Armenia

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Armenia is a landlocked country in the Armenian highlands of West Asia, and its best-loved mountain stands outside its borders. Mount Ararat rises 5,137 meters, or 16,854 feet, making it the highest mountain in the region. It now lies in Turkey, yet it is clearly visible from Armenia. Armenians regard it as a symbol of their land, and it appears on the national emblem today.

  A mountain that is seen every day but belongs to a neighbour says a great deal about this country. This documentary follows that tension through the highlands.

  Where does the name Armenia come from, and what did the people of this land call themselves long before it? What did human beings leave behind in these valleys before anyone wrote history down? How did a small kingdom, hemmed in by larger powers, keep its own faith and its own alphabet? And what kind of country stands here now, after massacre, revolution, Soviet rule and war?

  2929

• 2. Names and Origins

  ›

  The oldest native name for the country was Hayk, though people rarely use it today. The modern name Hayastan became popular in the Middle Ages, when the Persian suffix -stan, meaning place, was added. The roots of the name go back much further. Writers of the 5th century, including Agathangelos, Faustus of Byzantium, Ghazar Parpetsi, Koryun and Sebeos, are the first to attest it.

  Tradition traces the name to Hayk, the legendary patriarch of the Armenians and a great-great-grandson of Noah. The 5th-century author Movsis Khorenatsi says Hayk defeated the Babylonian king Bel in 2492 BC and founded his nation in the Ararat region. Some scholars look for a more historical root. They suggest that Hay comes from the Hayasa-Azzi, one of two confederated Hittite vassal states that existed between 1600 and 1200 BC.

  The foreign name arrived by a different road. The Old Persian Behistun Inscription of 515 BC calls the land Armina. The Greek forms, Armenia and Armenioi, first appear in the work of Hecataeus of Miletus, who lived from about 550 BC to about 476 BC. Around 401 BC, the Greek general Xenophon, who served in Persian expeditions, described Armenian village life and hospitality.

  Where the word Armenia truly comes from is unsettled. Some scholars connect it to Armani, an Early Bronze Age state, or to Arme, a Late Bronze Age state also known as Shupria. These links are inconclusive because nobody knows which languages those kingdoms spoke. Arme lay just west of Lake Van, probably near Sason. The location of Armani is debated, and some researchers place it near modern Samsat.

  Another idea begins with Armini, the Urartian word for an inhabitant of Arme. The Arme tribe in Urartian texts may have been the Urumu. In the 12th century BC, the Urumu and their allies, the Mushki and the Kaskians, tried to invade Assyria from the north.

  Older traditions offer a family tree instead. Movsis Khorenatsi and Michael Chamchian both derive Armenia from Aram, a descendant of Hayk. The Table of Nations in the Hebrew Bible lists Aram as a son of Shem. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus writes that Aram had four sons and that one of them, Ul, founded Armenia. In his account, Ul's brother Uz founded Trachonitis and Damascus, Gather founded the Bactrians, and Mesa founded the Mesaneans.

  3428524718

• 3. Stone, Leather, and Wine

  ›

  At Nor Geghi 1, a Stone Age site in the Hrazdan river valley, excavators uncovered thousands of artifacts about 325,000 years old. The find suggests that this stage of human technological innovation arose on and off across the Old World. Earlier thinking held that it spread outward from a single point of origin, usually imagined to be Africa. The first human traces in Armenia are far older still. Acheulean tools, generally found close to obsidian outcrops, date to more than 1 million years ago.

  Many Early Bronze Age settlements later appeared in the land. Among them were Shengavit, Harich, Karaz and Garni, along with others in the Valley of Ararat. Shengavit stood on the site of today's capital, Yerevan. Evidence of an early civilisation in the highlands reaches back to about 4000 BC.

  In 2010 and 2011, archaeological surveys at the Areni-1 cave complex produced a startling haul. They turned up a leather shoe, a skirt and a wine-producing facility, each described as the earliest known in the world.

  Several Bronze Age cultures and states flourished across Greater Armenia. They included the Trialeti-Vanadzor culture, Hayasa-Azzi, and Mitanni, which lay in the southwest of historical Armenia. All of them are believed to have had Indo-European populations. The Nairi confederation and its successor, Urartu, then established their sovereignty over the highlands. Each of these states took part in the ethnogenesis of the Armenians. The first Armenian state of Urartu was established in 860 BC. By at least 600 BC, an archaic form of Proto-Armenian, an Indo-European language, had spread across the highlands.

