Who ruled Yerevan?

Yerevan lies on the Hrazdan River at the north-eastern edge of the Ararat plain, in sight of the snow-capped Mount Ararat across the border in Turkey. The plain is one of the most fertile areas of the Armenian Highlands, and settlements have stood here for some five thousand years. Yerevan counts its own age from a fortress founded in 782 BCE, yet for most of its history it was a provincial town on the contested frontier between Persian and Ottoman power. It became a national capital only in 1918 and was largely rebuilt in the 20th century.

On the edge of the modern city, the settlement of Shengavit was occupied in the Early Bronze Age, from the late 4th millennium BCE. In 782 BCE Argishti I, king of Urartu, built the fortress of Erebuni on a hill above the plain, recording the event on a cuneiform inscription that was found there in 1950. The name Erebuni is generally seen as the origin of "Yerevan".

After Urartu declined, the plain became part of the Achaemenid Empire and then of the Armenian kingdoms that followed. Their capitals lay close by, at Armavir, Artashat and later Dvin, and Yerevan itself remained a modest settlement for many centuries. Armenia became the first state to adopt Christianity as its official religion, traditionally in 301 CE, and the nearby cathedral of Etchmiadzin became the seat of the Armenian Church. The region passed through the hands of the Sasanian Empire, the Arab caliphate, Armenian Bagratid kings, Seljuk Turks, the Georgian-backed Zakarid princes, the Mongols and the Turkmen confederations of the 14th and 15th centuries.

From the 16th century Yerevan grew in importance as a frontier fortress between the Safavid shahs of Persia and the Ottoman Empire. It changed hands many times: the Ottomans fortified it in the 1580s, Shah Abbas I recaptured it in 1604 and deported much of the Armenian population of the plain into Iran, and the city fell again to the Ottomans in 1635 before the Persians retook it the next year. An earthquake in 1679 destroyed much of the town. From the mid-18th century it was the seat of the Erivan Khanate, a Persian province ruled by local Turkic khans. The map's alternation of Ottoman, Safavid and "Caucasian khanate" colours reflects this unsettled frontier.

In October 1827, during a war between Russia and Persia, Russian troops under General Ivan Paskevich took the fortress, and the Treaty of Turkmenchay of 1828 transferred the khanate to the Russian Empire. Armenians from Persia and the Ottoman lands resettled in the region, and Yerevan, still a small town, became the centre of a Russian province.

After the Russian Empire collapsed, Armenia declared independence in May 1918, and Yerevan became the capital of a republic swollen with refugees from the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire. The Red Army took over at the end of 1920, and Yerevan became the capital of Soviet Armenia. The architect Alexander Tamanian's master plan of 1924 replaced most of the old town with broad avenues, squares and buildings faced in local pink tuff, while factories and institutes turned it into a major Soviet city of about a million people.

Mass demonstrations over Nagorno-Karabakh began in Yerevan in 1988, and Armenia became independent in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Street protests in the city brought a change of government in the Velvet Revolution of 2018. Yerevan today has about 1.1 million people, roughly a third of the population of Armenia, and dominates its economic and cultural life.