Armenia

Where the Armenian state sits on its plateau

Armenia has no coast. Georgia lies to the north, Iran to the south, Azerbaijan to the east and Turkey to the west, and the whole country stands high. Britannica gives an average elevation of 1,800 metres and finds no lowland anywhere. Mount Aragats, an extinct volcano, reaches 4,090 metres, and Lake Sevan lies at 1,905 metres in a basin ringed by ranges.

People gather on the low margin. Half the population lives below about 1,000 metres, on roughly a tenth of the territory, and most of that tenth is the Ararat Plain around the capital. Yerevan held 1,106,300 people on 1 January 2024. Britannica estimates the national population at 3,177,000 for 2026, about 247,000 above the count of 2017, and one figure is a count while the other is an estimate.

The plain itself is divided. The Aras River runs across it, and Britannica places its northern half in Armenia and its southern half in Turkey and Iran. The same source describes Yerevan's setting as framed by Mount Aragats, Mount Azhdaak and Mount Ararat, the last of them across the river.

The geography of Armenia follows the height, the rivers and the borders one by one.

How the republic came to hold the eastern corner

The shield on the arms also carries the coats of arms of four kingdoms of historical Armenia. Their seats are scattered well beyond the present frontier. Ani, the Bagratid capital built up in 964, went to Turkey with the Kars territory in 1921. The kingdom of Cilicia, crowned in 1199 and destroyed by the Mamluks of Egypt in 1375, stood far to the south-west among the castles of the Taurus passes.

The present republic follows a later line. The Treaty of Turkmenchay gave the khanates of Erivan and Nakhichevan to Russia in 1828, and migration through the nineteenth century gave the Erivan Governorate an Armenian majority. West of that line lived the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, about two million before the First World War by the count of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute. In the deportations and massacres that began in 1915, Britannica's conservative estimate is 600,000 to more than 1,000,000 dead, and the museum gives about one and a half million. The Turkish government acknowledges deportations and atrocities and rejects the word genocide; Britannica reports that most historians have concluded the events fit its definition.

Survivors who reached the east found a republic declared on 28 May 1918, which fell to Soviet power on 2 December 1920. Seven decades of Soviet rule followed. Armenia declared independence on 23 September 1991, two days after a referendum, and fought Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh up to a ceasefire in May 1994. War resumed in September 2020. After an Azerbaijani offensive in September 2023, more than 100,000 of the roughly 120,000 Armenians of the region had fled by October, most of them into Armenia. Armenia: history takes the sequence from Urartu onward.

Why Armenia's constitution addresses Armenians abroad

The preamble presents the state as the fulfilment of the ancestors' behest "for the restoration of the sovereign state", and several articles reach past the border. Article 19 binds the republic to work with the Armenian diaspora on "the development of comprehensive ties and preservation of the Armenian identity", to promote repatriation and to support the Armenian language and schooling in other states. Article 47 lets Armenians by national origin acquire citizenship through a simplified procedure once they settle in the country. Article 18 recognises the "exclusive mission" of the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church in preserving national identity. Britannica, citing most estimates, places a plurality of the 5,000,000 or more Armenians abroad in the states of the former Soviet Union and more than 1,000,000 in the United States. Its language entry counts about 6.7 million speakers of Armenian in the early twenty-first century.

The same text has entered the settlement with Azerbaijan. In March 2025 negotiators announced that the text of a peace treaty had been agreed. Azerbaijan made its signature conditional on Armenia removing what Azerbaijan regards as implicit territorial claims from the constitution, and the Armenian government proposed a referendum for 2027. This catalogue records both positions and takes none.

How the Armenian parliament took over the executive

The referendum of 6 December 2015 moved executive power from a directly elected president to a prime minister chosen by the National Assembly, and the change took effect in April 2018. Parliament now elects the president for a single seven-year term. Article 89 sets a floor of 101 deputies and no ceiling, and the Electoral Code adds seats whenever one list wins more than two thirds, so the size of the chamber follows the vote. It sat 105 members after April 2017, 132 after December 2018, 107 after June 2021 and 105 after June 2026. In August 2026 the chamber had 37 women among its 105 members, 35.2%.

