Geghard & Garni

Geghard and Garni are the day everyone takes from Yerevan, and they deserve it: half an hour east, past the arch that the poet Charents left as a frame for Ararat, the road reaches Garni, where a Greek temple of the first century — the only pagan temple left in a country that turned Christian before anyone else — stands on a promontory over the Azat gorge, next to the mosaic floor of a Roman bath; below it, reached on foot or by a rattling jeep, the gorge wall is a wall of basalt columns, hexagonal and hanging like organ pipes, that the Armenians call the Symphony of Stones. Nine kilometres further, where the valley narrows to rock, Geghard is a monastery founded in the fourth century and cut in the thirteenth into the cliff itself: chapels carved from the mountain, springs running through the floor, khachkars in the walls, and a chamber where a single voice fills the stone. The spear that pierced Christ was kept here — the name means the monastery of the spear — and is now in Etchmiadzin.

The traveller leaves Yerevan early to have the temple in cool light and the Symphony to himself; stops at the Charents arch on the way for Ararat, if the morning is clear; walks the temple's platform and looks down into the gorge before going down into it, two kilometres on foot or the jeep from the village square; eats in Garni, where the women bake lavash on the walls of a tonir in front of you and serve it with cheese, herbs, honey and the vodka of the house; drives on to Geghard, walks the carved chapels with a candle, listens if a choir or a single singer happens to be there, and buys the sweet sujukh — walnuts in grape must — from the stalls at the gate; and, with time and boots, hikes from Garni across the gorge to the ruined monastery of Havuts Tar on the edge of the Khosrov forest, where nobody goes.

The Guide's honesty: this is the most visited half-day in Armenia and the buses arrive mid-morning — go early or in the late afternoon and take the sites in reverse if the crowds are coming the other way; the temple is a reconstruction of 1975 from the stones of the one that fell in an earthquake of 1679, and honest about it — the numbered blocks are the originals; the Symphony of Stones is a bumpy jeep ride or a real walk down and back up, not a viewpoint; marshrutkas from Yerevan reach Garni but rarely Geghard — a taxi for the day is the sane way and costs little; dress for a working monastery; the lavash lunch is a tourist ritual and also genuinely good; and Ararat, the mountain on every Armenian wall, stands across a closed border in Turkey — the traveller who understands what that means for the people serving him lunch has understood the country.