-standing and half cut into the cliff. Four massive free-standing columns carry a stone roof with a hole in the middle to let the light in.

Now look up at the centre. The dome over the middle bay is a stalactite vault, and it is the best example of the technique anywhere in Armenia. It is also, unmistakably, muqarnas — the honeycomb vaulting of Islamic architecture, which had been arriving in Armenia since the eleventh century. The vaults here are very close indeed to those of the Seljuk Sultan Han caravanserai at Aksaray, built in 1229. A Christian monastery in the Caucasus, roofing its narthex in the manner of a Turkish caravanserai, six years earlier.

Avazan: the church cut round a spring

North-west of the gavit, the first cave chamber. It is called Avazan — “basin” — and it was hewn in the 1240s inside the ancient cave with the spring in it, so that the pre-Christian holy place ended up literally inside a church. The water still runs; people still drink it.

It is entirely cut from the rock, on an equal-armed cross plan, with two pairs of intersecting pointed arches carrying a tent-shaped dome whose inner surface is worked into stalactites, as are the capitals and the conch over the altar. On the southern wall, small triple arches with conches of different shapes are linked top and bottom by finely cut floral ornament.

And at the base of the tent, among reliefs of pomegranates, is an inscription with the architect's name: Galdzak. He cut this church, the other rock church, and the funerary chambers, over some forty years. There is also an inscription asking you to remember Archimandrite Galdzag. Named medieval architects are rare anywhere; a named architect who worked exclusively in subtraction is rarer.

The Proshyan tomb, and the arms in the rock

East of Avazan, reached through the gavit, is the main zhamatun, cut in 1283 as Prince Prosh's burial chamber. It is a roughly square room with deeply cut reliefs in the walls and burial vaults in the floor.

The thing to find is on the northern wall, above the archways, and it is one of the strangest objects in Armenia. In the centre, a ram's head with a chain in its jaws. The chain runs out and winds around the necks of two lions, whose heads are turned to face you and whose tails end not in tufts but in the heads of upward-looking dragons. Between the lions, below the chain, an eagle with half-spread wings and a lamb in its claws. It is almost certainly the coat of arms of the Proshyan princes, and the animals in it go back well beyond Christianity.

On the eastern wall, the doorways to the chapel and to the Astvatsatsin church have rectangular frames joined by two relief crosses, with sirens — harpy-like birds with crowned women's heads — on the chapel portals, and haloed human figures in long robes on the church wall, elbows bent. Those are probably the family who paid for all of it.

The Proshyan chapel, 1283

Through the tomb is the second rock-cut church, the Chapel of the Proshians, known from an inscription to be Prince Prosh's gift of 1283. Cruciform, with curved corners, a drum lined with half-columns alternating with blind windows, and a dome with a circular opening at the centre. The walls carry animals, warriors, crosses and floral work; the altar dais has a pattern of squares and diamonds.

Two things to hunt for. At the butt of the altar stair, a completely realistic goat. And on a khachkar to the left of the altar apse, two men: one holding a staff, in the same pose as the figures on the portal, who may well be Prince Prosh himself; the other in near profile, a spear pointing down in his left hand, blowing a horn raised in his right.

The Upper Zhamatun — and the sound

Outside the gavit door, an external staircase climbs the rock. At the top, cut in 1288 on a second level, is the funerary chamber of Papak Proshyan and his wife Ruzukan — an inscription says so, though their tombstones have gone. Princes Merik and Grigor are buried here too. The corridor up is covered in carved crosses.

The chamber reproduces the form of a built gavit exactly: columns cut from the rock carry low semicircular arches in trapeziform frames, squaring the plan, and on that square sits a spherical cupola with a light hole at its top. In the back right corner there is a hole in the floor. Look through it: you are looking down into the tomb chamber below.

Then stop and listen. The acoustics in this room are extraordinary — a single hard-surfaced volume with one small opening, and a reverberation that no built room of the same size could produce. Small groups of Armenian singers perform here through the day, usually unaccompanied sharakan, the medieval hymns. It costs nothing, it lasts three minutes, and it is the single best thing at Geghard. If you hear one beginning while you are somewhere else in the complex, go.

