Armenia is a landlocked country in the Caucasus, a rugged, mountainous land at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. One of the oldest nations in the world, it was the first state to adopt Christianity as its official religion, and it has preserved a unique language, alphabet, and culture through thousands of years at a turbulent frontier of empires. Watched over by the sacred peak of Mount Ararat, just across its closed border, Armenia carries a long history of achievement and of tragedy.
The Armenian highlands were home in antiquity to the kingdom of Urartu and then to the Kingdom of Armenia, which under Tigranes the Great briefly grew into an empire. In the early fourth century, around the year 301, Armenia became the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity as its state religion, a defining event for its identity. For most of its later history Armenia was caught between and ruled by greater empires, Roman, Persian, Byzantine, Arab, Mongol, Ottoman, and Russian, struggling repeatedly to preserve its nationhood.
Armenian tradition holds that the people descend from Hayk, a great-great-grandson of the biblical Noah, who led his people to settle the lands around Mount Ararat and defeated a tyrant in battle to found the Armenian nation. It is from Hayk that Armenians call themselves Hay and their land Hayastan. The legend gives the people an ancient and heroic origin reaching back to the dawn of the world, but Hayk himself belongs to legend and tradition rather than the documented historical record.
Armenia is a country of high mountains, deep gorges, and rocky highlands, with little flat land, set on a volcanic plateau in the Caucasus. Its landscape is dominated by mountains and by the beautiful alpine Lake Sevan, one of the largest high-altitude lakes in the world. Although Mount Ararat, the national symbol that appears in its art and legends, now lies just over the border in Turkey, it towers over the Armenian capital and remains central to the nation's identity.
The flag of Armenia has three horizontal bands of red, blue, and orange. The colours are commonly understood to represent the blood shed by Armenians in the defence of their homeland and faith in the red, the blue skies of Armenia in the blue, and the courage and creative talent of the people, along with the fertile land, in the orange. The tricolour was first adopted in the brief independent republic after the First World War and revived at independence in 1991.
Armenia's identity is inseparable from its Christianity: as the first nation to adopt the faith as its state religion, it has an ancient and distinctive church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, which has been the heart of national life and survival through long centuries of foreign rule and persecution. Its ancient monasteries and stone churches, often perched in remote and dramatic settings, and its unique carved cross-stones, the khachkars, are among the country's greatest treasures.
Armenian cuisine is ancient and rich, making generous use of fresh herbs, fruit, and grains. Its most iconic element is lavash, a thin, soft flatbread baked on the walls of a clay oven, so central to the culture that it is recognised as part of the world's heritage. Grilled meats, known as khorovats, stuffed vegetables and vine leaves, and an abundance of apricots, pomegranates, and other fruit fill the table, accompanied by the country's wine and its famous brandy.
Agriculture is important to Armenia despite its mountainous terrain, with farming concentrated in the valleys and on the plateau. The country is renowned for its fruit, above all apricots, so associated with Armenia that the fruit bears its name in scientific Latin, along with grapes, pomegranates, and peaches. Armenia has an exceptionally ancient winemaking tradition, with some of the oldest known wineries found here, and it produces the brandy for which it is internationally known.
The early adoption of Christianity, the invention of the Armenian alphabet that preserved the language, and the kingdom of Tigranes are sources of deep pride. The most defining and painful event of modern Armenian history is the genocide of 1915, in which a large part of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire was killed or driven out, a catastrophe that scattered survivors across the world and created a vast diaspora. Independence came again in 1991.
Armenia has a population of around 3 million people, overwhelmingly ethnic Armenians, who speak a unique language forming its own branch of the Indo-European family, written in a distinctive alphabet created in the fifth century. A defining feature of the nation is its diaspora: far more people of Armenian descent live abroad, scattered by genocide and emigration, than within the country itself. Most Armenians live in the central valleys, above all in the capital, Yerevan, one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities.
