Armenia: Sevanavank Peninsula – Armenia’s Sacred Shoreline

Twice the Size of Geneva and Twice as Blue: Lake Sevan, Armenia

Lake Sevan came up as part of a day tour out of Yerevan, a few weeks into a longer trip that had taken me round Slovakia and then on into the Caucasus. I’d done no homework on any of it before setting off, which isn’t like me at all — I’m normally the sort who reads up on a place for weeks beforehand, the better to feel smug about it once I actually get there — but this trip had somehow carried on without me ever quite getting round to it. So I simply turned up at the meeting point that morning, got on the minibus, and let the day happen to me, which after a couple of weeks on the road felt like a perfectly sensible way to be doing things.

🏔️ A Lake with Some Proper Statistics Behind It

The numbers alone are worth setting out before I get onto what it actually looks like, because they’re the sort of numbers that make you stop and recalculate what you thought you knew about lakes. Sevan sits at an altitude of roughly 1,900 metres above sea level, up in the mountains of eastern Armenia, which already puts it in a different category to anything I’m used to — the nearest thing we’ve got back home is a particularly ambitious reservoir. It covers somewhere in the region of 1,240 square kilometres, which made it, by most reckonings I’d read, one of the largest high-altitude lakes anywhere on earth, and roughly twice the size of Lake Geneva, a comparison I found strangely satisfying given how smugly well Geneva tends to come across in these things.

What really got me, though, wasn’t the size so much as the colour. The water is a deep, saturated blue that looks almost artificial, the sort of blue you’d assume had been fiddled with if you saw it in a photograph on someone’s Instagram. Standing on the shore looking out at it, with the mountains ringing the whole basin and barely another building in sight, I found myself doing that thing where you take a photo, look at the photo, look back at the real thing, and conclude that the camera simply hasn’t understood what it’s looking at. Mine certainly hadn’t.

🗿 The Sea of Geghama and a Name Nobody’s Entirely Sure About

The lake has been sitting up there for a very long time indeed, and the ancient Armenians apparently called it Geghama Tsov — the Sea of Geghama — after the mountain range that wraps around much of its eastern side. Quite why they settled on “sea” for something that is, strictly speaking, a lake, I couldn’t tell you, though having stood in front of it I can report that it’s a forgivable bit of overstatement. You genuinely can’t see the far shore in places, and there’s enough weather coming off the surrounding peaks to give the water a proper, sea-like temper when it fancies it.

The name eventually settled into something closer to Sevan, and the explanations I came across for where that word comes from didn’t entirely agree with one another, which I always find oddly reassuring — it means somebody, somewhere, hasn’t tidied the story up too neatly. One theory has it coming from an old Urartian word simply meaning “lake.” Another has it deriving from an Armenian word for “black,” which seems a slightly peculiar choice of adjective for a lake this spectacularly blue, though I suppose colours get names for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with how a place looks on a sunny Tuesday in whichever century you’re asking about.

The Urartians themselves were no strangers to this lake. Theirs was an Iron Age kingdom that controlled a good deal of what’s now Armenia, along with chunks of eastern Turkey and northwestern Iran, from somewhere around 860 BC down to about 590 BC, and they knew Sevan well enough to build fortifications along its shores, presumably because a lake this size, sitting up at this altitude, was too strategically useful a feature to leave unguarded. It’s a fairly sobering thought, standing by the water on a quiet morning with nothing much happening, that people were posting sentries around this exact shoreline the better part of three thousand years ago.

🏭 A Rough Twentieth Century, Courtesy of the Soviets

Sevan’s more recent history is rather less romantic, and considerably more depressing, which is a pattern I was starting to notice with a fair number of things in this part of the world by this point in the trip. During the Soviet era, the lake was treated as a resource to be drained rather than a landscape to be looked after, and water was extracted from it on a genuinely enormous scale to irrigate farmland and to drive hydroelectric power stations further down the valley. The scale of the extraction was such that, by the 1980s, the water level had dropped by nearly twenty metres, and the overall area of the lake had shrunk by somewhere around twelve per cent. Twenty metres is not a modest drop. Twenty metres is the sort of drop that turns peninsulas into islands, or — as I was about to discover — islands into peninsulas, depending on which direction you’re looking at the problem from.

