Yerevan is 29 years older than Rome, founded as the Urartian fortress of Erebuni in 782 BC. Three days trace that arc: cuneiform on basalt, illuminated gospels rescued from massacre, Tamanyan's pink tuff city, and the neighbourhoods rebuilt by survivors.
The citadel King Argishti I founded in 782 BC on Arin Berd hill, its cuneiform foundation slab naming Erebuni — the city's birth certificate. Excavated temple of Haldi, frescoed halls, wine cellars. Open 10:30-16:30, closed Mondays.
A Kura-Araxes settlement inhabited 3200-2500 BC beside Yerevan Lake, with circular mud-brick houses, cyclopean walls and a subterranean passage to the Hrazdan. One of the few Bronze Age towns you can walk through inside a capital city.
23,000 Armenian codices, including the 1202 Mugni Gospels and the Homilies of Mush — a 28 kg manuscript carried out of the 1915 massacres in two halves by two women. Alphabet inventor Mashtots guards the basalt stairway.
A tiny 13th-century chapel that survived only because a larger 17th-century basilica was built around it; when Soviet crews demolished the outer church in 1936 the medieval core with its khachkars emerged intact and was preserved.
400,000 objects from the 5,500-year-old Areni leather shoe to Urartian bronze cauldrons and the Metsamor astronomical finds. The national narrative laid out floor by floor, from Neolithic to the 1918 First Republic.
The house of the filmmaker imprisoned by Soviet authorities from 1973 to 1977, filled with collages he assembled from bottle caps and buttons in the labour camp. His prison-made objects are the sharpest artefacts of late-Soviet dissent here.
A 22 m copper statue raised in 1967 on the pedestal that held Stalin until 1962 — the swap itself is the exhibit. Inside, the museum covers the 1941-45 war and the Karabakh conflict, with Marshal Baghramyan's papers.
Theatre Square, now Freedom Square by the Opera, is where hundreds of thousands gathered from February 1988 demanding Karabakh's transfer — the mass movement that pushed Armenia out of the USSR three years later.
The only surviving fragment of pre-Soviet Yerevan, a hillside warren of 17th-19th century houses that Tamanyan's 1924 masterplan never levelled. Steep alleys, the ruined Tepebashi mosque wall, and courtyards still lived in.
The 1952 Stalin-era trading hall on Movses Khorenatsi, where families from Musa Dagh and Van sell dried fruit, sujukh and basturma by recipes carried from Anatolia in 1915. Vendors will name the ancestral village if asked.
The reconstructed Tiflis study of the poet who organised relief for 1915 refugees pouring into Etchmiadzin and negotiated with warring villages. Manuscripts, his death mask, and correspondence from the famine years of 1919-20.
The 1945 arched bridge over the gorge, built by German POWs, looks down on the remnants of the medieval caravan road and the 17th-century Kozern cemetery khachkars scattered along the canyon slopes.