Harichavank Monastery, Armenia

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The architectural monument of Harichavank is situated in the village of Harich in the Artik District, on a cape formed by shallow ravines and the rivers flowing in them. In the village known since the second century B.C. there survived ruins of ancient fortifications.

On the cemetery there are ruins of a small single-nave basilica of the fifth century with annexes in the sides of the altar apse and interesting tombstones with ornamented slabs of the 5th—6th centuries, now at Armenia’s State History Museum in Yerevan.

he first church of St. Grigory was of the cross-winged dome type and dated back to the 7th century. The apse wings of the cross are semicircular inside and pentahedral outside, as in Mastara and Artik. The central part, square in the plan, is roofed by means of original pendentives with a tremendous 12-hedral cupola which imparts to the interior a majestic appearance. Just as in Mastara, the outer surfaces of the walls are plain and free of ornaments. This emphasizes the severity of the edificeÂ’s bulk. Later, in the 10th century, a one-storey annex was added to the south-eastern corner of the church and in the 13th century Sarkis Dzhon added a two-storey annex to its south-western corner. The four-pillar bell-tower with a belfry in front of the western entrance and a globular roof of the cupola appeared in the 19th century when the monastery was expanded.

The second, main, church of Astvatsatsin was built in 1201. It belongs to the type, widespread at the end of the 12th — the beginning of the 13th century, of outwardly rectangular and inwardly crosswinged domed buildings with two-storey annexes in all the four corners. The lateral sides of the western annexes, which border on the church interior and to which cantilever stone stairways lead, are built as three-arched colonnades unique in the history of Armenian architecture.

The interior is marked by its severe architecture. Its only decoration is a carved ornament on the front wall of the altar dais, consisting or the traditional early-13th—century motives of interwoven stalkes and stylized leaves with curls. The laconicism of the bunches of tall columns, marking the corners of the mid-cross section, and of the wall-arches with pendentives, emphasizes the graceful proportions of the interior and its upward orientation to the cupola.

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