  A large cuneiform inscription found in Yerevan shows that the city was founded in the summer of 782 BC by King Argishti I. That makes Yerevan one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Urartu itself would fall at the beginning of the 6th century BC.

  4041424446

• 4. Kingdoms and Faith

  ›

  After Urartu fell, the Medes held the highlands for a time, and then the Achaemenid Empire took over. From the second half of the 6th century BC until the second half of the 4th, the land was divided into two satrapies. One was the western part, with its capital at Melitene. The other was the northeastern part. In the late 6th century BC, the Orontid dynasty established the first geographical entity that neighbouring peoples called Armenia.

  In 190 BC, King Artaxias I made the kingdom fully sovereign from the sphere of influence of the Seleucid Empire. He began the rule of the Artaxiad dynasty. Between 95 and 66 BC, under Tigranes the Great, Armenia reached its height. It was the most powerful kingdom of its time east of the Roman Republic. Later, Tiridates I founded the Arsacid dynasty of Armenia, a branch of the Parthian Empire, and the kingdom sat within the Persian sphere of influence.

  Before Christianity, religion in ancient Armenia was related to the beliefs that led to Zoroastrianism in Persia. Worship focused on Mithra, and the pantheon included Aramazd, Vahagn, Anahit and Astghik. Armenians reckoned time with a solar calendar of 12 months.

  Christianity reached Armenia in the 1st century AD, carried by two of Jesus's twelve apostles, Thaddaeus and Bartholomew. In 301, under the influence of Gregory the Illuminator, King Tiridates III proclaimed it the state religion, partly in defiance of the Sasanian Empire. This made Armenia the first officially Christian state. The Armenian Apostolic Church, described as the world's oldest national church, is still the country's primary religious establishment.

  Around 405, Mesrop Mashtots invented the Armenian alphabet, another cornerstone of national identity. It has thirty-nine letters, and three of them were added during the Cilician period.

  In 428 the Armenian Arsacids fell, and most of the land became a marzpanate within Sasanian Persia. The Battle of Avarayr followed in 451. Christian Armenians kept their religion, and the Treaty of Nvarsak in 484 gave Armenia autonomy. That autonomy would be tested again when the Sasanian Empire itself was conquered by the Rashidun Caliphate in the mid 7th century.

  2763627013

• 5. Centuries Under Empires

  ›

  Arminiya was the name the Arabs gave to an emirate with its centre in the Armenian city of Dvin. It also included parts of Georgia and Caucasian Albania. Within it, Armenia became an autonomous principality under the Umayyad Caliphate. A Prince of Armenia ruled it, and both the Caliph and the Byzantine Emperor recognised him. In 884, Ashot I of Armenia won independence from the weakened Abbasid Caliphate. His Bagratuni dynasty ruled the revived kingdom until 1045.

  Several regions of the Bagratid kingdom became separate kingdoms and principalities while still honouring the Bagratid kings. They included the Kingdom of Vaspurakan in the south, ruled by the House of Artsruni, and the Kingdom of Syunik in the east. The Kingdom of Artsakh covered the territory of modern Nagorno-Karabakh. In 1045 the Byzantine Empire conquered Bagratid Armenia, and the other Armenian states soon followed. Byzantine rule was brief. The Seljuk Empire defeated the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 and conquered Armenia.

  Ruben I, Prince of Armenia, escaped with some countrymen into the gorges of the Taurus Mountains and then to Tarsus in Cilicia. He was fleeing death or servitude at the hands of the men who had killed his relative Gagik II, King of Ani. The Byzantine governor of the palace gave the refugees shelter. On the 6th of January 1198, the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia was established under Leo I, a descendant of Ruben. Cilicia lay on the Mediterranean coast and lasted from the 11th to the 14th century, first as a principality and then as a kingdom. It was a strong ally of the European Crusaders and saw itself as a bastion of Christendom in the East. The seat of the Catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church moved there.

  Back in the homeland, Armenian princes of the Zakarid family drove out the Seljuk Turks in the early 12th century. They established a semi-independent principality in northern and eastern Armenia under the patronage of the Georgian Kingdom. The Orbelian dynasty shared control in places, especially in Syunik and Vayots Dzor. During the 1230s the Mongol Empire conquered Zakarid Armenia and then the rest of the country. Other Central Asian forces followed, including the Kara Koyunlu, the Timurid dynasty and the Ağ Qoyunlu, from the 13th century to the 15th. Each invasion brought destruction, and Armenia grew weaker.

