Geghard Monastery — Guardian of the Holy LanceArmenian Apostolic Mythology

Geghard takes its full name, Geghardavank, from the geghard — the spear, the Holy Lance said to have pierced the side of Christ on the cross at the hands of the soldier Longinus. Armenian tradition holds that the relic was brought to Armenia by the Apostle Thaddeus and kept at this monastery for centuries, giving the place its name and its renown; pilgrims came to be near the spear that had touched the body of Christ, and the lance is now traditionally said to be held among the treasures of the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, the spiritual center of the Armenian Apostolic Church.

But the holiness of this gorge is older than Christianity. The monastery is also known as Ayrivank, the 'Monastery of the Cave,' for the spring that rises within the rock here — a spring revered as sacred in Armenia's pre-Christian, Zoroastrian-influenced past. When Christianity came to Armenia, founded in tradition by Saint Gregory the Illuminator at the start of the 4th century, the new faith did not destroy the old holy place but absorbed it: a monastery rose around the sacred spring, and the water that had been venerated by Armenia's earlier religion went on being venerated as a Christian blessing. Today pilgrims still drink from and gather the cold spring water inside the rock-cut church, and many tie strips of cloth to the trees and stones around the monastery as prayers and wishes — a living devotional practice carried on at the threshold of the cave.

Geghard stands at the head of the Upper Azat Valley in Kotayk Province, central Armenia, roughly 40 kilometers east of Yerevan and a short distance beyond the pagan-era temple of Garni. The setting is the heart of the experience: the monastery is wedged into the foot of towering grey cliffs at the entrance to the gorge of the Azat River, the rock walls rising sheer on every side, so that the buildings seem to belong to the mountain itself.

What makes Geghard unique is how much of it is cut directly into the living rock. Beyond the free-standing main church (the Katoghike, built in 1215) lie chambers carved entirely out of the cliff — rock-hewn churches and gavits (narthexes), and chapels reached through passages in the stone, their domes and columns and intricate carvings excavated rather than built. In one chamber the sacred spring flows from the rock; in another, the carved tombs and the great relief of a lion and an eagle mark the funerary chapel of a princely family. The acoustics of the stone chambers are extraordinary, and visiting choirs and clergy sometimes fill them with Armenian sacred chant.

Geghard is an active monastery and an easy, popular day trip from Yerevan, very often combined with the temple at Garni. It is open to visitors; as a working place of worship and pilgrimage, modest dress is appropriate, and quiet respect is expected inside the chapels, especially during services. Khachkars — Armenia's carved cross-stones — stud the cliffs and walls around the site.

Geghard is one of the great monuments of Armenian medieval architecture and a center of the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Oriental Orthodox church of a nation traditionally remembered as the first state to adopt Christianity, in 301 CE. A monastery is said to have been founded at the sacred spring by Saint Gregory the Illuminator in the early 4th century; the early foundation, destroyed and looted over the centuries (including by Arab raids in the 9th century), gives the site great antiquity, while the structures that survive date mainly from a flowering of construction in the 12th and 13th centuries under the patronage of the Zakarian princes and the wealthy Proshyan family, who carved the rock-cut churches and tombs.

The monastery's fame rested above all on the relic of the Holy Lance, which by tradition was kept here for some five hundred years and drew pilgrims from across the Armenian world before being moved to Etchmiadzin. The spear gave Geghard its name and its place in Armenian religious memory; the older name Ayrivank preserves the memory of the still more ancient sacred cave-spring around which the whole complex grew — a clear instance of Christian Armenia building its holiness on pre-Christian sacred ground rather than erasing it.

UNESCO inscribed 'the Monastery of Geghard and the Upper Azat Valley' (#960) as a World Heritage Site in 2000, recognizing the rock-cut churches and tombs as representing the very peak of medieval Armenian architecture, set within a dramatic natural landscape. This is the directory's first Armenian entry, opening the Caucasus — a meeting point of Christian, Zoroastrian, and far older traditions — as a region of its sacred geography.