Everything else cut into the hill

More than twenty spaces of different shapes and sizes were cut at various levels into the rock around the main chambers. The ones on the western side were for service use; most of the rest are small rectangular chapels with a semicircular apse and an altar, some of them twinned or tripled behind a single entrance, several with carved doorways. Most of the monks did not live inside the walls at all but in cells cut into the rock face outside them, which survive.

Walk out of the eastern gate and you will find a stone table for matagh, the ritual animal offering that Armenians still make at monasteries, and a bridge over the stream. It is a live practice, not a relic.

The chapel above the road

A hundred metres back down from the entrance, high above the road, stands the Chapel of St Gregory the Illuminator, built before 1177 and so older than everything else here. It is partly hewn from the rock and its shape was probably dictated by a cave that was already there: rectangular, with a horseshoe apse, and passages and annexes cut at different levels, some on top of one another. Traces of plaster with dark remnants of frescoes show it was painted inside. Its walls and the rock around it are covered in khachkars.

It takes five minutes to climb to. Almost nobody does.

Garni, down the valley

About ten kilometres back down the Azat gorge is Garni, an Ionic colonnaded temple conventionally dated to the first century AD and the only largely preserved Hellenistic building in the former Soviet Union. Be precise about what you are looking at, though: it collapsed in an earthquake in 1679 and stood as a heap of its own masonry for nearly three centuries, until it was rebuilt between 1969 and 1975 by anastylosis — putting the original fallen stones back where they came from. It is genuine, and it is a reconstruction, and both of those are true at once. Below it, in the gorge, is the Symphony of the Stones: a cliff of hexagonal basalt columns hanging over the river like organ pipes. The two sites are visited together so routinely that Armenians treat “Garni-Geghard” as a single destination, and you should plan it that way.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The Proshyan arms Northern wall of the main zhamatun: a ram's head chained to two lions with dragons for tails, and an eagle carrying off a lamb. Cut straight into the living rock.
• The singers in the Upper Zhamatun Free, three minutes long, and the best thing here. If you hear one starting, drop everything.
• Galdzak's signature At the base of the tent-dome in Avazan, among carved pomegranates — the name of the man who cut the place.
• The muqarnas dome in the gavit Islamic honeycomb vaulting in a Christian narthex, and closely related to a Seljuk caravanserai of 1229.
• The goat At the foot of the altar stair in the Proshyan chapel, entirely realistic and entirely unexplained.
• The hole in the floor Back right corner of the Upper Zhamatun. It looks down into the tomb chamber underneath.
• The wishing shelves In the cliff just before the entrance. Throw a pebble; if it stays up, you get your wish.
• The Chapel of St Gregory Older than the whole monastery, a hundred metres above the road, and nearly always empty.

Insider tips

Go early. Geghard is one of the most visited places in Armenia and the coaches start arriving from mid-morning; the rock chambers are small and twenty people fill them.

Buy something on the way up. The sujukh and the fruit lavash are made locally and genuinely good, and the women selling them are from the village.

Wear shoes with grip. The floors are rock, worn smooth by eight hundred years of feet, and often damp because of the spring; the external stair to the Upper Zhamatun is steep and open.

Take a scarf if you are a woman — head covering is often expected inside the churches, and while scarves are usually available at the door it is easier to have your own.

Do Garni first and Geghard second if you can. Garni is a bright open hilltop and Geghard is dark; doing it in that order makes the contrast land, and it also puts you at Geghard later in the afternoon when the first wave of coaches has gone.

Where to stay and eat nearby

Almost everyone stays in Yerevan, an hour away, and does Garni-Geghard as a half or full day. The village of Garni has a handful of guesthouses and several places doing traditional lavash baking demonstrations with lunch, which are touristy but the food is real. There is nothing at Geghard itself beyond the stalls.

More churches in the Caucasus

• Etchmiadzin Cathedral — the Mother See of the Armenian Church, and where the Holy Lance actually is.
• Khor Virap — the pit where St Gregory the Illuminator was imprisoned, under Mount Ararat.
• Svetitskhoveli Cathedral — Georgia's national cathedral, and the church of the queen whose generals built Geghard's main church.

See all the Armenian churches in this guide →