The environmental consequences were considerable, and not the sort of thing that gets put right overnight. Since Armenia’s independence in 1991, there have been serious, sustained efforts to let the lake recover, including schemes to divert additional water into the basin and tighter controls on how much gets taken out again, and by most accounts the level has been climbing back up gradually in the years since. It remains, by every account I read, a work in progress, which is the sort of phrase that covers an awful lot of ground and rarely tells you anything you actually wanted to know, but there it is. Standing by the water, you wouldn’t necessarily guess at any of this unless you already knew to look for it — it’s only when you start walking up towards the old monastery that the whole business of islands and peninsulas starts to make itself rather plain.

⛪ Up to Sevanavank, on What Used to Be an Island

From the car park, the walk up to the Sevanavank peninsula is a steady, unglamorous uphill trudge, nothing that’s going to trouble anyone’s knees too severely, though I did arrive at the top rather more out of breath than I’d have liked to admit to anyone watching. What struck me as I was going up, and what I only properly understood once somebody explained it to me, is that this patch of land wasn’t always a peninsula at all. Before the Soviet-era draining of the lake, Sevanavank sat on an actual island, cut off from the shore by open water, and it was only once the water level had dropped far enough that a strip of land emerged and joined the whole promontory onto the mainland. It’s one of those facts that sounds like a minor footnote until you actually stand there and realise you’re walking on land that, within living memory, simply wasn’t there. It does rather put the scale of the Soviet interference into a context that statistics alone don’t quite manage.

At the top, perched on the clifftop with views rolling out across the water in every direction, sits the complex generally known as Sevanavank, which translates as “monastery of Sevan.” It’s made up principally of two small medieval churches, built close together, along with a smaller chapel nearby, and between them they’re the whole reason anyone bothers with the climb.

⛪ The Church of the Holy Apostles

The first of the two main churches is Surb Arakelots, the Church of the Holy Apostles, and it was built in 874 AD, during the reign of Princess Mariam, daughter of the Bagratid King Ashot I. The Bagratids were the ruling dynasty of Armenia from roughly the ninth century through to the eleventh, and they took their religious architecture seriously, commissioning churches and monasteries right across the territory they controlled as a fairly deliberate statement of dynastic and spiritual authority. Surb Arakelots is a good example of what that patronage produced on a modest scale: a small, austere building in the classic Armenian style, built from dark volcanic stone, with thick defensive-looking walls, a conical drum, and a dome that from a distance looks almost too heavy for the building underneath it. Given that it’s been sitting up here, exposed to whatever the Sevan weather cares to throw at it, for considerably more than eleven hundred years, it’s in remarkably good order.

I stood for a good while on the terrace in front of it, looking out across the water with the mountains rolling away on every side, and decided fairly quickly that whatever the climb had cost me in wind and dignity, the view had settled the account in full.

⛪ The Church of the Mother of God

A few metres away stands the second church, Surb Astvatsatsin, the Church of the Mother of God, built in the same year, 874 AD, by the same community of monks who established the monastery here in the first place. I can only assume they chose this particular spot because it offered exactly what a monk looking to get on with some serious, uninterrupted praying would want: a position so remote and so thoroughly inconvenient to reach that almost nobody else was likely to bother coming up to disturb them. On the evidence of my own aching legs, they succeeded rather well on that front.

The monastery carried on functioning for several centuries before gradually falling into decline, as these places so often do once the world around them moves on and the original reasons for building somewhere quite so inaccessible stop mattering as much. During the Soviet period, the site was repurposed — with the sort of casual disregard for history that Soviet planners seemed to have in reliable supply — as a summer residence for writers, which is a slightly bizarre image to sit with, picturing a committee of Soviet literary types holidaying in a medieval monastery on a shrinking lake. It was handed back to the Armenian Apostolic Church after independence in 1991, and today it functions, as far as I could tell, as a proper working religious site once again, albeit one that spends a good part of its day fending off tourists with cameras, myself very much included.

🙏 St Jacob’s Chapel and a Last Look Back

Nearby stands a third, smaller structure, the St Jacob Armenian Chapel, known as Surb Hakob, also medieval in origin and worth a few minutes of anyone’s time, though it’s fair to say it plays very much the supporting role to the two main churches. It’s the combination of those two churches against the enormous backdrop of the lake that really stays with you once you’ve walked back down and driven off — the dark stone against that improbable blue water, with nothing much else competing for your attention in any direction.