Kecharis monastery

Kecharis Monastery is a medieval Armenain monastic complex dating back to the 11th to 13th centuries, located 60 km from Yerevan, in the ski resort town of Tsakhkadzor in Armenia. Nestled in the Bambak mountains, Kecharis Monastery was founded by a Pahlavuni prince in the 11th century, and construction continued until the middle of the 13th century. In the 12th and 13th centuries, Kecharis was a major religious center of Armenia and a place of higher education. Today, the monastery has been fully restored and is clearly visible from the ski slopes.Heavily damaged in an earthquake of 1927, reconstruction works were never conducted by the Armenian SSR until the 1980s. A series of nationwide problems led to a halt in reconstruction for about a decade as the 1988 Armenian earthquake hit, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Nagorno-Karabakh War broke out, and Armenia was blockaded by its two allied Turkic neighbors. As Armenia recovered slowly from its crisis, the reconstruction of Kecharis was finally resumed in 1998 and finished in 2000 thanks to a donation by an Armenian benefactor from Vienna named Vladimir Harutyunian, in memory of his parents Harutyun and Arsenik. The main group of the complex consists of three churches, two chapels and a gavit, to the west of which, a few dozen meters away, there is another church with its own vestry at the side of a road leading to the forest. There still are many tombstones around these monuments.