Things to Do in Yerevan: The Best Sights, Museums and Experiences

Yerevan rewards a slow approach. The center is compact enough to walk in a couple of days, but the things worth doing here range from an 8th-century BC fortress to a manuscript library, a solemn national memorial, open-air markets and some of the best wine bars in the Caucasus. Here's what's actually worth your time, roughly in the order most visitors should tackle it.

What are the best things to do in Yerevan?

The essentials are Republic Square and the Cascade (the city's two great set pieces), the Matenadaran manuscript museum, the Tsitsernakaberd genocide memorial, and Vernissage market. With more time, add Erebuni Fortress — where the city began in 782 BC — the History Museum of Armenia, the Blue Mosque, the old quarter of Kond, and the GUM food market. Then leave an evening free: Yerevan's café, wine-bar and restaurant culture, concentrated around Saryan Street and the Opera, is as much a part of the city as any monument. Most people need two to three days.

Republic Square

Start here. Republic Square is Yerevan's ceremonial center — a large oval ringed by monumental buildings in pink and honey-coloured tuff, including the History Museum of Armenia and the National Gallery. It's the clearest single statement of what the city looks like, and it works as an orientation point for everything else.

Come back after dark. The buildings are lit, the musical fountains run on summer evenings (seasonal schedule), and the square becomes a place where people simply gather. It's free, always open, and takes ten minutes or two hours depending on your mood.

The Cascade Complex

The Cascade is Yerevan's other defining sight: an enormous limestone stairway climbing north from the center through terraced gardens, fountains and sculpture to a viewing platform above the city. Walk up the outside for the terraces and the sculpture, or take the escalators inside — either way, the reward is the same, and it gets better with every level.

The whole complex doubles as an art destination. The gardens at the base and the galleries within form the Cafesjian Center for the Arts, opened in 2009 from the collection of the Armenian-American philanthropist Gerard Cafesjian, with more than 5,000 works of contemporary art and sculpture (Botero's Smoking Woman and Cat are the ones everyone photographs).

From the top, on a clear day, Mount Ararat fills the southern horizon beyond the rooftops. Go at sunset if you can — this is the best view in the city, and the tuff turns the color the "Pink City" nickname refers to.

The Matenadaran

The Mesrop Mashtots Matenadaran holds one of the world's great collections of ancient manuscripts — thousands of Armenian and foreign codices covering theology, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, history and literature, along with some of the finest medieval miniature painting anywhere. It sits at the top of Mashtots Avenue in a severe grey basalt building, with a statue of Mesrop Mashtots, who created the Armenian alphabet in the early 5th century, outside.

You don't need to be a specialist to find it moving. The illuminated Gospels alone justify the visit, and the exhibitions explain how a small nation used its alphabet and its manuscripts to hold onto an identity through centuries when very little else was in its control.

Note: it's open Tuesday to Saturday and closed Sundays and Mondays — an easy way to lose a day if you don't plan around it. Check current hours before going.

Tsitsernakaberd: the Armenian Genocide Memorial and Museum

The memorial complex on Tsitsernakaberd hill, built in the 1960s, commemorates the victims of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Twelve inclined basalt slabs lean inward around an eternal flame, and a 44-metre stele rises beside them, split in two. Below is the museum, added in 1995, which documents the events through archival records, photographs and survivor testimony.

It's a sober visit, and it should be. But it is also the single most useful place to understand modern Armenia — its diaspora, its politics, its relationship with its neighbours and its sense of itself. Allow an hour and a half to two hours for the memorial and museum together. Entry is free; the complex is closed on Mondays.

Erebuni Fortress

Yerevan is 29 years older than Rome, and Erebuni is the proof. The Urartian fortress that King Argishti I founded in 782 BC stands on Arin Berd hill on the southern edge of the city, and the cuneiform inscription recording its foundation — the city's "birth certificate" — is the reason Yerevan can date itself so precisely.

Excavations have exposed the walls, temple structures and storerooms, and the adjoining museum-reserve holds the finds: cuneiform tablets, Urartian bronze, pottery and jewellery. It's a short taxi ride from the center, and it's the one site that connects the modern capital to its full 2,800 years. Closed Mondays.

The History Museum of Armenia

On Republic Square, this is the national collection — prehistory through Urartu, the ancient and medieval Armenian kingdoms, and traditional culture, including the world's oldest known leather shoe and a remarkable holding of Bronze Age metalwork. Visit it early in your trip: it gives context for every church, monastery and archaeological site you'll see afterwards in the rest of the country.

The Blue Mosque

Built in 1765–66 by Hoseyn Ali Khan, ruler of the Erivan Khanate, the Blue Mosque is the most significant surviving building from Yerevan's Persian period — and the only active mosque in Armenia today. Its history says a lot about the city: secularized in the 1920s, it housed the Yerevan History Museum for more than fifty years, then was restored with Iranian support and returned to worship in 1996.

