Ani Ruins Through the Centuries

By All Over InformationUpdated August 10, 20268 min read

Ani is a city measured in centuries, and each one left its mark on the plateau above the Arpacay river. It rose as a fortress, flourished as the capital of the medieval Armenian kingdom, passed through Byzantine, Seljuk, and Georgian hands, and ended as a ghost town, only to be reborn as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Tracing Ani through the centuries is tracing the whole turbulent history of the eastern frontier of Anatolia. This is that story, era by era.

The Rise of the Bagratids

Long before Ani was a capital, it was a stronghold on a frontier. The triangular plateau above the river, protected by steep gorges on three sides, was fortified from early medieval times, and it guarded the routes that crossed the highlands between the Black Sea, Persia, and Anatolia.

The surrounding region was the heartland of historic Armenia, ruled over the centuries by Persians, Byzantines, and Arab caliphs. In the ninth century, as the caliphate weakened, the Armenian Bagratid dynasty built its power across the region, first as vassals and then as kings, and their small realm grew rich on the same trade that fed Ani.

The Bagratids chose their capital carefully. From their early seat at Kars they extended their control eastward, and by the mid-tenth century they were looking at Ani, with its impregnable plateau and its position on the trade routes, as the natural heart of a rising kingdom.

The Move to Ani

In 961, King Ashot III of the Bagratid dynasty moved his capital to Ani, and the city’s transformation began. Within a few decades the fortress town became a metropolis, its population swelling past a hundred thousand, one of the largest cities of the medieval world. The plateau filled with houses, palaces, and churches.

The move was a statement of ambition. Ashot’s successors, above all Smbat II and Gagik I, poured the kingdom’s wealth into Ani, building the great walls that still ring the plateau and covering the city with monuments. The kings of Bagratid Armenia were creating a capital to rival Constantinople.

The city’s growth was fuelled by trade. Ani sat where the caravan routes of the Caucasus, Persia, and the Mediterranean converged, and its merchants moved silk, spices, and metalwork through the passes. The profits of that commerce paid for the churches and walls that made Ani famous.

Ani Ruins, Turkey — Photo by SAVA86 on Pixabay

The Age of the Great Churches

The decades around the year 1000 were Ani’s golden age. King Gagik I, the greatest of the dynasty’s builders, and the church hierarchy together sponsored an extraordinary burst of construction, and the city’s skyline filled with the domes and conical roofs that earned it the name City of a Thousand and One Churches.

The greatest of these buildings is the cathedral, begun in 989 by the architect Trdat and completed around 1001. Trdat was the outstanding engineer of his age, and his design, a vast vaulted hall with pointed arches, was a triumph of stone construction that anticipated European Gothic architecture by two centuries.

This was also the age of the city’s fortifications. Smbat II’s walls, with their double lines and projecting towers, made Ani nearly unbreakable, and the city’s wealth was matched by its defences. At the turn of the millennium, Ani stood at the height of its power and beauty.

The Byzantine Takeover

The Bagratid dynasty’s luck ran out in the middle of the eleventh century. Rivalries within the royal family weakened the kingdom, and the Byzantine empire, always suspicious of a powerful Armenian state on its frontier, pressed its advantage. In 1045, the Byzantines annexed Ani and took the last Bagratid king to Constantinople.

Byzantine rule changed the city’s character. Ani became a garrison town on the edge of the empire, its churches passed under the authority of the Byzantine church, and the great building boom stopped. The city’s population began to drift as the imperial government, more interested in taxes than in Ani’s glory, managed its new possession from afar.

The Byzantine hold was brief and brittle. The empire’s eastern provinces were already crumbling under pressure from the Seljuk Turks, and Ani, deep in the frontier zone, was exposed. Within two decades, the city would face an army that the Byzantines could not stop.

The Seljuk Conquest

In 1064, Sultan Alp Arslan of the Seljuk Turks laid siege to Ani with a vast army. The defenders, supported by a Byzantine garrison, fought hard, but the city fell, and the sack that followed was one of the most savage in its history, described with horror by chroniclers of the age. The Armenian capital was gone forever.

The Seljuk conquest changed the region’s fate. The victory opened the way for the Turkic settlement of Anatolia, and Ani, once the Christian capital of Armenia, passed into the Muslim world. The city was handed to Shaddadid emirs, a dynasty of Kurdish origin who ruled it for more than a century.

Ani survived the change of masters. The Shaddadids governed from the city, maintained its walls, and built new monuments, and the city continued as a centre of trade and mixed faiths. The Armenian population remained, the churches stayed open, and the emirs built mosques beside them.

