Ancient Times

Today I visited the Garni Temple and the Geghard Monastery.  It was like walking back in time.

Walkway leading to the Garni Temple

A view along the way

Garni Temple stands alone against the backdrop of the mountains.
It was built in the 1st century,
 destroyed by earthquake in 1679 and reconstructed in 1975.
It truly is spectacular!

Closer up

A view of the majestic mountain range that surrounds the temple

This is the Geghard Monastery.  The photo was found online.
It captures what I could not.
The monastery has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
It dates back to 1215.

This monument is along the entryway path to the monastery.

A close-up of the monument

The front of the monastery.

Another view of the entrance

I wanted to capture the turrets, seen from the front,
but I couldn't get them all in one shot.

Not sure what the purpose of this is,
but there were several "v" shape indented areas of the building.

A small alleyway between the church and the mountain.

These steps lead to a small dark archway, used for praying maybe?

I'm standing in one of the large archways looking out.

The monastery was built into the mountain
where many religious symbols are carved in the rocks.

Although you can't see them, there are doors are either side of this archway.

This is inside the monastery.  It was incredibly dark,
with just a small single window in the middle of the main room.

This is one of the pillars in the monastery.

This is the sole source of light found in the ceiling.

This is another photo found online.
It gives a much better view that I could capture of the inside of the monastery.

This is an altar that looks ready for service.

This is to the left of the altar.

The mountains are huge.
I wanted to show how high they are relative to where we were.

Armenia was not on my radar to visit, but I'm glad I did.

The people were kind and helpful.  

It appears to be homogenous population.  There was no evidence of other ethnic groups.  There were ten of us in my tour group, and four of us were black (from the US).  Quite unusual, for sure.  The others were white, (also from the US) and Arabic (from Syria, Jordan and Egypt).  We brought the color with us.

Other observations:

The Armenians drive like we do, on the right, but the taxi I rode in today had it's steering wheel on the right.  All other cars on the road had theirs on the left.  Not sure why the cab was different and the driver's English wasn't well enough to try and figure out.

Speaking of language, thankfully almost everyone I came in contact spoke some English.  On any given day I'm around folks who speak three and four languages . . . fluently.  This is an area where I'm lacking in.  We really must do a better job in the US of making we are multi-lingual.  

It's time to pack up and get ready to go.  We have an early departure tomorrow.

As always, thanks for taking this ride with me.