Armenian Cemeteries Around the World

Why Armenian cemeteries matter

An Armenian cemetery is read as much as it is visited. Medieval cross-stones show the work of master carvers; Soviet-era granite shows the faces of the people buried beneath it; the inscriptions in between record names, places of birth and the families that tied them together.

For a nation scattered by the Genocide of 1915 and by a century of emigration, gravestones are often the only written record a family has. Church registers were lost, villages emptied, and surnames changed spelling from one country to the next. The stone stayed. A grave can tell a grandchild in Los Angeles or Marseille the father's name of a great-grandmother, the year she was born and the town her family came from.

That is why the destruction of old cemeteries is felt as a loss of memory, not only of monuments — and why recording the ones that remain matters.

From khachkars to portraits: how Armenian gravestones changed

There is no single "Armenian gravestone". Each era left its own kind of memorial, and a large cemetery in Armenia often shows several of them side by side.

1. 9th century
   The first khachkars. A khachkar is a stone slab carved with a cross, usually over a rosette or a "tree of life", framed by lace-like ornament. Early ones stood in graveyards and were raised for the salvation of a soul, living or dead.
2. 12th–14th centuries
   The height of the art. Master carvers produce the most intricate stones. Tens of thousands of khachkars survive today; UNESCO counts more than 50,000 in Armenia alone.
3. 16th–17th centuries
   Fields of cross-stones. A revival fills whole hillsides. At Noratus by Lake Sevan, hundreds of khachkars from the 10th to the 17th century still stand — now the largest surviving khachkar cemetery.
4. 20th century
   Granite and portraits. In Soviet times the cross often gives way to polished stone engraved with a portrait of the person buried there, sometimes with a few lines of verse.
5. Today
   Both traditions together. Families choose a khachkar, a portrait stone or both. The art of carving khachkars is still taught and was added to UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2010.

Cemeteries in Armenia worth knowing

Yerevan alone has more than a dozen large cemeteries, and almost every town and village has its own. A few have a place in the nation's history.

Lost cemeteries: Old Julfa and Khojivank

Old Julfa (Jugha), Nakhichevan. For centuries this was the largest Armenian cemetery in the world. A traveller counted about 10,000 khachkars in 1648; some 2,700 still stood in 1998. Between 1998 and 2005 they disappeared. Video filmed across the Araks River in December 2005 shows men breaking stones, and satellite images compared by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010 show the ground levelled where the stones had been. Azerbaijan's government has rejected these accounts. Much of what we know of the cemetery today comes from the photographs taken by Argam Ayvazyan over twenty-five years.

Khojivank, Tbilisi. The great Armenian cemetery of Tbilisi grew around a church built in 1655. From 1934 it was demolished; tens of thousands of graves were lost and many gravestones were reused as building stone. In 1962 about thirty surviving stones were gathered into the Armenian Pantheon, among them those of the writers Raffi, Hovhannes Tumanyan, Gabriel Sundukyan and Ghazaros Aghayan.

Both losses explain why HUSH.am photographs every stone it records: a picture and an index outlast the stone itself.

Armenian cemeteries in the diaspora

Wherever Armenians settled, they buried their dead together — around a church, in a section of a city cemetery, or in a cemetery of their own.

Where HUSH.am has records

HUSH.am began by photographing whole cemeteries in Armenia, stone by stone, and indexing every name. The records now cover hundreds of thousands of graves in Armenia, Artsakh, Georgia and several cities in Europe and the United States. Each cemetery below opens its own search.

How to read an Armenian gravestone — and find one

A gravestone is the best starting point for Armenian family history, but it has to be read the way it was written.

1. Read the father's name. Armenian names follow the pattern first name, father's name, surname: Armen Kareni Petrosyan is Armen, son of Karen. On a gravestone the father's name is often the key that tells two people of the same name apart.
2. Expect several spellings. The surname ending -yan / -ian means "of the family of". The same family may be Hakobyan in Yerevan, Hagopian in Beirut or Boston, and Akopyan or Akopov in Soviet documents, because Western Armenian pronounces some consonants differently from Eastern Armenian. Search each form.
3. Use the years, not the exact date. Birth and death years are the most reliable part of an inscription; days and months are often missing or worn.
4. Search by name, then narrow. On HUSH.am Find a grave, type the first name and surname, add the father's name if you know it, then choose the years or a cemetery. Names are stored as they are carved, with Latin spellings added, so typing in English reaches stones written in Armenian or Russian. More tips are in the FAQ and on the most common Armenian names.

When Armenians visit their graves

Merelots — the day of remembrance of the dead — follows each of the five great feasts of the Armenian Church: Christmas, Easter, the Transfiguration, the Assumption and the Exaltation of the Cross. Families go to the cemetery, clean the grave, bring flowers and ask a priest to bless it.

On 24 April, Genocide Remembrance Day, people walk to the Tsitsernakaberd memorial in Yerevan; around 100,000 came in 2014. On 28 January, Army Day, wreaths are laid at Yerablur.

For families abroad, these are the days when an untended grave weighs most. HUSH.am can aim a care visit or a flower delivery within the month of a memorial day, and sends the family photos afterwards.

Why HUSH.am records Armenia's cemeteries

HUSH.am began with the support of a few private donors, to photograph and index Armenian cemeteries and put the records online. Today it is the place where families search hundreds of thousands of Armenian graves, and the team in Yerevan looks after graves for families who live abroad — the service HUSH.am has offered since 2001.

My family miraculously escaped from Bitlis in Western Armenia in 1914–1915. I believe Armenians everywhere should keep their language and their heritage so they understand their past. The cemeteries are where that past is written down.

Mihran Vardanyan, founder of HUSH.am

Before

After

Every care order includes free flowers, photos before and after, and a full refund if the grave cannot be found. Families who want to visit in person can order the exact GPS location of a grave HUSH.am has recorded.

Questions families ask