Armenia, which has a long history and splendid culture, has attracted more and more attention from tourists in recent years.
Armenia has a long history and used to be a kingdom with vast territory. The legendary Noah's Ark was docked on Mount Ararat, which belonged to Armenia. Time flies, and today Armenia is just a small landlocked country with a land area of less than 30,000 square kilometers and a population of only 3 million.
As the first country in the world to establish Christianity as the state religion, in more than 1,700 years of religious inheritance, Armenia has left more than 14,000 exquisite churches and monasteries in this pocket-sized and beautiful landscape. A fragment of Noah's Ark and the holy spear that pierced Jesus' body have been collected in the religious treasure hall in Echmiadzin for a long time. Every Armenian believes in these long-standing myths.
"You are all covered in hoarse ochre, and you stretch out to the horizon, but here is only a small tea tray and water, and it makes a small picture."-Mandelstam
Treasures and ruins of Echmiadzin
Yerevan is the capital of Armenia. However, to explore Armenia's mysterious history, we must start from Echmiadzin, 18 kilometers away from Yerevan, because Echmiadzin has been the capital of Armenia for hundreds of years since 117 AD.
At the end of the 2 nd century, St. Gregory, a descendant of an Armenian aristocrat, began to spread Christian faith in Echmiadzin, and was thrown into a deep dungeon by King Tiridat III as a "cultist". Fourteen years later, because he cured the king's strange illness, he was able to fix it, and persuaded the king to convert to Christianity, and then regarded Christianity as the state religion.
In 301, St. Gregory was ordered to build the first church in Armenia (i.e. Echmiadzin Church). Since then, it has been fixed as the main church of the Armenian Apostolic Church, and Christian believers from all over the world come here to worship every day. As the center of Armenian Christianity, the main church of Echmiadzin holds a grand sacramental ceremony every seven years. All Armenian churches in the world will send people to attend and take with them the baptism oil that is only boiled every seven years.
To be precise, today's Echmiadzin Church is a large complex of buildings. The door facing the street is built like a monument to commemorate the 1700 th year of Armenia's conversion to Christianity. On the door, it depicts the sacred scene of the king handing over his scepter to the bishop.
Today, the palace of that year has also become the religious treasure hall of Echmiazin Church, containing countless holy objects, from the fragments of Noah's Ark to the holy spear that once pierced Jesus' chest, from the fragments of thorn crown on Jesus' head to the right arm sheath of St. Gregory's gold-inlaid treasure, from the painted Gospel book thousands of years ago to the gorgeous holy clothes of archbishops of past ages... When visitors pass by each treasure, they seem to be reading a heavy history book of Christianity.
In Echmiadzin, there is also an extraordinary ruin of a famous church. Its official name is the ruins of Zwartnotz Church. It was built in the 7 th century, destroyed in the 10 th century, and has not been restored or rebuilt since then. Even so, the remaining ruins still can't block its former glory, and its spectacular scenery is still amazing today.
Especially in the history of architecture, the ruins of Zwartnotz Church are even more important, because such a large-scale circular church is the first known in the East and even in the world.
It is said that the Byzantine Emperor Constantine personally visited the construction site of the nearing completion of the Zwartnotz Church in 652 and invited the architect Avanes to build a similar church in his capital city. This plan failed because the architect died on his way to Constantinople. However, the architectural concept of Zwartnotz Church was widely spread and developed in new masterpieces of architecture and art in Europe and Asia.
