Armenians call this the Mother See, and the phrase is meant literally: Echmiatsin is the spiritual centre of the Armenian Apostolic Church, the seat of the Catholicos, the place the faith is governed from. The cathedral stands on the edge of Vagharshapat, a flat town of about forty thousand on the Ararat plain west of Yerevan. Tradition holds that Gregory the Illuminator, after the king converted around the year 301, saw a vision of Christ descending with a golden hammer to mark where the church should rise. That vision gave the place its name: Echmiatsin means the descent of the only-begotten. The present building has been rebuilt and added to many times, but its bones date to the fifth century and the core to even earlier.
The setting is deliberately calm. Walled gardens, tall cypress and plane trees, a courtyard of cross-stones called khachkars carved by generations of masons, and a museum with relics said to include a fragment of Noah's Ark and the Holy Lance. Your boots will be loud on the stone in a place where people speak softly. Dress for a church: cover shoulders and knees, and take your helmet off long before the gate.
The ride in from Yerevan is simple and rather dull in the best sense. It is a straight, busy highway across the flat plain with orchards, apricot trees, vineyards, roadside stalls of melons and peaches, and a clear sight of Ararat to the south on a good morning. You pass close to the airport and the ruins of the seventh-century church of Zvartnots, a circular pillared ruin worth a short detour if you have the time. Traffic gets heavy near Yerevan, and drivers are not patient, so keep your mirrors busy.
Vagharshapat is large enough for everything practical: fuel stations on the approach roads, cafes around the main street, bakeries selling warm bread and sweet gata. Lunch of grilled meat, fresh herbs and tomatoes that taste like tomatoes costs very little. Midday heat in summer is fierce on the plain, with temperatures well into the thirties, so go early or late. In April, when the fruit trees are blossoming and the mountain is still white, the whole plain looks like a postcard from a gentler world.