Yerevan wears its culture in volcanic tuff: a 13th-century chapel buried inside a Soviet demolition site, 23,000 manuscripts in one institute, and Parajanov's foil-and-button collages. Three days through Armenian art, sound and stone.
Two survivors of old Yerevan: the tiny 13th-century Katoghike chapel, revealed in 1936 when the 19th-century basilica encasing it was demolished, and Zoravor (1694), the city's oldest working church. Open from 08:00.
The home-archive of the banned filmmaker: 250-plus collages, dolls and hats built from foil, buttons, lace and broken glass, many assembled inside Soviet prison camps. Open 10:30-17:00, last entry 16:30.
Armenia's largest painting collection occupies floors three to eight above the History Museum: Aivazovsky seascapes, Saryan's molten Ararat landscapes and Minas Avetisyan's village interiors. Tue-Sat 11:00-17:30.
Built in 1766 under the Persian Erivan Khanate and the only working mosque left in Armenia. One of four minarets survives beside a turquoise-tiled dome and a walled garden of plane trees. Visitors 15:00-18:00.
Some 23,000 manuscripts sit in the vault; around a hundred rotate through the halls, among them the 28 kg Homilies of Mush (1202), carried out of Western Armenia in two halves. Tue-Sat 10:00-17:00, closed Sun-Mon.
The composer's Yerevan apartment on Zarubyan Street, kept with his Bechstein grand, manuscript pages of the Sabre Dance and Gayane, and the concert dress coat he wore conducting in Vienna and London.
Alexander Tamanyan's 1933 tuff rotunda holds two auditoriums back to back — the opera stage and the Khachaturian Concert Hall. The Tumanyan Street box office sells same-evening seats from mid-morning.
A 300-seat hall on Isahakyan Street devoted to string quartets, duduk-and-piano programmes and Komitas's own folk-song arrangements, performed by the State Chamber Choir and visiting ensembles most weeknights.
Weekend craft market spread along Aram and Buzand streets: hand-knotted Karabakh rugs, khachkar rubbings, Soviet cameras, duduks carved from apricot wood and painters selling straight off the stall frames.
The one quarter Tamanyan's 1924 masterplan never flattened: a hillside maze of stone lanes, hand-built stairways and courtyards above Mashtots Avenue, now layered with murals from the Kond street-art festivals.
A working atelier on Artsakh Avenue where weavers knot and wash carpets by hand and restorers repair 200-year-old Armenian pieces. The tour covers the dye kitchen, the looms and the antique collection upstairs.
A vaulted 19th-century passage off Abovyan Street showing contemporary Armenian painters and ceramicists, with a courtyard café built into the old stone arches and a shelf of small-run Yerevan art books.