Amaras Monastery
Amaras Monastery () is an Armenian monastery near the village of Sos, "de facto" in the Martuni Province of the Republic of Artsakh, "de jure" in the Khojavend District of Azerbaijan, in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. It was a prominent religious and educational center in medieval Armenia. In Azerbaijan, the monastery is also called "Amaras" (); the state denies its Armenian Apostolic heritage, instead referring to it as "Caucasian Albanian". History. 4th–5th centuries. According to medieval chroniclers Faustus Byuzand and Movses Kaghankatvatsi, St. Gregory the Illuminator, the patron saint and evangelizer of Armenia, founded the Amaras Monastery at  the start of the fourth century. Amaras was the burial place of St. Gregory the Illuminator's grandson, St. Grigoris (died in 338). A tomb built for his remains still survives under the apse of the nineteenth-century Church of St. Grigoris. At the beginning of the fifth century Mesrop Mashtots, the inventor of the Armenian alphabet, established in Amaras the first-ever school that used his script. Destruction and restoration (13th–19th centuries). The monastery was plundered in the thirteenth century by the Mongols, destroyed in 1387 during Tamerlane's invasion, and demolished again in the sixteenth century. It underwent  radical restructuring in the second quarter of the seventeenth century when the surviving defensive walls were constructed. Amaras was later abandoned, and in the first half of the nineteenth century, the monastery served as a frontier fortress for Russian imperial troops. The Armenian Apostolic Church reclaimed the monastery in 1848. The monastery's church appears to have been severely damaged during the period of military occupation, to the extent that a new church had to be constructed on the site of the old one. This new church, dedicated to St. Grigoris, was built in 1858 and paid for by the  Armenians of the city of Shushi. It still survives and is a three-nave basilica constructed from bright white stone. Tomb of St. Grigoris. St. Grigoris was originally buried at the eastern end of the now-vanished St. Gregory Church. Archeologists think that the eastern entrance of the tomb, which is unusual for traditional church architecture, is based on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In 489 Vachagan III the Pious, king of Caucasian Albania, renovated Amaras, restoring the church and constructing a new chapel for the remains of St. Grigoris. In later centuries a church was built  over this chapel-tomb. Under the altar of the St. Grigoris church is a tomb chamber reached at its western end by twin flights of steps. A blocked passage at its eastern end indicates that there was originally an entrance from that direction as well. The barrel-vaulted tomb chamber is 1.9 m wide, 3.75 m long, and 3.5 m high. The upper half of the structure originally projected 1.5 to 2 m above ground level, but it is now entirely underground. Carved details date it stylistically to the 5th century.