Komitas Pantheon
Tuff-stone hillside cemetery of writers and composers, and half of an American author's ashes.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Komitas Pantheon in Yerevan opens with William Saroyan, the Fresno-born writer whose ashes were split in 1981 between this hillside cemetery above the Hrazdan River and his hometown in California, asking why a man devoted to two homelands never let anyone choose between them. It traces the volcanic tuff underfoot, the same soft grey-black stone built into Yerevan's boulevards, and turns to the nineteenth-century poet Bedros Tourian, buried here in a way that is stranger still. Walk the walled terraces and you're standing among people this hillside keeps in fragments rather than whole.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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