Spretnak The Blog: Four-stop Tour of Armenia Outside Yerevan, Featuring Mount Ararat

The Temple of Mithras in Garni.

Today was the day for a bilingual tour of Armenia outside Yerevan. Bilingual? Armenian and English? No. English and Russian. Russia is the #1 source of Armenian tourists. The rest of the tourists generally speak the international language of tourism: English.

This was not a tour with a hotel pick-up. This was a tour with one central meeting place, which was the Cascade Complex, a one-mile walk from my hotel. So I hoofed it, since the price was right.

I walked past the Alexander Spendiarian Statue en route. If you look at this photo, you will see the Mother of Armenia statue off in the distance, at the top right of the photo. I did not visit her, There's no cable car up to her like there is the Mother of Georgia.

The meeting point was in front of the Alexander Tamanian Statue in front of the Cascade Complex.

That is him. Well, his statue at least. And soon 20-ish tourists packed into a large van heading off to our first destination of the day: Khor Virap.

Let's go in.

Khor Virap is an historic monastery, built in 642 A.D., over the site of a prison (where St. Gregory was cast into the "deep pit"). You can go down into the pit, but people were a whole lot smaller back then which means the space is tiny and claustrophic and, making matters worse, packed with tourists.

This is the monastery building:

Inside:

The big draw at Khor Virap, and I mean that literally because the draw in very big, is that it is a great viewpoint Mount Ararat.

Mount Ararat is the national symbol of Armenia. It is what was once Armenian territory, but after a land swap made the Bolsheviks, it is in territory traded to Modern day Turkey (which I know all the cool kids Turkiye with random umlauts over random vowels which ordinarily is the sort of spelling thing I love) (but I am not one of the cool kids, linguistically or any other way).

Mount Ararat also is reputed to be where Noah's Ark hit dry land when the Biblical rains came to an end. (I am not calling it a "flood myth" because the flood was 100 percent real. Every culture talks about it a massive flood inundating the earth because there was a massive flooding of the temperate

zones of the planet after the ice sheets melted at the end of the Last Ice Age. So the flood is no myth.)

Ararat more artsily framed.

The mountain is absolutely massive and dominates the landscape. If Noah's Ark did actually float around in the neighborhood of Mount Ararat, then it is no surprise that the Ark ran aground here because the odds are great that it would strike something this massive.

And with Ararat being so prominent here, this is a rendering of the dove that Noah sent that returned with the olive branch evidencing dry land ahead.

And like every good place with a view, you climb to the viewpoint:

Cross along the way:

And here's a view of the monastery from the viewpoint:

One last look at Mount Ararat before heading to the next destination:

And the next destination was Garni. Let's go in and see what we're supposed to see.

The stop in Garni was to visit the Temple of Mithras.

It was crawling with tourists.

And this is the reconstructed, rebuilt Temple of Mithras.

This is the only surviving pagan temple in Armenia. The rest were all destroyed.

It is an active archaeological site.

Note the mosaic floor in what I believe is considered to have been the bathhouse area.

All Roman temples had bathhouses. So you could be clean when you went to temple.

The temple grounds not only are an active archaeological site. It is an active instagramming site:

Although some influencers do not know to pose to get the actual temple in the background. Case in point:

These are the remnants of a large church was built adjacent to (and taller than) the pagan Temple of Mithras/

The church was destroyed in a massive earthquake a few centuries ago.

But the pagan temple still stands, although it too required rebuilding work after that earthquake.

But clearly there is more of the temple than the newer church.

Nearby was the third stop of the day.

The Symphony of Stone. It is not named because the wind threw the canyon makes beautiful music. It gets its name because the lava rock cooled in such a way as the the rock resembles church organ pipes.

It's not a far walk into the canyon to check out the rocks.

Two pleasant surprises about the walk. The tour guide said that if we did not want to walk the uphill walk out of the canyon, there was a bus we could take that cost 500 Armenian dram, which is a little more than a buck in U.S. dollars. Bus? Eh. But it wasn't a bus. No.

It was a tourist train! And what sort of tourist does not love a tourist train?

The other "surprise" was that, at the end of the canyon walk, you could see the just-visited Temple of Mithras high atop the hill across the way.

Should I zoom in for a closer look?

Time to pay my 500 drams and take that train.

I actually talked a few of the others on this tour to get on board. They enjoyed the ride as much as I did. Which was a lot.

Time for lunch.

We saw Armenian "lavash" bread being made, which looked like a giant tortilla, in my opinion.

After eating, it was time for the fourth destination of the day: Geghard.

Geghard is a church that is partially in a cave. It was built to house probably the most important relic in the possession of the Armenian Apostolic Church: the spear that the Roman soldier used to pierce the side of Christ when Christ was hanging on the Cross.

The spear is no longer located at this church. It now is better protected at the Etchmiadzin Monastery in Vagharshapat, Armenia. Which was not on the day's itinerary.

Let's go into the cave part first:

It was dark.

At one point, there was a hole where you could look down and see the church part of Geghard,

We did not have to shimmy through that hole to get to the church. This was not like visiting the "deep pit" into which St. Gregory had been thrown. We walked.