Armenia

Armenia is a small country in the mountains.

It has no sea coast. Most of its land is high up. The capital city is called Yerevan.

Armenia is a small, landlocked country, which means it has no coast on any sea or ocean. It lies just south of the great Caucasus mountain range, at the northwestern edge of Asia. Its neighbors are Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkey.

Armenia is a land of mountains, high plateaus and deep river valleys. On average the land is about 1,800 meters above sea level, and there are no lowlands at all. The capital is Yerevan. About 3.1 million people lived in Armenia in 2025, and nearly all of them speak Armenian.

Armenia is a landlocked country of Transcaucasia, lying just south of the great Caucasus range and facing the northwestern edge of Asia. Georgia and Azerbaijan border it to the north and east, Iran to the southeast and Turkey to the west, while Naxçıvan, an exclave of Azerbaijan, borders it to the southwest. It covers about 29,700 square kilometers.

Britannica describes the modern state as only a small part of ancient Armenia, which at its height reached from the south-central Black Sea coast to the Caspian Sea. The land is mountainous and geologically unstable: the average elevation is 1,800 m, half the territory lies between about 1,000 and 2,000 m, and only about one-tenth lies below 1,000 m. Armenia's Statistical Committee estimated the permanent population at 3,090,500 on 1 October 2025.

Yerevan is the capital city.

Many of its buildings are made of colored stone. A huge snowy mountain rises behind the city. Geghard is an old monastery cut into the rock.

Yerevan, the capital, sits on the Hrazdan River. It is very old: the fortress of Erebuni was built there in 783 BCE, and Yerevan has been the capital since 1920. Many of its buildings are made of local stone in different colors. To the south, across the border in Turkey, Mount Ararat rises behind the city.

About 1.14 million people lived in Yerevan in 2025. Gyumri is Armenia's second-largest city. East of Yerevan, at the entrance to the Azat Valley, the monastery of Geghard has churches and tombs carved right into the cliffs.

Yerevan stands on the Hrazdan River, 23 km from the Turkish border. It is first recorded in 607 CE, but archaeology traces a settlement on the site to the 6th–3rd millennia BCE and the fortress of Erebuni to 783 BCE. Romans, Parthians, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Persians, Georgians and Russians all ruled it at times; it fell to the Russians in 1827 and became the capital of the independent Armenian republic in 1920. Its university dates from 1919, and the Matenadaran archives (founded 1920) hold ancient Armenian manuscripts such as the Lazarus Gospel of 887. Preliminary figures from the Statistical Committee put its population at 1,144,700 in 2025.

The Monastery of Geghard and the Upper Azat Valley, a World Heritage Site since 2000, has monuments from the 4th to the 13th century. Most of its churches and tombs are cut into the living rock; the first rock-cut church was built before 1250 and the second in 1283. It also held a school, a scriptorium and a library, and UNESCO calls it an exceptionally complete example of medieval Armenian monastic architecture.

Armenia has many tall mountains.

The tallest is Mount Aragats. It is an old volcano that does not erupt now. Lake Sevan is a big lake high up in the mountains. Summers are hot and sunny.

The highest peak, Mount Aragats, is 4,090 meters tall. It is an extinct volcano, and its old crater now holds a glacier. The northwest, where Aragats stands, has high ranges, deep river valleys and lava plateaus dotted with other extinct volcanoes.

In the east, Lake Sevan lies about 1,900 meters above sea level and covers 1,360 square kilometers. Armenia's rivers are short and fast, with many rapids and waterfalls. On the plains, summers are long and hot, about 25 °C on average, while winters are usually not very cold, about −5 °C in January. Armenia also has strong earthquakes.

Mount Aragats (4,090 m), the highest point of both Armenia and the Lesser Caucasus, is a circular, shieldlike mountain of lavas and tufas: a volcanic cone of recent geologic age sits on far older rocks, and its crater has become the cirque of a glacier. The ranges of the Lesser Caucasus cross the north, with volcanic plateaus cut by deep valleys between them. In the southwest, the Aras River divides the Ararat Plain, its northern half in Armenia and its southern half in Turkey and Iran.

