Travel Guide Spitakavor

By winding towards Eghegnadzor, always on the flanks of the Chaîne chain, 7 km north of the village of Vérnachén, you must visit the Ermitage hermitage. At 2 500 m above sea level, on the grassy slopes of Mount Téksar, the site, where a magnificent panorama of the surrounding mountains is discovered, lends itself to the eremitical life. The ensemble consists of a small church (Sourp Asdvadzadzine) surmounted by a slender dome and preceded by a courtyard whose entrance acts as a steeple. The church, whose eardrum is decorated with an expressive sculpture of the Virgin to the Child, was built by Prince Eatsi Prochian and completed by his son Amir-Hasan II in 1321. It was the property of the large princely dynasty of the Prochian (to whom one owes the monastery of Kéghart) whose ruins of the fortresses (Prochabert), along the mountain, attest to the past power. In the th century, the hermitage sheltered a higher school, with less radiation than the prestigious university that developed between the walls of the nearby monastery in Tanat. In view of the sorry plateau on which this monastery is located (7 km east of Vérnachén), it is difficult to imagine that it was one of the main cultural centres of medieval Armenia. It is, however, on the slopes of this mountain at the flanks marked by erosion that one situates the prestigious university of Gladzor which, from 1280 and until the middle of the th century, forma generations of theologians, scientists and scholars.The main church Saint-Etienne (Sourp Stépanos) was built in 1279 on the location of a more ancient monastery where, in 735, the bishop and martyr of Siounie, Stepanos, was buried. It is lined with a high dome roof roof and has a sculpted décor rich in its facades. The small church adjacent to it would have sheltered the Holy Cross of Varag; repatriated from the northern monastery of Norvaragavank where it was preserved (see chapter on Northern Armenia), the relic has made a long way from the Vaspourakan of origin! Enjoying the prestige of the University of Gladzor, the site has become a place of pilgrimage.