now only partially surrounded by the crumbling mud walls and bastions in which an 18th-century Katholikos enclosed the monastery. For some years before the war Echmiadzin had been undergoing transformation. Wealthy Armenians in Russia and elsewhere had subscribed considerable sums for the renovation and enlargement of the national cloister; and the simple unadorned monastic buildings of a previous age had given way to heavy and rather ugly structures of mournful black basalt. Among the latter are the library, the museum, the seminary, the unfinished new palace of the Katholikos, now used for refugee orphans, and the equally incomplete observatory. Almost the only survivor of the older buildings is the wing of the main quadrangle facing the porch of the cathedral, where the Katholikos still lives in great simplicity. This main quadrangle is of noble dimensions, and affords a worthy setting to the cathedral in the middle.

The cathedral is of the usual Armenian type, having four apses, one at each point of the compass, surmounted by the characteristic Armenian (and Georgian) dome, which is really a polygonal drum supporting a conical roof. Like most other old Armenian churches, the cathedral received in the 17th century the addition of a porch and belfry at the west end, in this case built of a deep red stone and sumptuously decorated. The building is small in comparison with European cathedrals, although large for an Armenian church of the period. The central object of the interior is a canopied altar surmounting the spot where the Saviour struck the ground in Gregory's vision. In the northern apse is the altar used for the consecration of bishops; all bishops of the Armenian Church throughout the world must be consecrated at Echmiadzin. One of the most pleasing features is the arabesque decoration of the dome, the work of an Armenian artist believed to have come from Persia in the reign of Nadir Shah. The treasury is an ugly modern excrescence which the bad taste of the 19th century has allowed to be added to, and to cloak, the east end of the church. It is entered by doors at either side of the high altar, and before the war contained relics and treasures of the highest interest. Foremost among these is the right arm of the Illuminator, which,

enclosed in a silver-gilt case, is placed on the head of each Katholikos at his consecration, and has been regarded for many centuries as the palladium of the Armenian race.

The present Katholikos, elected in 1911, is His Holiness George V; and his full title is the Servant of Jesus Christ, and by the incomprehensible Will of God Chief Bishop and Katholikos of all Armenia, Supreme Patriarch of the National, Beloved and Holy See at the Sacred Apostolic Cathedral Church of Echmiadzin in Ararat.' He is not only Patriarch with immediate jurisdiction over the ecclesiastical province of Ararat, but is supreme pontiff over all Armenians belonging to the national Church, wherever they may be. He alone consecrates Armenian bishops; and his office affords a close analogy to the Papacy. So highly venerated is it that Armenians address the Katholikos by a title which is the Armenian equivalent of Your Majesty'; the Persians, as we may read in Morier, call him Khalif. In the days of the Armenian kingdom he was in a sense the national High Priest, and for a time enjoyed the dignity by right of hereditary descent from the Illuminator. After its fall he became the ethnarch, the tangible rallying-point of his nation; and so he continued under Moslem rule. Echmiadzin was now visited by Armenian pilgrims from every part of the world, who came to pay their respects to the visible embodiment of the race. 'Forty-seven archbishops,' says Gibbon, each of whom may claim the obedience of four or five suffragans, are consecrated by the hands of the patriarch of Ekmiasin ; but the greater part are only titular prelates, who dignify with their presence and service the simplicity of his court. As soon as they have performed the liturgy, they cultivate the garden; and our bishops,' he adds characteristically, 'will learn with surprise that the austerity of their life increases in just proportion to the elevation of their rank.'

Among other objects of interest in Echmiadzin are the churches of St Gaiané and of Shoghakath (the Effusion of Light), built on the two remaining sites of St Gregory's vision. Similar to, but smaller than, St Rhipsimé, both churches probably date in their present form from the seventh century, and are exceedingly well Vol. 288.-No. 472.

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preserved. Another feature is the great pond, built in the last century by the Katholikos Nerses V to the south of the monastery, and fed by a neighbouring stream. During the war, when more than 200,000 refugees from Turkish Armenia were given such shelter as was possible by the monks of Echmiadzin, the stately trees that fringed this artificial lake were cut down for firewood. The site lost thereby much of its charm; but not even this act of sad necessity could destroy the view of Ararat, rising in majesty incomparable with his lesser brother from the valley of the Araxes. Itself in Armenian belief the centre of the world, the Mountain of Noah surveys, as it watches over the destinies of the sons of Haik, that fertile plain where Armenian tradition places the site of the Garden of Eden. Alas, that from time immemorial eddies of blood have mingled with the melting snows on these slopes where, until recently, three empires met. Well, indeed, may Bryce observe that the curse of the flaming sword has clung to the Aras valley. From the dawn of history to the present year it has been unceasingly devastated by fire and sword, spared neither by Persian king nor by Kurdish brigand, the constant witness of the clash between Asia and Europe, Christianity, paganism, and Islam. Yet when the storm is past,' continues Bryce, 'the patient peasant returns; he draws water again from the ancient canals whose network covers the plain, and remembers these scourges of mankind only in vague traditions, where the names of Nimrod and Semiramis are mingled with those of Tamerlane and Nadir Shah.' But for the amazing fecundity of the Armenian race, there would have long ago ceased to be any peasants to return to their cotton and their vines in this cockpit of East and West.

