Classroom lesson 路 Armenia's stone monasteries馃嚘馃嚥 Armenia

Armenia's stone monasteries

Ancient stone buildings tucked into cliffs and mountain valleys

Photo 路 Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

Armenia is famous for its ancient stone monasteries - small fortress-like buildings perched on cliffs, hidden in canyons, or built into the side of mountains. Some of them are more than 1,000 years old. They were built by master stone-carvers using local pink and grey volcanic rock.

Tell me more

Tatev Monastery sits on the edge of a deep canyon in southern Armenia. To get there, visitors ride the longest cable car in the world without a stop - 5.7 kilometres swinging across the canyon, with the river far below. The monastery itself is more than 1,100 years old.

Geghard Monastery is something even more unusual - parts of it are carved straight into a solid cliff. The builders dug into the rock itself to make chapels with stone columns. Inside, the air is cool and quiet, and the carved walls glow when sunlight comes through narrow windows.

Many monasteries are decorated with khachkars - stone slabs covered in tiny carved patterns of crosses, flowers, and knotwork. No two khachkars are exactly the same, and a single one might have hundreds of carvings. Master craftspeople spent years on a single stone.

These buildings were built over a thousand years ago, by craftspeople who worked with simple hand tools - chisels, hammers and ropes. Yet the buildings have stood through earthquakes, snowstorms and centuries of weather. Visitors today can walk inside the same halls.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01How might builders without modern tools have lifted huge stones into place a thousand years ago?
  2. 02Why might people have built their most important buildings in such hard-to-reach places?
  3. 03What is the oldest building near where you live? How does its age compare?
Try this

Classroom activity

Design your own khachkar on squared paper. Start with a cross or shape in the middle, then fill the space around it with tiny patterns - knots, flowers, leaves, stars. No two pupils' designs should be the same. Display the class's khachkars on a board.