  In the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid dynasty of Iran divided the country between them. The Peace of Amasya, and decisively the Treaty of Zuhab, left Eastern Armenia under the Safavid, Afsharid and Qajar dynasties. Western Armenia stayed under Ottoman rule. In 1604, Abbas I of Iran adopted a scorched-earth policy to protect his north-western frontier. It involved forcibly resettling masses of Armenians outside their homelands.

  Russia's first move came in the 18th century, when Peter the Great allied with the Armenian meliks of Syunik and Artsakh during the Russo-Persian War of 1722-1723. Eastern Armenia formally passed to Russia only in the early 19th century. In the 1813 Treaty of Gulistan and the 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay, Qajar Iran ceded the Karabakh, Erivan and Nakhichevan Khanates. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 added Kars and Ardahan.

  Most of Western Armenia remained Ottoman. Under the millet system, Armenians lived in relative harmony with other groups, including the ruling Turks. Yet as Christians in a strict Muslim social order, they faced pervasive discrimination. After the 1894 Sasun rebellion, Sultan Abdul Hamid II organised state-sponsored massacres between 1894 and 1896 that killed close to 200,000 people. They earned him international infamy as the "Bloody Sultan" or the "Red Sultan".

  In the 1890s the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, known as the Dashnaktsutyun, became active in the Ottoman Empire. It tried to unite the small groups pressing for reform and to defend villages from massacre. Its members also formed fedayi groups that protected civilians through armed resistance. Its wider goal was a "free, independent and unified" Armenia, though it sometimes settled for advocating autonomy.

  The Young Turk Revolution overthrew Sultan Hamid in 1908. In April 1909, the Adana massacre killed as many as 20,000-30,000 Armenians. The Armenians of the empire had hoped that the Committee of Union and Progress would end their second-class status. The Armenian reform package of 1914 proposed a solution: an inspector general appointed to oversee Armenian issues.

  7069135366

• 6. Genocide and the First Republic

  ›

  On the 24th of April 1915, Ottoman authorities arrested Armenian intellectuals. The new government in Istanbul had come to look on Armenians with distrust, because the Imperial Russian Army included a contingent of Armenian volunteers. After the Tehcir Law of the 29th of May 1915, a large proportion of the Armenians living in Anatolia perished in what became known as the Armenian genocide.

  The killing came in two phases. First, the able-bodied men were massacred, and army conscripts were put to forced labour. Then women, children, the elderly and the infirm were deported on death marches toward the Syrian desert. Military escorts drove them on, deprived them of food and water, and subjected them to periodic robbery, rape and massacre. Armenians in the region organised local resistance against the Ottoman measures.

  Armenians and the vast majority of Western historians regard the events of 1915 to 1917 as state-sponsored mass killing, or genocide. Turkish authorities deny to this day that it took place. It is acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides.

  The death toll is still debated. Research by Arnold J. Toynbee estimated that 600,000 Armenians died during deportation in 1915-1916. That figure covers only the first year, and it leaves out those who died after his report was compiled on the 24th of May 1916. The International Association of Genocide Scholars places the toll at "more than a million". The total has most widely been estimated at between 1 and 1.5 million. Armenians commemorate the genocide each year on the 24th of April, known as Armenian Martyr Day. Armenia and the diaspora have campaigned for official recognition for over 30 years.

  During the war, the Imperial Russian Caucasus Army under Nikolai Yudenich, together with Armenian volunteer units led by Andranik Ozanian and Tovmas Nazarbekian, won much of Western Armenia. The October Revolution of 1917 cost them those gains. Russian-controlled Eastern Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan then tried to join together in the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic. It lasted only from February to May 1918.

  On the 28th of May, the Dashnak-dominated government of Eastern Armenia declared independence as the First Republic of Armenia, under Aram Manukian. Its short life was fraught with war, territorial disputes, ethnic unrest and Bolshevik rebellions. Refugees from Western Armenia poured in, bringing disease and starvation. The Entente Powers tried to help with relief funds and other support.

  The Treaty of Sèvres, signed on the 10th of August 1920, promised to keep the Armenian republic alive and to attach the former territories of Western Armenia to it. United States President Woodrow Wilson was to draw the new borders, so the region was also called "Wilsonian Armenia". Days earlier, on the 5th of August, Mihran Damadian of the Armenian National Union declared Cilicia an autonomous Armenian republic under a French protectorate. Making Armenia a mandate under American protection was even considered. The Turkish National Movement rejected the treaty, and it never came into effect.

