Architecture and landscape of the historical province of Tashir in northern Armenia

The paper focuses on a reading of the built landscape of the territory of northern Armenia, formerly known as the Tashir region, within the province of Loṛi. The region is characterised by a large plateau dotted with religious buildings, including churches and monasteries. According to scholars, these were built between the 6th and 12th centuries, making the region an active centre of architectural production for centuries. The highland has an agricultural tradition, while the infrastructure system is clearly hierarchical: it is bordered to the west by Loṛi Berd, and to the east by the Akht‘ala Monastery. The route between these fortified vertices is marked by a monastic-type architectural infrastructure within an agricultural landscape, where the fields display various patterns reflecting different agrarian practices and land use. Monastic centres mark out the territory by isochrones and constitute a real network along the route serving the agricultural vocation of the place. The historical layering of the Tashir settlement is today an important repository of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The paper proposes a multiscale reading of the architectural elements in conjunction with the infrastructural-territorial hierarchy, thus offering a framework within which to interrogate the functions and roles of certain buildings within monastery complexes and the development of the territory over the course of centuries.