6

One of the most interesting sights in Armenia is the medieval city of ANI, capital of an Armenian kingdom which endured from the ninth to the eleventh century. I visited Ani in 1920, on one of my return journeys from Erivan to Tiflis, leaving the railway at Ani station, which is a station and nothing else, and taking with me ponies kindly provided by the Armenian Government. From the railway we rode for seven miles westward over bleak country to the modern village of Ani, an Armenian hamlet consisting of a score or so of miserable hovels.

The ancient city of Ani lies three miles beyond the village, from which it is separated by the river Arpa Chai, the Akhurian of Armenian history. At this part of its course the bed of the Arpa Chai is a deep ravine flanked by perpendicular cliffs of black rock, which hide the river from view until the traveller has arrived at the very edge of the cliff. Having scrambled down to the bank, we found the swiftly flowing river unfordable from recent rains, so swam the ponies across and followed in a crazy triangular craft, partly boat, partly punt, which we discovered by a half-deserted mill. A rough track led us from the opposite bank, past a small monastic church in a fair state of repair, up to the plateau, and in half an hour we were at the walls of Ani.

In the days before the invention of artillery the site of Ani must have been well-nigh impregnable. The city is built on the apex of a plateau bounded on one side by the ravine of the Arpa Chai, on the other by that of a tributary, the Alaja Chai. The base of this isosceles triangle is formed by a superb mediæval rampart running from cliff to cliff, a double line of curtain and towers that separates the tip occupied by the city from the remainder of the plateau, which recedes far into the background and is ultimately merged into the plain of Kars. This is the only part of Ani which is enclosed by walls; elsewhere the two cañons, 200 to 300 feet deep, afford better protection than could any ramparts raised by man. At the extreme point of the triangle the plateau rises to a slight eminence, topped by the scanty remains of the ancient citadel.

Like Famagusta in Cyprus, Ani may well be termed a mediæval Pompeii. It is difficult to believe that this city of the dead was once the thriving capital of a strong and flourishing kingdom, that the deserted plain in which it stands could ever have been thickly peopled and famous for the richness of its crops. Since leaving the railway we had seen no sign of cultivation, no living soul except a few dazed peasants at the village. Apart from these, not a vestige of life could be discerned in the vast expanse around us; from his snow-topped heights the mighty Alagyöz brooded over a scene of hopeless desolation. Ani, the old city, is utterly abandoned of man. From the platform on which it stands, now a wilderness

of grass and débris, there rise four or five noble churches -the walls and nothing else. Not even a trace has survived of any domestic buildings, or of the palaces of those who reigned here in splendour a thousand years ago.

I do not propose to enter into a detailed account of these churches, in which the art of the Armenian architect and the skill of his craftsmen have reached their zenith. Descriptions of them may be read at large in the pages of Lynch, although I would add that not a little of what Lynch saw and described in 1893 has since been destroyed by time and neglect and the ravages of war. The most notable monuments are the stately rectangular cathedral, whose pointed arches and coupled piers establish the oriental origin of Gothic architecture, the circular Church of the Redeemer, and, overhanging the ravine of the Alaja Chai, the delicious little Chapel of St Gregory, also circular, or, to be quite accurate, polygonal. These three buildings are well preserved, and their roofs wholly or largely intact; the others are rapidly disappearing. The churches of Ani derive much of their charm from their materials, a pink or terra-cotta volcanic stone picked out with black basalt; and their age, their beauty of design and decoration, and the supreme excellence of their masonry give them a place among the most remarkable specimens of Christian architecture. Furthermore, they are valuable historical documents for a period of which few records survive, for they are covered inside and out with Armenian inscriptions, carved in the fine uncial characters of the 10th and 11th centuries.

ERIVAN, the capital of the present Armenian republic, is architecturally a mixture of old Persian and very new Russian. In the higher part of the town, creeping with its orchards up the slopes of Akhmangan, the massif that separates the Armenian capital of to-day from Lake Gokcha, we meet rambling houses of mellow pink brick, laid in herring-bone pattern, and mud walls enclosing spacious gardens; in the modern quarters below, built in Russian times, the prevailing materials are rusticated blocks of grim black basalt. These give to the city of Noah, despite its greenery, a gloomy and forbidding aspect; half in ruins, too, from the devastations of the last tempestuous years, its khans roofless, its bazaars burnt