47 Fun Facts About Armenia

Armenia is a landlocked country bordered by Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iran and which country to the west?

Turkey. Ankara shut that border in 1993 to back Azerbaijan in its war with Armenia, and it was still closed more than 30 years later.

Around AD 301, Armenia became the first state in the world to do what?

Adopt Christianity as its official religion. Tradition says King Tiridates III kept Gregory the Illuminator in a pit for over a decade, then freed him and was baptised by him.

What is the native name Armenians use for Armenia?

Hayastan. Armenians call themselves Hay, and tradition traces the name to Hayk, a legendary archer said to have freed his people by killing the Babylonian tyrant Bel.

Which Iron Age kingdom around Lake Van, a rival of Assyria, ruled the Armenian highlands before the Armenians?

Urartu. Its engineers cut a canal that still carries water to Van more than 2,500 years on, and the Armenians succeeded the kingdom in the 6th century BC.

Which Armenian city grew from Erebuni, a fortress whose founding in the 8th century BC is recorded on a cuneiform slab?

Yerevan. The slab, unearthed in 1950, records a king founding the fortress, and the city counts its age from it: it celebrated its 2,800th birthday in 2018.

Under which king, between 95 and 66 BC, was Armenia the most powerful kingdom east of the Roman Republic?

Tigranes the Great. He took the title King of Kings and ruled from the Caspian Sea to Syria, until Rome's Pompey invaded in 66 BC and stripped him of his conquests.

Which singer and Oscar-winning actress, born with the surname Sarkisian, flew to Armenia on a relief cargo plane in 1993?

Cher. Her father's family was Armenian, and she arrived with 45 tons of medical supplies, books and toys at a time when the blockaded country had little heat or light.

Who invented the Armenian alphabet around AD 405?

Mesrop Mashtots. The monk devised the letters so the Bible could be put into Armenian, and the 36 he created are still in use with only a few added since.

The Armenian mother church at Vagharshapat, founded in the early 300s, is often called the world's oldest what?

Cathedral. In the founding legend, Gregory the Illuminator saw a figure descend from heaven and strike the ground with a golden hammer to mark the spot; the church has been rebuilt there more than once since.

Which medieval Armenian capital, nicknamed the 'City of 1,001 Churches', now lies in ruins?

Ani. Capital of the Bagratid kings until 1045, it was sacked by the Mongols, shaken by an earthquake in 1319 and finally left behind when the trade routes moved away.

Cilician Armenia, an ally of the Crusaders, lay on the coast of which sea?

The Mediterranean. Armenians fleeing the Seljuk invasions founded the kingdom far from their homeland, and it outlived its Crusader allies on the mainland before falling to the Mamluks in 1375.

Which two empires divided the Armenian homeland between them from the 16th century?

The Ottoman and Persian empires fought over the land for more than a century before a 1639 treaty settled the line, and the Persian share passed to the tsars in 1828.

The 1915 genocide is dated from 24 April, when hundreds of Armenian community leaders were arrested in which Ottoman city?

Constantinople. About 250 community leaders were seized in the capital that night and most were later killed; Armenia mourns its dead, 1.5 million by its own count, each 24 April.

Which Ottoman interior minister, shot dead in Berlin in 1921 by an Armenian student, ordered the deportations of 1915?

Talaat Pasha. His killer admitted the shooting in court, saying 'I have killed a man, but I am not a murderer', and the Berlin jury acquitted him.

Which US president broke with his predecessors' caution towards a NATO ally by formally calling the 1915 Armenian killings a genocide?

Joe Biden. His statement came on the 24 April anniversary in 2021; Ronald Reagan had used the word in passing in 1981, but every president after him avoided it for fear of angering Ankara.

Which Soviet leader cut short a New York visit to fly to Armenia after the Spitak earthquake?

Gorbachev. He had just arrived in New York when the quake struck in December 1988; he flew home early, and the Kremlin appealed for outside help, which America answered with medical aid and sniffer dogs.

