Yerevan is one of those capitals that surprise you precisely because you don't expect much. It's a pink city, built largely from volcanic tuff in shades of peach and ochre, laid out in the 20th century around a large circular square with a monumental Soviet feel, and yet full of young energy: cafés open at all hours, natural wine bars, a booming food scene and disarming hospitality. It's older than Rome —it was founded in 782 BC— but its character is that of a city constantly reinventing itself.
Everything in Yerevan is in conversation with Mount Ararat. The biblical mountain where, according to tradition, Noah's Ark came to rest dominates the southern horizon with its two snowy peaks, and yet today it lies on the other side of the border, in Turkish territory, out of reach for Armenians since the 1915 genocide. That mountain you can see but not touch is the very symbol of the country: it's on the national coat of arms, on brandy labels and in the soul of a nation that lost its sacred mountain but never stopped looking at it.
This guide helps you get around Yerevan with a practical approach: how public transport and taxi apps work, what to see in Republic Square and at the Cascade, how to visit the Matenadaran and the Genocide memorial with the respect they deserve, where to eat and drink wine, and which day trips to the surrounding monasteries and temples are worth making. It's a safe, affordable and warmly hospitable city, ideal for starting a trip through Armenia and the Caucasus.
Yerevan was born as an Urartian fortress in 782 BC, when King Argishti I founded Erebuni on the hill of Arin Berd, making it one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, older than Rome. For centuries it was a secondary stronghold fought over by Persians, Ottomans and Russians, until it fell to the Russian Empire in 1827. It was a dusty provincial town until 1918, when it became, almost by accident, the capital of the short-lived First Republic of Armenia, and later of Soviet Armenia. In the 1920s, architect Alexander Tamanian redesigned it from scratch as a garden capital of pink stone, with its circular square and radial avenues, and the city grew to over a million inhabitants. It was the stage for the mass demonstrations that preceded independence in 1991 and for the Velvet Revolution of 2018. That story of an ancient fortress, a nation without a state and a rebirth is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The historical and spiritual heart of Armenia: the pink capital born from the Urartian fortress of Erebuni, the mother cathedral of Etchmiadzin, the pagan temple of Garni, the rock-cut monastery of Geghard and Khor Virap, where the conversion of the world's first Christian country began.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In the south-east of modern Yerevan, on a dry hill called Arin Berd, a king had a birth certificate carved in stone that has survived almost three thousand years. The cuneiform inscription says, roughly: 'By the greatness of the god Khaldi, Argishti, son of Menua, built this mighty fortress and named it Erebuni, for the glory of Urartu and to strike fear into the enemies'. The year was 782 BC. That date, carved on the orders of King Argishti I, makes Yerevan one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, founded some eighty-odd years before Rome.
Erebuni was a stronghold of the kingdom of Urartu, a great power of the ancient Near East that ruled the Armenian Highlands from Lake Van to Lake Sevan and came to rival the mighty Assyrian Empire. From the citadel of Arin Berd, with its temple to the god Khaldi, its palace and its wine and grain stores, the Urartians controlled the fertile Ararat Valley. When Urartu collapsed, around the 6th century BC, people went on living at the site, but it lost its importance. For more than two thousand years Yerevan was little more than a village, a minor place in the shadow of grander capitals such as Artashat, Dvin or Ani.
That long modesty is part of its story. While Armenia lived through its centuries of splendour and catastrophe, Yerevan remained a dusty crossroads on the route between Persia and the Caucasus, fought over again and again by neighbouring empires. No one could have imagined that this village would become, in the 20th century, the capital of the Armenian nation.
Through the Middle Ages and the early modern period, Yerevan was above all a frontier city, and frontiers are dangerous places. Its position in the Ararat Valley, between the Persian and Ottoman worlds, made it a prize that changed hands with every war. In the 16th century the Erivan Fortress was built on the Hrazdan River, and the city became the capital of a khanate under Persian rule. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries it was taken, sacked and retaken dozens of times by Safavid Persians and Ottoman Turks. Its population, mostly Armenian and Persian, suffered through every siege.
One of the most dramatic episodes was the mass deportation of 1604. Shah Abbas I of Persia, carrying out a brutal scorched-earth policy against the Ottoman advance, ordered the whole region emptied and tens of thousands of Armenians forcibly moved deep into Persia, to Isfahan, where they founded the New Julfa quarter. Yerevan was left half empty. It was one of many wounds suffered by a land doomed to be other people's battlefield.