Lake Sevan covers 1,360 km² at 1,905 m. It drains through the Hrazdan to the Aras, but loses most of its water to evaporation; hydroelectric plants on the Hrazdan lowered it, so a 49-km tunnel was built in the late 1970s to bring in water from the Arpa. The climate is dry and continental: plain temperatures average 25 °C in June and August and −5 °C in January, and the record low is −46 °C. Mountain slopes get about 800 mm of rain a year, sheltered plains only about 200 to 400 mm. On 7 December 1988 an earthquake destroyed the town of Spitak and badly damaged Gyumri; about 25,000 people were killed.

Wild goats and wild sheep live high in the mountains.

Bears and lynx live in the forests. Big birds called bearded vultures live high up too. Leopards live in Armenia, but they are very rare.

Armenia is small, but it has more than 3,000 kinds of plants, more than the whole vast Russian Plain. Going up from the dry plains to the peaks, the land changes from semidesert to steppe grassland, then forest, alpine meadow and, at the very top, tundra.

Each zone has its own animals. Wild boar, jackals and wildcats live in the dry semidesert of the lower slopes and plains, where leopards are found only rarely. The forests of the northeast are mostly beech trees, home to the Syrian bear, lynx and squirrels. High in the mountains live the bezoar goat and the mouflon, a wild sheep, and bearded vultures are among the mountain birds.

Armenia's broken relief and its position where several biogeographic regions meet produce a great variety of landscapes. Though small, the country has more than 3,000 plant species, more than the vast Russian Plain, in five altitudinal zones: semidesert, steppe, forest, alpine meadow and high tundra. The semidesert, up to about 1,300–1,400 m, carries sagebrush and drought-resistant plants such as juniper, sloe, dog rose and honeysuckle; boar, wildcat, jackal, adder, the venomous gurza, scorpions and, more rarely, the leopard live there.

Steppe is the most widespread zone. Forest covers nearly one-tenth of the country: largely beech in the northeast and oak in the drier southeast, with hackberry, pistachio and dogwood lower down. Its animals include the Syrian bear, wildcat, lynx and squirrel, and woodcocks, robins, warblers, titmice and woodpeckers are numerous. Above about 2,000 m, alpine meadows give good summer pasture; the mountain turkey, horned lark and bearded vulture live there, and the mountains shelter the bezoar goat and the mouflon.

About three million people live in Armenia.

Most people speak Armenian. Armenian has its own alphabet. A thin bread called lavash is baked in clay ovens.

About 3.1 million people lived in Armenia in 2025, and about two-thirds of people live in towns and cities. Nearly everyone is Armenian and speaks Armenian, a language that forms its own branch of the big Indo-European family. Kurds, Russians and smaller groups, such as Ukrainians and Assyrians, live in Armenia too.

Armenian is written in its own alphabet, created in the 400s and still used today. Lavash is a traditional thin bread, slapped onto the wall of a clay oven to bake and often rolled around cheese, greens or meat. Grapes grow well on the sunny, watered Ararat Plain, and peaches and apricots are the most common orchard fruits.

Armenia's Statistical Committee estimated 3,090,500 permanent residents on 1 October 2025, about 1,144,700 of them in Yerevan (preliminary). Britannica notes that two-thirds of the population is urban, and that emigration waves in the 20th century mean that, by most estimates, at least 5 million Armenians live abroad, more than 1 million of them in the United States. Armenians make up nearly the whole population; Kurds, Russians and small numbers of Ukrainians, Assyrians and others make up the rest. Most believers belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church or the Armenian Catholic Church.

Armenian is a distinct branch of the Indo-European family. Its script of 38 letters (31 consonants and 7 vowels) dates from the 5th century; local tradition says Mesrop Mashtots invented it in 405, and it was probably modeled on the Pahlavi script with Greek influence. Lavash, inscribed by UNESCO in 2014, is usually made by a small group of women working together: thin sheets of wheat dough are stretched over an oval cushion and slapped onto the wall of a conical clay oven, while men make the cushions and build the ovens. Vineyards are the leading branch of farming, and peaches and apricots are the most common orchard crops.