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Monastery · Harich, Shirak

Harichavank

Հառիճավանք · Harich Monastery

A monastery on a promontory between two canyons in Harich village near Artik, pairing a 7th-century church of Saint Grigor with a cathedral built in 1201 by the Zakaryan brothers.

Where it is

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Open Harichavank on the XTOUR map. Directions are available there.

40.6065, 43.9995

Why go

Look at the east facade of Saint Astvatsatsin, where a relief shows the brothers Zakare and Ivane holding a model of the church they built. The complex is almost completely preserved, and in the 19th century, when it served as a summer residence of the Catholicos of Etchmiadzin, it gained a two-storey belfry and buildings for teaching and living. On the edge of the ravine, a small hermit's chapel stands apart on its own rock with a single entrance from the north. Harichavank works well as a day trip from Gyumri for travellers who want an intact medieval monastery rather than a ruin.

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City

Gyumri

Gyumri is Armenia's second city and its most architecturally distinctive, built from black and red volcanic tuff in a nineteenth-century merchant style that survives across more than a thousand buildings in the protected Kumayri district. It has a strong independent cultural identity, a reputation for humour and craft that Armenians take seriously, and a train link from Yerevan that makes it one of the easiest places in the country to reach without a car.

Near Harichavank