Gandzasar

Gandzasar monastery rises above the wooded valleys of Khachen. Its church of Saint John the Baptist, built by the Armenian prince Hasan Jalal-Dawla between 1216 and 1238, is famed for the richly carved figures and ornaments on its dome and façades. Beside it stands a spacious narthex completed by his family after his death. The monastery served as a burial place for the princes of Khachen and their descendants.

From the later Middle Ages Gandzasar was the seat of the Catholicos of Caucasian Albania, a regional office of the Armenian Church. The monastery was repaired more than once, and a seventeenth-century enclosure incorporated monks' cells and a refectory. Its catholicoi also took part in the political efforts of Armenian leaders seeking relief from Persian and Ottoman rule, giving the mountain monastery a role beyond its religious life.