Turkey's Daily Sabah has published an article about the Armenian religious architecture after one of their travel reporters, Ernest Whitman Piper, and a team of wanderers set out for a journey to track down Armenia's most amazing churches and monasteries.
"Armenia was one of the first ever Christian countries, as the locals never hesitate to tell you. They were so excited about being the first Christians that scads of them ran up into the hills to build astonishingly beautiful and compellingly strange monasteries. They put stone cones on their tops, they decorated their graves with intricate braided carvings. We had selected a handful of the most architecturally unusual places of worship for our tour," Piper says, adding that Khor Virap and Noravank were the first monasteries they visited in Armenia.
According to the article, Noravank has the greatest collection of khachkars anywhere on earth.
"Noravank is a tiny monastery on a tiny square block with insane carvings everywhere, positioned next to and on top of bright red rock cliffs.," it says
Next on their list were Geghard and Garni, a pair of temples close to each other.
"Geghard monastery felt alien. The wooden doors were covered by carvings in medieval Armenian, an alphabet which is basically a magic spell, Piper says.
Garni is a Greek-style pagan temple whose construction was ordered by a first century Armenian king to make the kingdom more Hellenic.
"It was destroyed by an earthquake in the 17th century, and the USSR, to their credit, rebuilt it. After Armenia's conversion to Christianity, most of the pagan temples were destroyed, but Garni endured," the article says.
