Saint Gayane Church

This guide to Saint Gayane Church in Yerevan starts at the ground where Armenian tradition places the beginning of the world's first Christian nation, in the year 301. It tells of Gayane, an abbess who had fled Rome with her companion Hripsime, and of the fury of King Tiridates the Third after Hripsime refused him, a fury that ended in Gayane's death on this spot. The guide then follows what happened to the king himself, and to a prisoner named Gregory who had been locked away for years. The current church was raised in the 630s over an earlier shrine on the same ground.