The story of one of Yerevan’s oldest burial grounds, erased in the 1930s
Show Image Old photograph: massive stone tombstones of Kozern, with the low houses of old Yerevan beyond. [Credit and source to be added before publication. Similar 1930 views by the photographer G. Melik-Dadayan appear on orbeli.am.]
Walk up Marshal Baghramyan Avenue today and you pass the parliament, the presidential residence and the Academy of Sciences. A little over a century ago, this was the northern edge of the city: rocky slopes, orchards and an old graveyard.
Old Yerevan lived mainly in two quarters: Shahar, the old town, and Kond. Kond stood on a rocky hill above the Hrazdan gorge and was inhabited mostly by Armenians. The Armenian meliks of the Aghamalyan family lived there, and, as the historian Tadevos Hakobyan notes, about a hundred households of Armenian Bosha later settled there for good. To the north, Kond met another hill, called Kozern, with a cemetery on it (Hakobyan, History of Yerevan, ch. VII).
No lists of Kozern’s residents turned up in the sources I found, but several pieces fit together.
In the 18th century Kozern was an outskirt of the city, known for its medieval cemetery with a chapel and for its orchards. The older name of the area was “Kozern Gardens,” and the website of Lovers’ Park notes that some of the park’s tall trees were planted as far back as the 18th century (bg.am). The sources mention no housing there at that time; Kozern was a place of gardens and graves.
At the turn of the 20th century this changed. After the massacres in Western Armenia, and then the Genocide, refugees poured into Yerevan. Some settled in Kond, some on Kozern. They built makeshift shelters right among the half-ruined tombstones and the chapel. Over time such shacks turned into permanent homes, and the old stones ended up inside their walls (MassisPost).
Families lived beside the chapel into our own time. Armenian Wikipedia says the entrance to the chapel ended up inside a residential house (No. 62/3), where three old tombstones were kept (article on the cemetery). The outlet Urbanista visited one such home. It was built in 1940 by Grisha Janazyan, next to the half-ruined chapel, and one of its bedrooms shares a wall with the chapel. The old chapel doorway is hidden behind that wall, and a niche now used as a wardrobe was once the upper part of the door. According to the family, the graves of Hovhannes Kozern and the clergymen are about two meters below their basement, and visitors still knock at the door to touch the saint’s tomb (Urbanista, “The House of the Holy Spirits”).
The same report says a 2004 government decision classified the Kozern hill for development, though the program has not been carried out, and that before the decision only 16 houses in the area had been privatized; after popular protests, most residents privatized their properties. The report also says the Mother See of Etchmiadzin had considered buying the houses to restore the chapel, but no clear plan existed.
So the living and the dead on Kozern have shared the same ground for a very long time. Please note this is a picture assembled from indirect evidence, not a census. If you have archival lists or recollections of old residents, they would be a valuable addition.
The hill and cemetery are named after one of the people buried here first: the vardapet Hovhannes, nicknamed Kozern. 11th-century writers knew him as a leading expert on the Armenian calendar and church feasts (Hakobyan).
A story survives about how people turned to him. When, one Easter, the lamps failed to light in Jerusalem, a dispute broke out in Byzantium over who was to blame. Armenian scholars, Kozern among them, were invited to Constantinople. They did not go, but sent a written analysis: the Byzantines had miscalculated the date of Easter. Years later, in 1022–1023, the sky shone with a strange light and the earth shook. The Armenian king gathered his nobles around Hovhannes, who wept and spoke of coming disasters. MassisPost retells these episodes after the chronicles of Matthew of Edessa and Arakel of Tabriz.
Popular texts explain the nickname in different ways (“baby camel,” “boy”), and I cannot reliably choose one. One guidebook calls Kozern a 9th-century scholar, but the events he is tied to belong to 1006 and 1022–1023, so the 11th century is the safer date.
Later the vardapet Melkiset Vzhanetsi, a teacher of secular sciences at the famous school of Amrdol Monastery in Baghesh (modern Bitlis), was buried next to Kozern. Between the two scholars lies Catholicos Movses III Syunetsi. According to Arakel of Tabriz, he died at the monastery of St. Ananias (Zoravor) in Yerevan and was carried to Kozern with honor: his remains were laid between the graves of the two vardapets, beneath closed tombstones. The inscription on his tomb is dated 1633.
A chapel rose over these graves. Sources disagree about its history, so I list them separately:
The exact date of the chapel and how many chapels there were remain unresolved. Burials on Kozern continued until the mid-1930s.
Kozern was ancient not only because of its monks. In the 1930s the cemetery was excavated, and stone-cist burials dated to the 4th–7th centuries were found, along with pre-Christian graves resembling those excavated at Dvin and Avan (Armenian Wikipedia). So the hill served as a necropolis long before the 11th century.
A caution that matters for publication: the phrase “7th-century tombstones” is not supported by the sources I found. What can be stated with confidence is “burials of the 4th–7th centuries.” Likewise, the 11th century is the time of Kozern’s life; the chapel over his grave has no firm date in the sources found.
In the 1930s Yerevan was rebuilt to a new plan. The cemetery fell within the reconstruction and was liquidated. The inscriptions on the tombstones were photographed first (Armenian Wikipedia).
It was not an isolated case. In 1930–1931 the ancient basilica of St. Peter and Paul was demolished to make way for the Moskva cinema, even though excavation showed its history reached back to the 5th–6th centuries (Marine Navasardyan, Yerevan History Museum). A city rebuilt as the capital of a new state was losing layers of its medieval past.
After the war, new buildings rose on the new Baghramyan Avenue (called Barekamutyun, “Friendship,” Avenue from 1970 to 1995): the Communist Party Central Committee, the Council of Ministers, the Academy of Sciences. The first, designed by Mark Grigoryan, was built in 1948–1950 for the Central Committee (English Wikipedia names the Supreme Soviet as its first occupant). Today it houses the National Assembly (Wikipedia; Travel to Armenia). Neighboring Lovers’ Park lies in the north of the former Kozern district; it was named after Pushkin in 1949 and renamed in 1995 (bg.am).
People often say the parliament stands right on the cemetery. The sources disagree:
Neither cites plans or excavation records. A safer wording for the article is: “Kozern lay on a hill in the area of today’s Baghramyan Avenue; in this area a building was later erected that now houses the parliament, but the cemetery’s exact position relative to it needs confirmation from plans and archives.” Useful checks include Yervand Shahaziz’s Old Yerevan (1931), cited by Hakobyan; records of the 1930s Committee for the Protection of Antiquities; and K. Ghafadaryan’s Yerevan: Medieval Monuments (1975).
I did not embed any images, because I could not confirm their authors or rights. These are the leads I found:
Before publishing any of these, check the licence or ask the holder; the Yerevan History Museum and the Committee for the Protection of Antiquities are natural places to ask for originals.
Very little of Kozern survives: a few tombstones in private houses, old photographs, and a name that lives on in the district. Yet the place remembers a great deal: a scholar who argued with Byzantium about the date of Easter, a catholicos lying between two vardapets, refugees who built homes among ancient stones, and families who still live beside a hidden chapel door.
Image Source: Samvel Aproyan
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