Lake Sevan is Armenia's great expanse of water: a landlocked country found its own 'sea' in this vast high-altitude lake. At almost 1.900 metres, surrounded by mountains, Sevan is one of the largest high-altitude freshwater lakes in the world, and its deep blue, shifting to turquoise and silver depending on the sky, is one of the country's best-loved images. In summer, its shores fill with families, parasols and barbecue smoke; the rest of the year, it is a serene, windswept and sometimes frozen landscape of austere beauty.
Its most famous postcard view is Sevanavank Monastery, perched high on a peninsula — an island until the 20th century — that overlooks the whole lake. Its 9th-century churches of dark stone, set against the water and the mountains, sum up Armenia's blend of faith and grand scenery. And at any restaurant on the shore the ishkhan awaits: the trout endemic to Sevan, the 'prince fish' that for centuries was served at royal tables.
This guide helps you enjoy Lake Sevan with a practical eye: how to get there from Yerevan, how to climb up to Sevanavank Monastery, where to swim in summer, how to try ishkhan (and why you should choose the farmed kind), and how to combine it with Dilijan and the Noratus khachkar cemetery. It's an essential half-day or full-day trip, and the gateway to the country's green northeast.
Lake Sevan, at almost 1.900 metres, is one of the largest alpine lakes in the world and the heart of Armenia's water supply. On its northwest shore, on what was for centuries an island, Sevanavank Monastery was founded in 305, according to tradition by Saint Gregory the Illuminator; its two current churches, Surp Arakelots (Holy Apostles) and Surp Astvatsatsin (Holy Mother of God), were commissioned in 874 by Princess Mariam, daughter of King Ashot I Bagratuni. In the Soviet era, an ambitious irrigation and hydroelectric scheme lowered the lake level by nearly twenty metres, an ecological disaster that shrank its surface, damaged its ecosystem and turned the monastery's island into a peninsula. Since independence, Armenia has been working to restore the level and protect the lake and its wildlife, including the endemic ishkhan trout, now endangered. That story of faith, water and ecology is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Armenia's water and forest: Lake Sevan, one of the world's great high-altitude blue gems, with Sevanavank Monastery on its peninsula, and Dilijan, the 'Armenian Switzerland' of wooded valleys, spa-town air and hidden monasteries.
Read the history of Lake Sevan and Dilijan →They depart from Erevan, 61 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Armenia is a mountainous, landlocked country, hemmed in by the plateaus of the South Caucasus. That is why, since ancient times, Lake Sevan has been much more than a lake for Armenians: it is their own sea, their great horizon of water. Lying at almost 1,900 metres above sea level, it is one of the largest high-altitude freshwater lakes in the world, and it covers such a large share of the national territory that it dominates the country's geography and imagination.
The lake formed hundreds of thousands of years ago through the region's volcanic and tectonic activity, which dammed the waters in a large basin surrounded by mountains. Fed by nearly thirty rivers and streams, but with a single natural outlet, the Hrazdan River, Sevan built up over millennia an immense volume of cold, clean water, a deep blue that shifts with the light and earned it the name 'the pearl of Armenia'.
The shores of the lake have been inhabited since prehistoric times: Bronze Age remains, petroglyphs and traces of the ancient cultures that settled the Armenian highlands have been found in the area. For all those peoples, as for Armenians today, the great high-altitude lake was a source of life —water, fish, a milder climate— and a place full of meaning, a defining feature of this land of mountains.
On the northwestern shore of the lake, on a rocky island rising from the water, the most famous chapter in Sevan's history was written. According to tradition, it was Saint Gregory the Illuminator himself —the man who converted Armenia to Christianity in 301— who founded a place of worship there in 305, taking advantage of the island's isolation, ideal for a contemplative life. This was the birth of Sevanavank, 'the monastery of Sevan'.
The complex that survives today is somewhat later. In 874, Princess Mariam, daughter of King Ashot I Bagratuni —the monarch who restored to Armenia a period of independence and splendour—, had the two churches built that still stand on the peninsula: Surp Arakelots (the Holy Apostles) and Surp Astvatsatsin (the Holy Mother of God), solid and austere, typical of Armenian architecture of the Bagratid period. The island became an important monastic centre.
