Akhtamar:
About two miles from the shore at the south-eastern corner of Lake Van is the small island of Aghtamar, on which the tenth century King Gagik Ardsruni of Vaspurakan built his royal residence, complete with palace, church and extensive gardens. Gagik's magnificent palace church was erected and decorated between 915 and 92` AD Its exterior is carved with friezes representing a wide variety of biblical scenes and secular motifs, and the church is recognized as one of the earliest and finest examples of Romanesque architecture in the Byzantine world and in medieval Christendom generally, a precursor of the great Romanesque churches of the Mediterranean.
For several centuries, Aghtamar was the center of an independent Armenian Catholicosate, a rival to the mother Church at Holy Etchmiadzin and in Sis, but now the island is deserted and its former Armenian community long since dead of dispersed.
Copied from David Marshall Lang's Armenia Cradle of Civilization. 1970
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