page_title: Varagavank
section_title: Current state
hierarchical_section_title: Varagavank / Current state
caption_attribution_description: English: Varakavank in 2009
context_page_description: Varagavank was an Armenian monastery on the slopes of Mount Erek, 9 km southeast of the city of Van, in eastern Turkey.
  The monastery was founded in the early 11th century by Senekerim-Hovhannes Artsruni, the Armenian King of Vaspurakan, on a preexisting religious site. Initially serving as the necropolis of the Artsruni kings, it eventually became the seat of the archbishop of the Armenian Church in Van. The monastery has been described as one of the great monastic centers of the Armenian church by Ara Sarafian and the richest and most celebrated monastery of the Lake Van area by Robert H. Hewsen.
  During the Armenian Genocide, in April–May 1915, the Turkish army attacked, burned, and destroyed much of the monastery. More of it was destroyed in the 1960s, although some sections are still extant.
context_section_description: A significant number of the structures surviving the 1915 destruction were destroyed in the 1960s. As of 2006, the monastery's remains were used as a barn. According to historian Ara Sarafian, as of 2012, "good sections have just barely survived until our days." Dr. Jenny B. White, a scholar on Turkey, wrote in 2013 that, on her visit, the remains of the monastery "consisted of nothing more than a few brick vaults used to house goats amid a clutch of tumbledown Kurdish homes." The best-preserved section of the monastery is the church of Surb Gevorg (St. George), which is now looked after by a caretaker. The dome is partly collapsed and contains some traces of surviving frescoes. The dome of the church of Surb Nshan is entirely gone.
  In February 2010, following the renovation of the Holy Cross Cathedral at Akdamar Island in Lake Van, Halil Berk, the Deputy Governor of Van Province, announced that the Governor's Office sought to restore Varagavank and the Ktuts monastery at Çarpanak Island. In June of that year, the governor also stated that the monastery at Çarpanak Island and Varagavank would be renovated "in the near future." In October 2010, Radikal reported that a nearby mosque, built in 1997, would be demolished to make room for the restoration of Varagavank.
  The monastery was damaged as a result of the 2011 Van earthquake. According to Ara Sarafian, "parts of the main church collapsed, while other parts were significantly weakened. Old cracks got bigger, new ones appeared." Turkish engineers reportedly inspected it and announced that they would commence restoration work in the spring of 2012. Sarafian wrote that "such promises have been made in the past and one needs to be a little skeptical. The current state of the church makes such work much harder than at any time in the past." He noted in a 2012 article that the local and provincial governments supported the preservation and restoration of the monastery. In October 2012, the artist Raffi Bedrosyan, who contributed to the restoration of the St. Giragos Church in Diyarbakır, stated that he had hoped to restore Varagavank and added that "Both Ankara and Van agreed to launch the restoration project, but social and natural obstacles delayed the process.". In 2017 it was documented that the remaining stones of the monastery are regularly taken off by the local authorities to build a local mosque and other developments with them.
caption: 2008
exif: {"Image Make": "NIKON CORPORATION", "Image Model": "NIKON D300", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Ver.1.10", "Image DateTime": "2008:03:18 13:41:20", "Image Artist": "", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image Copyright": "", "Image ExifOffset": "348", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 2, 0, 0]", "Image GPSInfo": "34164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "300", "Thumbnail YResolution": "300", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "34292", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "9254", "Thumbnail YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/80", "EXIF FNumber": "7/2", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Aperture Priority", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2008:03:18 13:41:20", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2008:03:18 13:41:20", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "18/5", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Cloudy weather", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "28", "EXIF SubSecTime": "06", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "06", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "06", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "4288", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2848", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "34132", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CVAPattern": "[0, 2, 0, 2, 0, 1, 1, 2]", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Manual", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "42", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "None", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0"}