Yerevan sights

This morning we met our tour director, Artyom and the rest of our tour group. Wow! Most of them are veteran travellers and have done many more tours than we have. It’s going to be good.

We started by visiting the statue of Mother Armenia which was erected in 1967 on the pedestal that formerly held a statue of Stalin. She personifies the nation and symbolizes “peace through strength”.

We visited the Matenadaran Museum, home to one of the largest collections of ancient Armenian manuscripts.

We learned that the Armenian alphabet was developed by Saint Mesrop Mashtots in 405 AD, with some letters based on the Greek alphabet and others possibly influenced by Persian or Syriac scripts. The primary goal was to create a script for translating the Bible into Armenian, making Christian scriptures accessible to the Armenian people. There were originally 36 characters written in four columns of nine. These characters were also used to represent numbers. For example inside the door of the museum is 1957.

The Cascade, a limestone stairway that links the city center to parks.  Originally the idea of architect Alexander Tamanyan in the early 20th century to link the northern and central parts of the city with green areas cascading down one of the city’s highest hills. The plan was forgotten until a revival in the 1970’s by the city’s chief architect. His plan included a monumental exterior stairway, a long indoor shaft containing a series of escalators, and an intricate network of halls, courtyards, and outdoor gardens embellished with numerous works of sculpture bearing references to Armenia’s rich history and cultural heritage. (These statues do not refer to Armenia’s history and initially caused much consternation with the city’s inhabitants.)

Construction began in the 1980s but was abandoned after the Armenian earthquake of 1988 and the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. With independent rule and the transition to democracy, Armenia entered a period of severe economic hardship, and the Cascade remained a neglected relic of the Soviet era for more than a decade. In 2002 Gerard Cafesjian, a philanthropist in the United States, offered the city of Yerevan funding to complete the project. Over the next seven years, virtually every aspect of the monument was renovated, and much of it completely reconstituted into a Center for the Arts bearing the name of its principal benefactor.

We took the escalators to the top – avoiding the more than 500 steps!