Which volcanic rock gives the buildings of Armenia's 'Pink City' capital their colour?

Tuff. Soviet builders remade the city from the 1920s to architect Alexander Tamanian's plan in this local stone, formed of compacted ash, so whole avenues glow pink, brightest at sunrise and sunset.

Which breakaway region, known to Armenians as Artsakh, did Azerbaijan retake in September 2023?

Nagorno-Karabakh. After a blockade lasting months and an offensive that was over within days, more than 100,000 of its roughly 120,000 Armenians fled within weeks.

Nikol Pashinyan came to power in 2018 after protests he called what?

A velvet revolution. Pashinyan, a former newspaper editor, began with a two-week protest walk across the country; ten days after it ended, Serzh Sargsyan resigned, saying 'I was wrong'.

In August 2025 Pashinyan and Ilham Aliyev signed a peace declaration at which venue?

The White House. The deal gave the United States exclusive rights to develop a transit corridor through Armenia, to be named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.

With Mount Ararat lying beyond the border, which four-peaked volcano is the highest point in Armenia?

Mount Aragats. Its summit stands about a kilometre lower than Ararat's, and in 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, Soviet physicists built a cosmic-ray station 3,200 metres up its slopes.

Lake Sevan, a vast freshwater lake lying 1,900 metres up, fills a basin in which mountainous region?

The Caucasus. Soviet power stations on its outflow let the lake's level fall so far that a 49 km tunnel was bored through the mountains to feed it from another river.

What is Armenia's currency, introduced in 1993?

The dram. Armenia kept the rouble after independence until Moscow pulled out of the shared currency zone in July 1993, leaving its neighbours no choice but to print money of their own.

Which Grammy-winning metal band, whose four members are all of Armenian descent, first played in Armenia in 2015?

System of a Down. The band formed in California's Armenian diaspora and closed a tour marking the genocide's centenary with a free concert in the capital's main square.

The Areni-1 cave complex yielded the world's oldest known leather shoe and oldest known what?

Winery. Its makers apparently trod grapes barefoot in a press set beside a fermentation vat, and because the cave was a burial site the wine may have been meant for the dead.

Which Armenian flatbread was inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2014?

Lavash. Dried, it keeps for up to six months, and at Armenian weddings a sheet is draped over the newlyweds' shoulders to bring them fertility and prosperity.

The duduk, Armenia's mournful double-reed instrument, is made from the wood of which tree?

Apricot. UNESCO lists the duduk and its music as Armenian heritage, and Djivan Gasparyan carried its sound into Hollywood when Hans Zimmer sought him out for the Gladiator soundtrack.

What is a khachkar?

A khachkar is a carved memorial cross-stone, each with its own design. The greatest field of them, once about 10,000 strong at Julfa in Nakhchivan, was destroyed down to the last stone by 2006.

The monastery of Geghard takes its name from which relic once kept there?

The spear that wounded Jesus. Geghard means 'spear': tradition says the apostle Thaddeus brought the lance to Armenia, and after 500 years at the monastery it moved to the treasury at Etchmiadzin.

Garni, Armenia's lone standing Greco-Roman temple, is usually said to have honoured Mihr, the god of what?

The sun. Others read the building as a royal tomb; either way it fell in 1679, lay in pieces for nearly three centuries and was put back together in 1969-75 largely from its own stones.

Wings of Tatev, a record 5.7 km ride over a gorge to an Armenian monastery, is what kind of transport?

A cable car. Opened in 2010, it turned a 40-minute drive down and up the hairpin road through the Vorotan gorge into a 12-minute glide, with no stop along the way.

Which Armenian composer wrote the Sabre Dance, from his ballet Gayane?

Aram Khachaturian. By his own account he wrote the dance in eleven hours when the director asked for one more number, and he came to resent being billed abroad as 'Mr Sabre Dance'.

