Khachkars: Armenia's Sacred Cross-Stones
Scattered across the Armenian highlands — in monastery courtyards, cemeteries, at roadsides, embedded in church walls — stand tens of thousands of carved stone monuments unlike any other in the world. They are called khachkars (from khach , cross, and kar , stone), and they are Armenia's most distinctive contribution to the art of the Christian world: upright rectangular slabs of volcanic basalt or tuff, carved in shallow relief with an interlaced cross whose arms extend to the edges of the stone, surrounded by a dense interlace of knotwork, rosettes, palmettes, and geometric patterns of extraordinary complexity. The tradition began in the 9th century — when Armenia adopted Christianity as its state religion in 301 CE, the earliest nation to do so — and the carvers never stopped. Each khachkar is unique: no two have the same pattern, and the tradition of pattern-making became over the centuries a form of mathematical exploration in stone, the interlaces growing more complex, the s...