The new system was tested within weeks. In April 2018 parliament elected Serzh Sargsyan, whose second presidential term had just ended, as prime minister; he resigned after soldiers joined the street protests on 23 April, and in May parliament elected the opposition leader who had led them.

Armenia's alliances have moved since the loss of Karabakh. It joined the Collective Security Treaty Organization in 1994 and the Eurasian Economic Union on 10 October 2014. It suspended its membership of the first in June 2024 and ratified a bill on accession to the European Union in February 2025, while staying in the second. Armenian politics sets out the rules of the chamber and the crises they settled.

What the Armenian economy earns at home and abroad

Output came to US$29.2 billion in 2025, or US$9,474 a head, after growth of 7.2% that year. The trade figures need a second reading. Gems and precious metals made up 61.7% of exports in 2024, and the World Bank counts the stones in that line as re-exports, goods bought abroad and sold on. In May 2026 total exports fell 11.5% year on year while exports without the stones grew 18%, led by minerals from the copper and molybdenum mines.

Emigration runs through the income accounts. By the mid-1990s about 750,000 people, around a fifth of the population, had left in Britannica's estimate. Remittances peaked at around 20% of GDP in the mid-2000s, and in May 2026 about 61% of net money transfers into Armenia came from Russia, according to the World Bank. Some diaspora Armenians invested directly after independence, and they founded the American University of Armenia in Yerevan to teach the running of a market economy.

Freight depends on two open borders. The Georgian Black Sea ports of Batumi and Poti handle more than 90% of the goods shipped to and from Armenia, by the figure Wikipedia's economy article gives. Unemployment stood at 12.9% in 2025. The Armenian economy separates the trade that passes through from what the plateau produces.

Which half of a divided culture Armenia keeps

Mesrop Mashtots created the alphabet around 405, and it still writes the language. The written standard had been classical Armenian, the language of the first Bible translation, and in the nineteenth century a modern standard was built in two forms. Eastern Armenian was built on the speech of Yerevan and Tbilisi, Western Armenian on that of the Armenian community of Istanbul, and after 1915 the western standard lived on mainly in Turkey, the Arab countries and the emigrant communities of Europe and the United States.

Soviet Armenia reformed the spelling from 1922 to 1924. Western Armenians and the Eastern Armenians of Iran kept the classical spelling. The republic uses the eastern standard and the reformed spelling, so much of the diaspora that Article 19 addresses writes Armenian in another standard and another orthography.

UNESCO lists three World Heritage properties in Armenia, all cultural. The monasteries of Haghpat and Sanahin were inscribed in 1996; Echmiatsin with the site of Zvartnots, and Geghard with the upper Azat valley, followed in 2000. Eight elements stood on the intangible heritage list by 2023, from the duduk in 2008 to the blacksmithing of Gyumri in 2023. Armenian culture works through the script, the churches, the kitchen and the music.

Who travels to Armenia and by which roads

Border posts counted 2.263 million tourist visits in 2025, according to figures the Ministry of Economy published in March 2026, and about 938,000 of them, around 43%, were visits from Russia. The frontiers with Turkey and Azerbaijan are closed. Visitors fly into Zvartnots outside Yerevan or Shirak at Gyumri, or come overland from Georgia or Iran.

The diaspora has a place of its own in the count. In the 1990s, when visits first passed half a million a year, most visitors were ethnic Armenians from abroad. The Birthright Armenia programme brings schoolchildren and students from the diaspora, and every four years Armenia hosts the Pan-Armenian Games, with thousands of competitors from across it. The US Commercial Service lists genealogical tourism among the sub-sectors it follows.

Travel in Armenia covers the routes in, the visa rules and the seasons on the plateau.