Hayravank Monastery
A rocky headland projects into Lake Sevan northeast of Hayravank village. The church built here in the late ninth century has four semicircular apses. Their curves are visible from outside. Inside, the four recesses open towards a single domed space. Rough basalt forms much of the walling, while the corners and the drum beneath the dome use more finely cut tuff.
A later addition to the west is the gavit, a hall where the monastic community could gather. Look up from its floor and diagonal courses of red and dark stone lead the eye towards a small opening in the octagonal vault. This opening admits the daylight that makes the masonry pattern visible. One of the oldest surviving inscriptions at the monastery bears the date 1211.
Excavations reveal a much longer history on the headland. Finds include Bronze Age pottery fragments as well as tools and ornaments from the Iron Age.
An inscription on the church credits the brothers Hovasap and Nerses, leaders of the monastery, with its repair. They worked under the patronage of Buba, the local lord. The gavit dates to around the turn of the thirteenth century. Its builders enclosed the existing western apse of the church inside the new hall, which explains why a curved exterior wall can be seen from within the gavit.
Its eastern corners contain two-storey chambers, an arrangement more commonly found in churches than in assembly halls. A raised platform later built against the east wall also allowed services to take place here. Other inscriptions record gifts to the monastery, preserving evidence of the people who sustained it after the builders had gone.
Hayrapet Mnatsakanyan directed archaeological investigations here in 1952, 1972 and 1973. An early find was a fragment of a black burnished vessel. Later painted pottery includes a fragment with a white design on a red ground. Bone tools, metal objects and a clay figurine belong to the Iron Age. Together they tell a history of settlement on the headland long before the church was built.
The monastery later became a place where manuscripts were copied. Another kind of memory survives in a legend recorded by Catholicos Ghazar of Jahuk. In his account, the abbot Hovhan turns captives into doves, which fly to the island of Sevan. The monastery’s alternative name, Mardaghavnyats, recalls the people transformed into doves in this story.