Which French singer raised money for Armenia after its 1988 earthquake and became its ambassador to Switzerland?

Charles Aznavour. The son of Armenian refugees, he co-wrote 'Pour toi Arménie' within months of the disaster and had dozens of French stars record it; Armenia made him a citizen in 2008.

Which Armenian grandmaster took the world chess title from Botvinnik in 1963 and held it until 1969?

Tigran Petrosian. Orphaned during the Second World War, he swept streets to earn a living; his near-unbreakable defence later won him the nickname 'Iron Tigran'.

Which grandmaster led Armenia to Chess Olympiad gold in 2006, 2008 and 2012?

Levon Aronian. Midway through that run, in 2011, Armenia made chess a compulsory subject in its primary schools, and months later he reached number two in the world rankings.

Which city's walled Old City is divided into Armenian, Christian, Jewish and Muslim quarters?

Jerusalem. Armenian monks settled there in the 4th century, founding the oldest Armenian community outside the homeland; their quarter still covers about a seventh of the Old City.

Which country runs the military base at Gyumri in north-west Armenia?

Russia. The Gyumri garrison is a holdover from Soviet times, but ties have frayed: in 2024 Armenia had Russian border guards removed from its main airport after 32 years.

The Matenadaran, a landmark museum in Armenia's capital, is devoted to collecting and studying what?

Ancient manuscripts. Its core is the Armenian Church's own library from Etchmiadzin, taken over by the state in 1920, and its treasures include a Gospel book copied in 887.

Which Soviet-built Armenian nuclear plant was shut after the 1988 earthquake and restarted in 1995?

Metsamor. Years of blackouts under an energy blockade forced the restart, even though the EU reportedly ranked reactors of its type among the least reliable the Soviets built.

Which people, Armenia's largest ethnic minority, built the world's biggest temple of their faith in an Armenian village?

Yazidis. Most descend from families who fled Ottoman religious persecution in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the community has a guaranteed seat in Armenia's parliament.

In which sport did Armen Nazaryan win independent Armenia's first Olympic gold, in 1996?

Wrestling. Nazaryan took a Greco-Roman title for Armenia, then switched to Bulgaria and won gold again in 2000; Armenia waited until 2016 for its second Olympic champion.

Which Armenian footballer, the national team's record scorer, has played for Manchester United, Arsenal and Inter Milan?

Henrikh Mkhitaryan. In 2019 he sat out Arsenal's Europa League final in Baku over fears for his safety in Azerbaijan, a row that carried the conflict onto the sports pages.

Which fruit, an Armenian emblem of fertility, is in the title of Sergei Parajanov's 1969 film about the poet Sayat-Nova?

Pomegranate. Parajanov named the film Sayat-Nova, but Soviet censors objected to his stylised, poetic treatment of the poet's life and it went out as The Colour of Pomegranates.

Which Ottoman sultan presided over the massacres of Armenians in 1894-96?

Abdul Hamid II. The killings answered Armenian demands for reform and autonomy; estimates of the dead start at 80,000, and they earned him the nickname 'the Red Sultan'.

What title is held by the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, whose seat is at Vagharshapat?

The Catholicos. The seat spent centuries away, lastly at Sis in Cilicia, until a council of several hundred churchmen voted in 1441 to bring it back to Etchmiadzin, where it has stayed.

At Avarayr in 451, Vardan Mamikonian's Armenians resisted Sasanian Iran's attempt to impose which religion?

Zoroastrianism. The Armenians lost the battle and their commander, but the victory cost the empire so dearly that a treaty in 484 left them free to worship as they chose.

Which memorial on a hill in Armenia's capital commemorates the victims of the 1915 genocide?

Tsitsernakaberd. Moscow only reluctantly allowed the 50th anniversary to be marked in 1965, and the street protests that day pushed the Soviet authorities to finish the memorial two years later.