Saint John the Baptist Church
Hilltop basilica whose stone crosses are carved with the names of the noble family that rebuilt it.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Saint John the Baptist Church in Yerevan opens with a question about the carved crosses covering its walls: why so many name people instead of saints. It traces the 1710 rebuilding of the earthquake-leveled church by Melik Aghamal, a local strongman ruling under Persian overlords, and how he turned the project into something closer to a family register than a house of worship. You'll hear the names of his father, siblings and children pressed into the tuff, and the church's own later brush with ruin, half-collapsed by the twentieth century, before an architect and then his son worked to save it. Look for the one name on the wall in front of you that nobody remembers as anything but a name.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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