Anyone familiar with the beautifully carved medieval Armenian doorways—we have already seen one and another of them—will be surprised to discover that one of the mansions in the eclectic city center of turn-of-the-century Yerevan is adorned with exactly the same kind of decoration. Deeply undercut interlacing patterns reminiscent of Armenian khachkars, medieval Armenian bird and siren motifs, and stylized eternity symbols and pomegranates all appear on its façade.
Sirens (whose iconography ultimately derives from Persian models, and whose name is also connected with the Persian word shirin, “sweet”) are, in Armenian art, the birds of Paradise and spiritual protectors. This is why they are usually placed in the upper part of a composition, as on the khachkar from Hayravank shown below.
Only a few small details—especially the beautiful Art Nouveau copper door handle in the shape of a peacock and the Art Deco figures on the door mullion—reveal that this doorway is much later than those we have seen so far, even though it faithfully follows their decorative motifs.
The street on which the mansion stands was named after Khachatur Abovyan (1809–1848), the great reformer of Armenian literature, in 1920. However, when the house was built in 1884, it bore the name of Mikhail Astafyev, the governor of Yerevan who died that same year. It was Astafyev who championed the construction of Yerevan’s first grand representative avenue, running in a straight line northeast from the city center toward Tbilisi, following the route of the old Georgian caravan road.
Along this avenue, the Armenian elite—wealthy merchants, physicians, industrialists, and intellectuals—began acquiring plots of land, while the era’s two brilliant architects, Vasily Mirzoyan and Boris Mehrabyan, seemed to compete with one another by erecting magnificent mansions on opposite sides of the street. Their preferred building material was the local red and black tuff stone. This was also the period when finely crafted wrought-iron balconies and carved doorways like this one became fashionable. During the Armenian belle époque (1868–1920), the avenue was the very heart of urban life. Here stood the city’s first European-style hotels—the Grand Hotel, the Orient, and the France—as well as its first modern pharmacies, fashionable boutiques, and the municipal club that served as the center of Yerevan’s vibrant cultural life.
The twin mansion at 8 Abovyan Street, where this doorway is located, was commissioned by the industrialist and merchant brothers Grigor and Barsegh Yeghiazaryan and designed by Vasily Mirzoyan. The brothers had accumulated their wealth primarily through Yerevan’s construction boom, more specifically through their brickworks supplying the city’s rapidly expanding building industry. They were also leading cotton processors and textile and cotton merchants, one of the most profitable sectors of the period.
The doorway opened onto a luxurious residence comprising twelve rooms, two kitchens, and seven stoves, while three small shops operated in the inner courtyard. From 1900 onward, several rooms on the ground floor were rented to the Indo-European Telegraph Company, turning the building into a node in the global communications network linking London with India. During the First World War, the entire upper floor was given over to a volunteer military hospital, and during the Armenian Genocide an orphanage was established here for refugee children.
In 1920, during the final days of the First Republic of Armenia, distinguished military representatives of the Entente powers were received on the Yeghiazaryan Mansion’s ornate wrought-iron balcony. On December 2 of the same year, it was from this very balcony that the establishment of Soviet rule in Armenia was proclaimed.
“War on the Palaces!” Armenian Bolshevik poster, 1924
In 1923, all the Yeghiazaryans’ property—their factories and their mansions—was confiscated. The family was evicted and officially branded as a "class alien." Most family members fled to provincial towns, attempting to survive as ordinary laborers in the hope of escaping the purges, but many failed: they were deported either to the Gulag or to Central Asia. Grigor and Barsegh, however, were spared. They were even allowed to remain as tenants in a tiny back room of their former home, forced to watch day after day as others occupied and gradually wore down the palace they had built.
The mansion was divided into small apartments, which were allocated to members of the Soviet Armenian government and the country’s cultural elite. In the same year, alterations were also made to the façade so that it would better harmonize with the appearance of the new socialist city.
But when, then, was this doorway actually made? As we have seen, it cannot be medieval, since the mansion itself dates only from 1884.
Yet it cannot have been carved in that year either, for it bears not the hallmarks of Eclecticism but rather those of Art Nouveau—especially the Arts and Crafts movement—which did not reach the Caucasus until the turn of the twentieth century.
At the same time, the figures on the door mullion, with their poses, clothing, and hairstyles, evoke the fashions of the 1920s and 1930s—what in the West we would call Art Deco. In Armenia, however, that style never truly arrived, as by then architecture was already forced to choose between radical avant-garde experiments and the rigid neoclassicism of Socialist Realism.
Such deeply sacred, historicizing, and national iconography—the deliberate evocation of medieval monastery portals and khachkars—would already have been dismissed in the Stalinist era as a bourgeois relic, and would not even have been approved at the planning stage for a public urban space.
So when was the doorway created?
The mansion’s rebirth came exactly fifty years after its nationalization. In 1968, Yerevan celebrated the 2,750th anniversary of its foundation, an event that sparked a remarkable national cultural renaissance throughout Armenia. People began openly acknowledging that modernization had destroyed much of old Yerevan’s architectural heritage, and a state restoration program was launched to preserve the surviving eclectic buildings along Abovyan Street, including the Yeghiazaryan Mansion.
To replace the ruined doorway, the authorities commissioned the master woodcarver Sahak Sahakyan, one of the foremost representatives of Armenian ethno-modernism. This style, which had become dominant by around 1970, grew out of the national revival of the 1960s. Rejecting Socialist Realism, it consciously revived the motifs of medieval Armenian manuscript illumination, stone carving, folk tales, and historical epics. In designing the doorway, Sahakyan took as his direct inspiration precisely the two medieval wooden doors discussed earlier: the 1134 portal of the Monastery of Mush and the 1188 portal of Haghpat Monastery.
It was this stylistic climate that made it possible for the former bourgeois Yeghiazaryan Mansion, nationalized in 1923, to be not merely restored during the 1973 renovation, but symbolically transformed through Sahakyan’s woodcarving. His work endowed it with an explicitly Armenian historical and national iconography, retrospectively linking the building to two golden ages of Armenian history: the medieval Armenian kingdom and Yerevan’s own belle époque.
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