Ani was named after Anahita, the Persian Mithraic goddess who was worshipped in Armenia before the adoption of Christianity. But the city first rose to prominence in the 5th century AD, near the beginning of Armenia’s Christian era.
Ani started as a hilltop fortress, but it was also strategically located on trade routes between the east and west. As such, it quickly grew prosperous.
In the 10th century, it was designated capital by the Bagratid dynasty, to which many of Armenia’s most prominent rulers belonged. They moved their administration there from nearby Kars.
While Armenia has had up to 12 capitals throughout its long history, Ani was the center of the kingdom during its most prosperous periods. Dubbed ‘The City of 1,001 churches,’ it was once considered one of the world’s most splendid capitals.
The Byzantine Empire briefly took hold of Ani for a couple of decades from 1045. But eventually, the Seljuks, the first Turkic empire to control most of Anatolia, invaded in 1064, committing a bloody massacre of the Christian population. And not long after, they sold Ani to the Shaddadids, a Sunni Kurdish dynasty who acted as Seljuk vassals.
Muslim rule came to an end in the early 1200s with help from the Georgian branch of the Bagratid dynasty, then ruled by the legendary Queen Tamar (Trabzon’s Kingdom of Trebizond also formed at this time).
After over a century of Georgian and Armenian rule, Ani was sacked by the Mongols in 1236. Later, a devastating earthquake struck the city in 1319. And after that, it saw further raids at the hands of Tamerlane. Unsurprisingly, the once-glorious capital was ultimately abandoned.
During the Ottoman years, Ani remained forgotten and mostly untouched – even by the Armenians themselves, many of whom had resettled in cities like Istanbul and Tbilisi.
It wasn’t until the 1800s that European travelers rediscovered the city while touring Anatolia and the Caucasus. And then in 1878, the region fell under the control of the Russian Empire.
After the Russians improved the infrastructure and living conditions of nearby Kars, Armenians started returning to the region. And they started taking great interest in their abandoned ancestral capital. Ani’s splendid architecture would then directly influence new constructions in cities like Kars and Gyumri.
The Russians also carried out excavations at Ani up until the Russian Revolution of 1917. The land then switched back and forth between the Ottomans and the newly declared Republic of Armenia.
It was around this time that the Ottomans began purging Armenians from their empire, a series of events known as the Armenian Genocide. Between 1914 and 1923, an estimated 1.5 Armenians were killed, with many more displaced.
The Ottomans justified their actions by claiming the Armenians had been colluding with the Russians. This stance is still maintained by the Republic of Turkey today, and the two countries remain bitter rivals. As you’ll notice, the informational signboards around Ani leave out the words ‘Armenia’ or ‘Armenian’ from their descriptions.
Armenia (or what the Armenians called Eastern Armenia) was eventually taken over by the Soviet Union in 1920. And the following year, the Soviets signed the Treaty of Kars with Turkey (then in the midst of Atatürk’s War of Independence).
They decided that the Arpaçay (or Akhuryan) River which surrounds Ani would mark the border between the two nations. To this day, Ani remains literally a stone’s throw out of Armenia’s reach.
The land borders between Armenia and Turkey remain closed, and one must travel through Georgia to visit both countries. As difficult as it may be, a visit to Ani would be complimented by a trip to the History Museum of Armenia in Yerevan.
Many important artifacts were evacuated from Ani in the early 20th century (though many more were lost), and Yerevan is where most of them are now being kept.