Eight days in Armenia: the first Christian country, and it never lets you forget it

Start where the city starts. Republic Square is an oval rather than a rectangle, ringed by five monumental buildings from the 1930s to the 1950s, every one of them faced in the pink and cream tuff Tamanyan insisted on, with the paving laid out in the pattern of an Armenian carpet. It should feel oppressive and it does not.

Walk north through the shopping street to the Opera and on to the Cascade. It is a stairway of limestone terraces climbing the hill behind the centre, begun in the 1970s as a Soviet grand project, abandoned half built, and finished in the 2000s with a fortune from the American-Armenian collector Gerard Cafesjian. Botero's bronzes sit at the bottom, escalators run up inside past halls of glass art, Warhol and Chagall, and the top terrace gives you Ararat.

Then eat late, because Yerevan does. Khorovats off the grill, a plate of herbs, and lavash straight off the wall of the oven.

Hire a driver for the day and go east into the Azat gorge. Garni comes first: a colonnaded temple in the Ionic order on a spur above the canyon, built in the first century AD when Armenia was a client kingdom balanced between Rome and Parthia, kept as a royal summer house after the country turned Christian, and thrown down by an earthquake in 1679. It was rebuilt from its own fallen blocks in the 1970s, which is why you can see every joint. It is the last classical colonnaded temple standing anywhere in the former Soviet Union.

Below the village, a rough track drops into the gorge to the Symphony of the Stones, a wall of hexagonal basalt columns hanging over the river like an organ, formed as lava cooled and cracked. Twenty minutes down, and worth the boots.

Then Geghard, ten kilometres up the valley where the road ends against a cliff. The front church dates from 1215; the older and stranger part is behind it, where chambers, chapels and a mausoleum were cut directly into the mountain, complete with columns and ribbed vaults carved out of the living rock. Sound does remarkable things in the upper chamber and there is often a choir standing in it. The name means spear, for the lance kept here for centuries.

Give the morning to Tsitsernakaberd. Twelve leaning basalt slabs close over an eternal flame on a hill across the Hrazdan, with a split stele forty four metres high beside them. It was built in 1967, when acknowledging the deportations and massacres of 1915 was still an act of defiance inside the Soviet Union, and the museum cut into the hillside below is careful, documentary and hard going. Two hours, and do not plan anything cheerful straight afterwards.

In the afternoon, the Matenadaran, at the head of Mashtots Avenue under a statue of the monk who invented the alphabet. It holds something like seventeen thousand Armenian manuscripts, much of it carried out of Anatolia by refugees a page at a time, and the display rooms show a hundred or so: illuminated gospels, medical treatises, a manuscript weighing under twenty grams and another that takes two people to lift. Take the guided tour.

Finish on the hill above the Cascade at Mother Armenia, twenty two metres of woman with a sword on a pedestal more than twice as tall, put up in 1967 on the plinth where a statue of Stalin had stood until the thaw. The park around her holds Soviet artillery, a Ferris wheel and the best view in the city at sunset.

Take the morning train. It leaves Yerevan station under the statue of David of Sasun, takes about three hours to cross the plateau and costs less than lunch, and the carriage will be almost empty. The landscape is bare volcanic upland the whole way, with Aragats off to the right.

Gyumri's main square is far too big and all the better for it. Two churches face each other across it: the Holy Saviour, wrecked in 1988 and rebuilt since, with its collapsed dome left on the ground beside it as a memorial, and the Seven Wounds church opposite.

In the afternoon, the gallery of Mariam and Yeranuhi Aslamazyan, two sisters from a village nearby who became the first prominent women in Soviet Armenian art and travelled across Asia and Africa on official trips. Six hundred works fill a restored merchant's house, and the colour in it is startling after a day of black stone.

Then walk the Kumayri quarter as the light goes. Black tuff walls with pink and cream carved surrounds, arched gateways into courtyards, hundreds of protected buildings inside a few streets, and gaps and props where the rebuilding has not reached.

Start with a taxi nine kilometres northwest to Marmashen, three churches of red and grey tufa on a terrace above the Akhurian, the largest finished around 1030 for Prince Vahram Pahlavuni, with orchards around them and the foundations of two more in the grass. Armenians come here to sit rather than to tick it off.

The river below is the border. About forty kilometres downstream stands Ani, the ruined medieval Armenian capital, on the Turkish side of a frontier closed since 1993: visible in clear weather from high ground, and reachable only by flying to Turkey and driving from Kars.

Back in town, the museum of national architecture and urban life occupies a rich merchant's house of the 1870s and keeps it whole, rooms, courtyard, furniture and photographs of a provincial imperial city at its richest. They will cook you a proper Gyumri lunch downstairs if you order a day ahead.

Finish on the hill at the Black Fortress, a round drum of black basalt the Russians raised in the 1830s once they had taken this frontier off the Ottomans, restored in recent years and used for concerts. The view is the reason to climb up.

The crossing to Dilijan takes about three hours with a change at Vanadzor, and the landscape turns from stone to trees somewhere along it. Ask your guesthouse to put you in a shared taxi if the minibus timings look grim, which they sometimes do.

Dilijan is small and the first thing to do is Sharambeghyan street: a short cobbled row of nineteenth century houses with balconies and shingled roofs, rebuilt in 1979 by the artist Hovhannes Sharambeyan as a working craft quarter rather than a museum. There are still woodcarvers, potters and a smith along it.

The folk art museum is a few minutes away in what was Princess Mariam Tumanyan's summer house, and it is far better than a town this size should manage: carpets, carved doors, embroidery, ceramics and a room of self-taught painters.

Take a driver and start early at Haghartsin, seven kilometres northeast and up a side road through dense forest to a clearing. Three churches, a refectory and a ruined gavit stand together on a shelf of the mountain, built between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, with a walnut tree in the middle that gets photographed as much as the buildings. A decade of restoration paid for by the ruler of Sharjah finished around 2013. Get there before eleven, when the coaches from Yerevan arrive.

Goshavank is twenty minutes on, in a working village rather than a forest, and it is the more interesting of the two. Mkhitar Gosh, who wrote the first Armenian law code, founded it in 1188 and ran it as a university. Against the outside wall stands the cross-stone everybody comes for, carved in 1291 in relief so fine the stone looks like lace, and signed by its maker Poghos.

Finish at Lake Parz, three hundred metres of green water at 1,350 metres with forest to the shoreline, a cafe, pedal boats and a marked trail back down to the town for anybody who would rather walk than ride.

The best hour in Dilijan costs nothing. From the old mineral water plant at the northwestern edge of town, a forest track climbs about three kilometres through beech woods to Jukhtak Vank: two small churches of the eleventh or twelfth century standing a few metres apart in a clearing, one of them strapped together with iron bands to stop it falling down. Allow two hours for the round trip and take the first bus back afterwards.

Minibuses to Yerevan leave roughly hourly through the middle of the day and take ninety minutes, which puts you at Zvartnots in about two and a half hours all in. Given how many flights out of Yerevan leave in the small hours, that is usually a lot more time than you need.