The turquoise-tiled courtyard, set back from busy Mashtots Avenue, is unexpectedly quiet. It's an active place of worship, so dress modestly and be discreet.

Vernissage Market

Vernissage is the open-air crafts and antiques market a few minutes from Republic Square, and it's the best souvenir shopping in the country: handmade jewellery, woodwork, ceramics, carpets and textiles, paintings, chess sets, duduks, and a deep supply of Soviet-era oddments — badges, cameras, medals, watches. It runs through the week but is fullest and liveliest at weekends, when the sellers turn out in force. Worth walking even if you buy nothing; many of the makers are behind their own stalls.

GUM Market

For food rather than souvenirs, GUM is the one. Armenian dried apricots and peaches, walnuts, spices, cheeses, preserves, lavash, and sujukh — the strings of walnuts dipped in grape must that Armenians make in autumn. Vendors hand out samples freely and enjoy the negotiation, which makes it one of the more sociable hours you can spend in the city.

Kond

Kond is the oldest surviving neighbourhood in Yerevan — a hillside of narrow lanes, small courtyards and irregular houses that the 20th-century city was built around rather than through. Layers of Armenian, Persian and Soviet history sit on top of each other here, and none of it has been tidied up for visitors.

That's the appeal, and also the caveat: Kond is a lived-in residential quarter, not an attraction, and parts of it are visibly poor. Walk it quietly and photograph people only with permission.

Armenian food, wine and brandy

Eating well is one of the main reasons to spend time in Yerevan. Look for khorovats (charcoal-grilled meat, the centrepiece of any celebration), dolma, harissa (a slow-cooked wheat and meat dish), spas (a warm yogurt soup), ghapama (pumpkin stuffed with rice, dried fruit and nuts), the sweet pastry gata, and lavash, the flatbread UNESCO recognizes as part of Armenian cultural heritage.

Wine has become one of the city's real pleasures. Armenia's winemaking tradition is among the oldest in the world, and the bars along Saryan Street pour bottles from Vayots Dzor, Aragatsotn, Armavir and Ararat, often made from indigenous grapes like Areni. Most offer flights, so you can taste your way through a region in an hour.

Brandy is the other national drink, with a reputation built in the Soviet era. The historic Yerevan producers run factory tours covering distillation, ageing and blending, finishing with a tasting — worth booking ahead.

Victory Park and Mother Armenia

Victory Park sits on a hill above the north of the center, dominated by the Mother Armenia statue — a monumental female figure with a sword, raised in 1967 on the pedestal that had held a statue of Stalin. There are city and Ararat views, Soviet military hardware and a small military museum in the base. It pairs naturally with the Cascade, since the top of the stairway leaves you partway there.

Churches in the city

Armenia's greatest monasteries are outside the capital, but a few city churches are worth stopping at: St Gregory the Illuminator Cathedral, the largest in Yerevan and a modern landmark; the tiny 13th-century Katoghike, swallowed by the modern city and standing beside the newer St Anna; St Sarkis Cathedral above the Hrazdan gorge; and the quiet Zoravor Surp Astvatsatsin, tucked behind the streets. Together they're a useful introduction before you head out to Geghard, Khor Virap or Echmiadzin.

Soviet architecture and the metro

Yerevan is unusually rewarding for anyone interested in Soviet modernism and brutalism — the Karen Demirchyan Sports and Concert Complex, the Hrazdan Stadium, monumental civic buildings, and whole residential districts, all in the local tuff. The metro belongs on the same list: a single short line, cheap and genuinely useful for a few destinations, with stations (Republic Square, Yeritasardakan) that are minor works of Soviet design in their own right.

The Parajanov Museum

Sergei Parajanov was one of the great filmmakers of the Soviet era — imprisoned for years, celebrated abroad, impossible to categorize — and this museum holds his collages, drawings, assemblages and personal effects. Much of it was made from whatever came to hand, including during his imprisonment. You don't need to have seen his films: the work is inventive and strange enough to hold anyone's attention, and it's the most distinctive small museum in the city.

An evening in the center

Leave one evening unplanned. When the heat drops, the terraces fill and stay full — the stretch between Republic Square, Northern Avenue, the Opera House, the Cascade and Saryan Street is where the city spends its nights, and simply walking it is one of the better things to do in Yerevan.

How to fit it together

• One day: Republic Square → History Museum or Matenadaran → Cascade at sunset → dinner and an evening walk in the center.
• Two days: add Tsitsernakaberd, Vernissage, the Blue Mosque, and a wine bar on Saryan Street.
• Three days: add Erebuni, GUM Market, Kond, the Parajanov Museum, and either a brandy factory tour or the Soviet-architecture circuit.

Yerevan is also the base for the country's best day trips — Garni and Geghard, Khor Virap with Ararat behind it, Echmiadzin, and Lake Sevan — all within a couple of hours. If you're planning those too, budget four or five days here in total.