  In 1920, Turkish nationalist forces under Kâzım Karabekir invaded from the east. They captured the territories that Imperial Russia had annexed in 1878 and occupied Alexandropol, today's Gyumri. The Treaty of Alexandropol of the 2nd of December 1920 forced Armenia to disarm most of its military and give up all the former Ottoman territory granted by Sèvres.

  At the same moment, the 11th Red Army under Sergo Ordzhonikidze invaded at Karavansarai, today's Ijevan, on the 29th of November. By early December his forces had entered Yerevan, and the republic collapsed.

  The new Soviet government's war communism policies provoked the February Uprising of 1921. After its defeat, Garegin Nzhdeh established the Republic of Mountainous Armenia and kept fighting Soviet forces in the southern region of Zangezur. To end the rebellion, Soviet authorities pledged to include Syunik Province within Armenia's borders. On the 15th of July 1921, the Red Army drove the revolt's leaders across the Araks River into Iran. Syunik is one of the ten provinces of Armenia today.

  7980848583

• 7. Soviet Rule and Independence

  ›

  In March 1922, Soviet Armenia formally entered the USSR as part of the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, alongside Soviet Georgia and Soviet Azerbaijan. The three separated into individual republics in December 1936. Earlier treaties had already redrawn the map. Under the Treaty of Moscow and the Treaty of Kars, Turkey gave up its claim to Batumi, which went to Soviet Georgia, and in return kept Kars, Ardahan and Surmalu. The ceded land included Ani, the medieval Armenian capital.

  Vladimir Lenin favoured a moderate policy in Armenia and appointed an experienced administrator, Alexander Miasnikian, to oversee the republic. During the New Economic Policy, Armenia enjoyed stability and a cultural revival, in contrast to the turbulent years of the First Republic. After Lenin's death and the rise of Joseph Stalin, the picture darkened.

  The Great Purge began in Armenia with the death of the popular leader Aghasi Khanjian in 1936, and Lavrentiy Beria played an especially conspicuous role. The repressions took the lives of leading intellectuals, among them Yeghishe Charents, Axel Bakunts and Vahan Totovents. The Armenian Church suffered as well. The Catholicos Khoren I was murdered, a crime for which Beria is usually held responsible.

  Armenia saw no battles in World War II, yet an estimated 500,000 Armenians, nearly a third of the population, served in the Red Army. About 175,000 of them died. A total of 117 citizens of Soviet Armenia, including 10 non-Armenians, received the title Hero of the Soviet Union. Six special military divisions were formed in 1941-42. The 89th Tamanyan Division, made up of ethnic Armenians, fought in the Battle of Berlin. Over 60 Armenians became generals. One, Ivan Isakov, reached the rank of Admiral, and three became Marshals of the Soviet Union: Ivan Bagramyan, Hamazasp Babadzhanian and Sergei Khudyakov.

  In March 1954, two years before Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin, the Armenian statesman Anastas Mikoyan flew to Yerevan. He called for the rehabilitation of Charents and the republication of the writers Raphael Patkanian and Raffi. Housing and the consumer economy improved. The Armenian Church revived when Catholicos Vazgen I took up his duties in 1955.

  In 1962, troops pulled down the massive statue of Stalin that towered over Yerevan. The figure of Mother Armenia replaced it in 1967. That same year, a memorial to the victims of the Armenian genocide went up on the Tsitsernakaberd hill above the Hrazdan gorge. It followed mass demonstrations on the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide in 1965.

  Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms of glasnost and perestroika brought a national revival and the Karabakh movement. Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast of Soviet Azerbaijan demanded union with Soviet Armenia, citing discrimination by Baku. By the beginning of 1988, nearly one million Armenians were joining demonstrations centered on Yerevan's Theater Square, today Freedom Square.

  In Azerbaijan, violence against Armenians erupted in the city of Sumgait, and ethnic rioting soon followed. A devastating earthquake with a surface-wave magnitude of 6.8 struck Armenia in 1988. In January 1990, another pogrom in Baku forced almost all of the 200,000 Armenians in the Azerbaijani capital to flee to Armenia.

  Armenia declared its sovereignty on the 23rd of August 1990. On the 17th of March 1991, it boycotted a nationwide referendum, together with the Baltic states, Georgia and Moldova. In that vote, 78% of all voters backed keeping the Soviet Union in a reformed form. On the 21st of September 1991, after the failed August coup in Moscow, Armenia officially declared its statehood. Levon Ter-Petrosyan, who had risen to prominence in the Karabakh movement, was elected the first president in October 1991. The Soviet Union formally dissolved after the Belovezha Accords in December, and Armenia's independence was recognised.