Life on that island was hard and severe. Cut off by the cold waters of the lake, the monks lived a life of discipline and penance, and it is said that the island was sometimes used as a place of forced retreat for monks being punished or for figures who had fallen from grace. For more than a thousand years, Sevanavank was a symbol of Armenian spirituality, a monastery suspended between water and sky, whose silhouette would become one of the timeless images of the country. No one imagined that, centuries later, the island itself would stop being an island.
The shores of Sevan hold another treasure that sums up Armenian artistic genius: the khachkars, carved stone crosses that are among the most original expressions of the country's art. Near the village of Noratus, on the western shore of the lake, lies the largest surviving khachkar cemetery in the world, with almost a thousand of these steles, some more than a thousand years old, forming an impressive forest of stone beside the water.
Each khachkar is a unique work: a central cross, often sprouting like a tree of life, surrounded by a filigree of interlacing, rosettes and geometric and plant motifs of hypnotic complexity, with no two sharing the same design. Those at Noratus range from the 9th-10th centuries to the 17th, and some include figurative scenes —weddings, feasts, farm work— that are a rare record of everyday life in medieval Armenia. The art of the khachkar is recognised by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Noratus's importance grew tragically in recent times: after the destruction, in the early 21st century, of the famous medieval khachkar cemetery of Julfa (in present-day Azerbaijan), Noratus was left as the largest surviving collection of this funerary art, which makes it a site of incalculable heritage value. Walking among its carved, lichen-covered stones, with Lake Sevan in the background, is a glimpse into a thousand years of Armenian faith and art.
The 20th century very nearly destroyed Lake Sevan. In the 1930s, the Soviet authorities came up with an ambitious and disastrous plan: to use the lake's water to irrigate the dry Ararat plain and to generate electricity through a cascade of hydroelectric plants along the Hrazdan River. The underlying idea was that such a large and relatively shallow lake was 'wasting' water through evaporation, and that it made sense to shrink its surface to make use of the resource.
The consequences were catastrophic. Over the middle decades of the century, the lake's level fell by nearly twenty metres, and its volume shrank drastically. The ecosystem took a brutal hit: water quality declined, algae spread, and native species, especially the endemic ishkhan trout, the 'prince fish' that for centuries had been the pride of the lake, were pushed to the brink of extinction, made worse by the introduction of non-native fish. One of the most visible effects was that the island of the Sevanavank monastery, with the water so much lower, became joined to the mainland, turned for good into a peninsula.
In the last decades of the Soviet era, faced with the scale of the disaster, measures began to be taken to stop the drain, including building tunnels to divert water from other rivers into the lake. But the damage was done, and Sevan became a bitter symbol of the excesses of Soviet planning, which sacrificed nature in the name of industrial progress.
Since Armenia's independence in 1991, Lake Sevan has become a national priority. Aware of the disaster it had inherited, the state passed specific laws to protect the lake and gradually raise its level again, strictly regulating the use of its water for irrigation and energy. Over recent decades, the level has slowly recovered by several metres, in a delicate balance between the country's water needs and the health of the ecosystem. The rise, however, brings its own problems, such as the flooding of buildings put up on the shore during the low-water years.
Protecting the ishkhan trout is one of the great challenges. The wild species remains critically threatened and fishing for it in the lake is banned; breeding and reintroduction programmes are under way to try to save it, while the ishkhan that reaches the table comes from fish farms. The fight to bring back the 'prince fish' has become almost a symbol of the effort to heal the whole lake. At the same time, work continues against pollution, algae and illegal fishing.
Today, Lake Sevan is both a natural treasure in recovery and Armenia's big summer destination. Its beaches fill up in July and August, its restaurants serve fish by the water, and the Sevanavank peninsula, with its 9th-century churches outlined against the blue, is still one of the country's best-loved images. Combined with the khachkar forest of Noratus and green Dilijan, Sevan sums up the two sides of Armenia: the breathtaking beauty of its nature and heritage, and the constant struggle to preserve them. The pearl of Armenia, wounded so many times, still shines.