The turning point came with the Russian Empire. In 1827, during the Russo-Persian War, the troops of General Ivan Paskevich took the Erivan Fortress, and the following year the Treaty of Turkmenchay handed the whole South Caucasus, the city included, to Russia. So began Armenia's long Russian chapter. Under the tsar, Yerevan remained a modest provincial capital, with dirt streets and low houses, but for the first time in centuries it lived in relative peace, and its Armenian population slowly began to grow and to dream of a future of its own.
No history of Yerevan can be told without naming the event that left its mark on the entire Armenian nation. During the First World War, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire carried out, from 24 April 1915, the systematic extermination of the Armenian population of eastern Anatolia. Around one and a half million people died from deportations across the desert, massacres, hunger and disease. It was the first great genocide of the 20th century, and it emptied of Armenians the historic lands that are now part of Turkey, among them the plain at the foot of Mount Ararat.
Yerevan, on the Russian side of the border, became a refuge for tens of thousands of survivors who arrived starving from the west. The small provincial town filled with orphans and displaced people, and that wave of refugees changed its make-up and character forever. Eastern Armenia, with Yerevan at its heart, became the home of a mutilated nation that had lost half of its historic territory and its sacred mountain, Ararat. Since then Armenians have looked at Ararat from a distance, across a closed border.
The memory of that genocide is written into the city's landscape. In 1967, in the middle of the Soviet era, the memorial to the victims was inaugurated on Tsitsernakaberd hill: a stele pointing to the sky, twelve sloping slabs around an eternal flame and, later, a museum that documents the events rigorously. Every 24 April, hundreds of thousands of Yerevan residents walk up the hill in silence to leave a flower. A century later, international recognition of the genocide is still a central cause for Armenia and its vast diaspora, and it explains much of the city's identity. Here a historical tragedy is remembered with restraint and rigour, without sensationalism, because in Yerevan memory is a way of existing.
The Yerevan we know today was really born in the 20th century. When the Russian Empire collapsed, the Armenians proclaimed the First Republic of Armenia in May 1918, and that modest provincial town became its capital almost by default: it was the only sizeable Armenian centre still standing. The independent republic lasted barely two and a half years. Blockade, starving refugees, war and pressure from its neighbours wore it down, until the Red Army entered Yerevan in December 1920 and Armenia became a Soviet republic.
Paradoxically, it was under Soviet rule that Yerevan became a real capital. The work was led by one man: the architect Alexander Tamanian, trained in Saint Petersburg, who presented a revolutionary master plan in 1924. Tamanian imagined a garden city laid out in concentric rings and radial avenues around a large central square —the future Republic Square—, and he decided to build it with the stone at hand: the local volcanic tuff, in shades of pink, ochre and peach, which gives the city its unmistakable colour and its nickname, 'the pink city'. Decade after decade, a monumental capital of pink stone rose over the low mud-brick houses of old Yerevan, with theatres, universities, ministries and the Cascade stairway.
Soviet Yerevan grew at a dizzying pace, from about 30.000 inhabitants at the start of the century to more than a million by the 1980s. It gained factories, scientific institutes, a metro, whole districts of apartment blocks and an intense cultural life, with its opera, its Matenadaran of rescued manuscripts and its famous brandy. The city of genocide refugees had become the proud centre of the Armenian nation, even within the straitjacket of the Soviet empire.
In the final years of the Soviet Union, Yerevan's Opera Square filled with crowds on a scale nobody had seen before. In 1988, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated day after day, first for the cause of Nagorno-Karabakh —the Armenian-majority region inside Soviet Azerbaijan— and then, more and more, for freedom. That movement, the Karabakh Committee, paved the way for independence. In September 1991, after an overwhelming referendum, Armenia broke away from a crumbling USSR, and Yerevan at last became the capital of a sovereign Armenian state, the first in almost six hundred years.
The first years of independence were extremely hard. The war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, the closed borders with Turkey and Azerbaijan, and the post-Soviet economic collapse left Yerevan dark and freezing. In the 'dark years' of the early nineties, people burned furniture and cut down trees in the parks to heat their homes, and queued for bread. The city survived, as it had so many times before. From the 2000s it began to rebuild itself, with new buildings, the restoration of the Cascade paid for by the philanthropist Gerard Cafesjian, and a growing life of cafés and culture that gradually changed the city.
In the spring of 2018, Yerevan was once again at the centre of history. A huge, peaceful protest led by the journalist and MP Nikol Pashinyan filled the streets for weeks, until it brought down the government without a single shot being fired. This was the 'Velvet Revolution', a rare example of democratic change won through marches, humour and civil disobedience. The following years brought new wounds —the hard 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh and the exodus of its Armenian population in 2023—, and the city still feels them deeply. But Yerevan, the capital older than Rome, the city of survivors built in pink stone, still looks out at Ararat every morning, stubborn and alive, as it has for almost three thousand years.