  The first years were marked by economic difficulties and a severe energy crisis. The crisis grew from a railway and air blockade that the Azerbaijani Popular Front pressed the Azerbaijan SSR to impose. It crippled the economy because 85% of Armenia's cargo and goods came by rail. In 1993, Turkey joined the blockade in support of Azerbaijan.

  Ter-Petrosyan led Armenia through the First Nagorno-Karabakh War alongside defence minister Vazgen Sargsyan. A Russian-brokered ceasefire ended it in 1994. Karabakh Armenian forces had captured practically the entire territory of the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast and most of seven adjacent districts of Azerbaijan. By then an estimated 30,000 people had been killed and over a million displaced. Armenian-backed forces held almost all of that territory until 2020.

  9495969799

• 8. Armenia Today

  ›

  Mount Aragats rises to 4,090 meters, the highest point in Armenia, and no spot in the country lies below 390 meters. Mountains cover 85.9% of the land, more than in Switzerland or Nepal. The average elevation is the tenth highest in the world. Lake Sevan sits in the highlands at 1,900 meters above sea level, the second largest lake in the world at such a height. Summers are hot and dry from June to mid-September, with temperatures between 22 and 36 C. Winters bring plenty of snow, and skiers head to Tsaghkadzor, thirty minutes outside Yerevan.

  Armenia has a population of 3,081,100 as of 2025. It peaked at 3.6 million in 1991, then shrank through heavy emigration. Since 2012 the emigration rate has slowed, and some growth has appeared. The diaspora, estimated at 8 million by some counts, far outnumbers the roughly 3 million people at home. The largest communities live in Russia, the United States and France.

  On the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni in the Venetian Lagoon, a monastery run by the Mechitarists fills the whole island. The Mechitarists are an Armenian Catholic congregation founded in 1712 by Mekhitar of Sebaste. Before the 1st of October 2023, about 139,000 Armenians lived in the Republic of Artsakh. Almost the entire population then fled to Armenia.

  Ethnic Armenians make up 98.1% of the population, Yazidis 1.1% and Russians 0.5%. The village of Aknalich is home to Quba Mêrê Dîwanê, completed in 2019 and the largest Yazidi temple in the world. A 2013 survey found that 95% of Armenians had some knowledge of Russian, compared with 40% for English.

  The economy leans heavily on investment and support from Armenians abroad. The 1988 Spitak earthquake killed more than 25,000 people and left 500,000 homeless. The shutdown of the nuclear power plant in 1989 brought the energy crisis of the 1990s, and GDP fell nearly 60% between 1989 and 1993. Growth resumed after the plant reopened in 1995. The dram, introduced in 1993, suffered hyperinflation in its first years. Armenian mines produce copper, zinc, gold and lead. In 2017 the economy grew by 7.5% on rising copper prices, and in 2022 GDP stood at $39.4 billion.

  Armenia is a representative parliamentary democratic republic. The president is head of state with largely representational duties, and the prime minister holds executive power. The National Assembly is a unicameral parliament of 105 members. In April and May 2018, protests led by the parliament member Nikol Pashinyan erupted against Serzh Sargsyan's third consecutive term as president. Pashinyan called the movement a "velvet revolution". Sargsyan resigned, and in May 2018 parliament elected Pashinyan prime minister.

  On the 27th of September 2020, a full-scale war broke out over the unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The ceasefire that ended the six-week war was seen by many as Armenia's defeat. The year-long March of Dignity protests forced early elections, and on the 20th of June 2021 Pashinyan's Civil Contract party won. Between the 19th and the 20th of September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale offensive against Artsakh, and a ceasefire was reached on the 20th of September.

  That offensive reshaped Armenia's alliances. Russia maintains a military base in Gyumri at the request of the Armenian government, as a deterrent against NATO member Turkey. After the 2023 offensive, relations with Russia began to deteriorate. In February 2024, Pashinyan said the Collective Security Treaty Organization "hasn't fulfilled its security obligations towards Armenia". In March 2024, Armenia expelled Russian border guards from Zvartnots International Airport in Yerevan. On the 12th of February 2025, parliament approved a bill endorsing Armenia's accession to the European Union.

  Relations with Turkey remain frozen. Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 and has not lifted the blockade. Protocols on normalising relations were signed on the 10th of October 2009, but the process stalled. On the 8th of August 2025, Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a joint declaration at the White House. It commits both countries to a peace deal that would end nearly four decades of conflict.

  23674