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Archaeological site · Horom, Shirak

Archaeological Complex of Horom

Հոռոմի բերդ · Horom Citadel

Two excavated hilltop citadels near Horom village on the Gyumri–Artik road, with walls up to two metres high above a settlement and cemetery used from the Early Bronze Age to the Urartian period.

Where it is

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Open Archaeological Complex of Horom on the XTOUR map. Directions are available there.

40.6566, 43.9023

Why go

Horom is an archaeological landscape rather than a single ruin. Two citadels, Horom 1 and Horom 2, occupy neighbouring hills about 320 metres apart, with wall sections and rectangular towers still standing, and pottery fragments and obsidian flakes lie on the surface. Excavations in 1987–1989 and 1990–1993, the later seasons run jointly by Armenian and American archaeologists, recovered 180 tombs of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages. A heritage survey calls it the largest Iron Age complex in Shirak province. It rewards travellers with a real interest in prehistory more than anyone looking for standing buildings.

Base yourself nearby

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 Archaeological Complex of Horom