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Church · Gyumri, Gyumri, Shirak

Seven Wounds Church

Սուրբ Յոթ Վերք · Yot Verk · Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God

The black tuff cathedral of the Holy Mother of God on Gyumri's Vardanants Square, built in 1873–1884 and popularly called Yot Verk, the Seven Wounds, after the sorrows of the Virgin Mary.

Where it is

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Open Seven Wounds Church on the XTOUR map. Directions are available there.

40.7861, 43.8422

Why go

Unlike most churches in Soviet Armenia, this one stayed open for services throughout the Soviet years, and today it is the seat of the Armenian Apostolic Diocese of Shirak. The 1988 earthquake brought down its two smaller domes; new ones replaced them, and the fallen originals now sit in the churchyard. Seen alongside Holy Saviour's Church on the same square, which needed decades of rebuilding, it shows two very different outcomes of the same disaster.

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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 Seven Wounds Church