Faith & stone
A field of a thousand carved cross-stones, no two alike, and the quiet western shore of Lake Sevan away from the crowds.
Duration
8 hours
Group
Small group, max 16
Difficulty
Easy
Languages
EN · RU · DE · FR · IT · ES
Worth knowingThe craft of khachkar carving was inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2010. That is a listing of the craft across Armenia, not of Noratus as a site — a distinction a lot of tour marketing gets wrong.
North-east to Sevan, then south along the quieter western shore rather than the busy northern tip.
A small, weathered monastery of the ninth to twelfth centuries perched on the rocks with the lake thirty paces from the door. Its gavit façade is laid in alternating pale and dark stone — a chequered harlequin masonry found almost nowhere else in Armenia.
A hillside field of nearly a thousand khachkars, the oldest from the late tenth century and a great many from a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century revival. No two repeat a pattern, and the older ones wear lichen so thick you have to run a hand over the carving to read it. Villagers say they once dressed the stones in helmets and leaned swords against them, and Tamerlane's army took the field for an army and withdrew.
Noratus is the largest surviving khachkar field because the larger one no longer exists. At Julfa in Nakhchivan there were roughly ten thousand, recorded by a French traveller in 1648; by 1998 some 2,700 remained, and in December 2005 the site was destroyed and levelled. Satellite analysis confirmed it in 2010. Your guide will tell you this quietly and without polemic.
Lunch on the shore, and time by the lake before the drive back, arriving around 18:00.
In the price
Not included
Stops in the order we visit them. Distances are indicative, not a driving route.
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Want it privately?
Your own vehicle and guide, your own start time, and the freedom to linger where it is worth lingering.