The Shaddadid Emirs

Under the Shaddadids, Ani recovered much of its prosperity. The emirs ruled the city and its region from the late eleventh century, and they maintained the fabric of the city, strengthening the fortifications and adding the monuments of their own faith. The mosque of Manuchihr, built in the late eleventh century, still stands at the edge of the gorge.

The city remained a meeting place of communities. Armenians, Muslims, and others lived side by side, and travellers described Ani as a busy, cosmopolitan town. The emirs taxed the trade routes that still passed through the plateau, and the city kept its commercial life alive.

The Shaddadid century was not untroubled. The city was caught between the great powers of the age, the Seljuk sultanate, the Georgian kingdom, and the new states of the region, and it changed hands more than once. Yet each new ruler found Ani worth keeping, and the city endured.

The Zakarid Revival

In 1199, Ani entered its final flowering. The city was taken by the Zakarids, an Armenian noble family in the service of the Georgian crown, and under their rule the Armenians returned to power in their old capital. The revival brought a new age of building and culture.

The most beautiful product of this era is the church of St Gregory of Tigran Honents, completed in 1215. Its exterior is covered with intricate carving, and its interior preserves the only significant fresco cycle at Ani, scenes of the life of Christ painted in brilliant colour. It is the last great church of the city.

Trade revived with the return of stability, and Ani grew rich again on the Silk Road. The Zakarids rebuilt the economy, repaired the city, and restored the Armenian church to its old position. For a few decades, Ani looked once more like the capital it had been.

The Mongol Storm

The revival ended in 1239, when the Mongols took Ani. The city surrendered and was treated relatively lightly, but the conquest was nevertheless a disaster. The Mongol empire disrupted the trade routes, imposed crushing taxation, and shattered the political order that had supported Ani’s prosperity.

The Zakarid line faded, the city’s commerce shrank, and Ani entered a long, slow decline. Through the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the city lived on its memories, its great buildings slowly decaying, its population falling. The plateau was becoming a ghost of its former self.

The decline was accelerated by the region’s instability. Wars, raids, and the shifting borders of the Mongol successor states kept the frontier in turmoil, and the trade that had once flowed through Ani found other routes. The city was being left behind by history.

The Earthquake of 1319 and the End

In 1319, a massive earthquake struck the region, and Ani was devastated. The cathedral lost its great vault, the domes and roofs of the churches collapsed, and many of the city’s buildings were reduced to shells. The damage was beyond the resources of the declining city to repair.

The earthquake was the end. The survivors drifted away, the churches fell silent, and Ani shrank into a small settlement at the edge of its own ruins. Through the Ottoman centuries the city continued its long death, until by the nineteenth century it was a ghost town of empty churches and broken walls.

The region’s new borders completed the transformation. The frontier between the Ottoman and Russian empires, and later between Turkey and Armenia, ran through the Arpacay valley, and Ani was left on the very edge of the map. The City of a Thousand and One Churches became a ruin in a borderland.

From Ghost Town to World Heritage

The modern history of Ani began with the archaeologists. In the late nineteenth century, European travellers and scholars started studying the ruins, and the Russian archaeologist Nicholas Marr conducted major excavations between 1892 and 1917. His work revealed the city’s plan and its history to the world.

The twentieth century was hard on Ani. Wars, earthquakes, and neglect took their toll, and the site remained remote and difficult to visit. Yet its importance grew in the eyes of scholars, and its extraordinary monuments were recognised as among the most significant medieval remains anywhere.

In 2016, the archaeological site of Ani was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Conservation, management, and visitors have followed, and the ghost city has entered a new century of care. After a thousand years of rise and fall, Ani’s long story continues.

Frequently asked questions

What was the golden age of Ani?

The golden age was the century around the year 1000, when Ani was the capital of the Bagratid Armenian kingdom. The cathedral, the great walls, and most of the city’s churches date from this period, when Ani was one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the medieval world.

Who ruled Ani after the Armenians?

After the Byzantine annexation of 1045 and the Seljuk conquest of 1064, Ani was ruled by the Shaddadid emirs, a Muslim dynasty, for more than a century. In 1199 it passed to the Zakarids, an Armenian family under the Georgian crown, before the Mongols took the city in 1239.

What ended Ani’s existence as a city?

A combination of disasters ended Ani. The Mongol conquest of 1239 disrupted its trade and prosperity, and the great earthquake of 1319 destroyed many of its buildings. The survivors drifted away, and by the Ottoman period the city had become a ghost town.

All Over Information

The All Over Information editorial team researches and writes practical English-language guides to Turkey. Facts are checked against official and local sources before publication, prices are published as dated ranges rather than quotes, and guides are revised when things change. We accept no sponsored posts, paid placements or paid links.