Under Aragats: Armenia’s Yazidis and the quiet work of belonging12 min read
In Shamiram, beneath the dry slopes of Mount Aragats, Armenia’s highest peak if Ararat, now across the border in Turkey, is set aside, the Yazidi presence is discreet rather than assertive. It appears in a village square, in a monument, in the rhythm of rural life, and in the quiet certainty of a community that has made this landscape its own. A few older men sit outside playing backgammon with visible passion, leaning over the board as cars pass slowly along the road. The road stretches toward other villages of Aragatsotn, where Armenian churches, Soviet-era buildings, Yazidi cemeteries and mountain views share the same horizon.
This is not the Armenia most visitors first encounter. The country is usually narrated through ancient monasteries, Christianity, genocide memory, war, and geopolitics. These are central to Armenia’s history, but they are not the whole story. The Yazidis reveal another Armenia: rural, non-Christian, multilingual, marked by refuge and coexistence, but also by the fragile work of preserving a minority identity in a small post-Soviet state.
Armenia’s Yazidis are not a recent diaspora or a temporary community. They are part of the country’s social fabric, particularly in villages around Mount Aragats. Their story is carried through temples, cemeteries, monuments, family memory, language, and the everyday life of rural communities. It complicates any simple image of Armenia as a culturally homogeneous Christian nation, without diminishing the importance of Armenian national history. Instead, it adds another layer to it.
A history of refuge
The Yazidis are an ethno-religious community whose faith has ancient roots and whose spiritual centre is Lalish, in northern Iraq. Their history has often been marked by persecution, misunderstanding and forced displacement. In the South Caucasus, many Yazidis settled during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially as violence and insecurity in the Ottoman Empire pushed communities toward the Russian Empire and later Soviet Armenia.
In Armenia, the Yazidi story is inseparable from broader histories of displacement across the region. The South Caucasus has long been a corridor of empires, wars, deportations and refuge. Armenians themselves carry the memory of genocide and exile. This shared history of persecution has often shaped Armenian-Yazidi relations, creating a sense of mutual recognition even when the two communities remain religiously and culturally distinct.
Genocide memorial 1915- 2015 in Aknalish, photo by Mathieu Lemoine
During the late Ottoman period and the First World War, Yazidis, like Armenians and Assyrians, were among the communities targeted by violence. In Yerevan today, a monument commemorates the victims of the Yazidi genocide. Near it stands a memorial to Assyrian victims, a reminder that the history of mass violence in the region was never confined to one people alone.
This memory helps explain why Armenia became one of the most important centres of Yazidi life outside the Middle East. The community is small in absolute numbers, but highly significant in Armenian terms. Yazidis are widely considered Armenia’s largest ethnic minority. Their presence is particularly visible in Aragatsotn, where several villages have a strong Yazidi identity and where the mountain landscape has become part of the community’s own geography of belonging.
Villages under the mountain
The road to Armenia’s Yazidi villages does not feel like a journey into a separate world. It is a gradual shift. The same dry hills, orchards, roadside shops and low houses continue from one settlement to another. Yet certain details begin to tell a different story: names, symbols, monuments, cemeteries, and the presence of a community whose roots are both local and transnational.
In Shamiram, the village square offers an image of ordinary rural life. Older men play backgammon with intensity, their gestures quick and expressive, turning a quiet afternoon into a small public performance. Nothing appears staged for visitors. Yet the place carries a deeper meaning. It is one of the best-known Yazidi villages in Armenia, a settlement where identity is not displayed as spectacle, but embedded in everyday life.
Yazidi Monument in Shamiram, photo by Mathieu Lemoine
The villages around Aragats also show how Yazidi identity has been preserved through rural life. Family networks, livestock, seasonal rhythms, cemeteries, language and local memory all matter. Soviet modernization, migration and post-independence economic hardship changed rural Armenia, but they did not erase the community’s distinctiveness. For many Yazidis, identity is held together through family, religion, endogamy, village belonging and memory.
At the same time, this world is fragile. Like many Armenian villages, Yazidi settlements face demographic decline, labour migration and limited economic opportunities. Young people leave for Yerevan, Russia or elsewhere. The challenge is not only to preserve religious identity, but to sustain the social conditions that make that identity liveable: schools, roads, livelihoods, cultural transmission and local institutions.
A village cannot preserve its traditions if it is emptying out. A language cannot be passed on if schools, families and cultural spaces weaken. Minority identity is often discussed in terms of rights and recognition, but in rural Armenia it is also a question of infrastructure, employment and whether people can afford to remain where their memory lives.
Aknalich and the architecture of visibility
If Shamiram expresses the everyday life of Armenia’s Yazidis, Aknalich represents their public and spiritual visibility. The village lies in Armavir province, east of Metsamor, close to the industrial landscape surrounding Armenia’s nuclear power plant. The contrast is striking: near one of the most strategic and Soviet-marked sites in the country stands Quba Mere Diwane, often described as the largest Yazidi temple in the world.
Opened in 2019, the temple was built through the initiative and funding of Mirza Sloyan, an Armenian-born Yazidi philanthropist. Inspired by Lalish, the principal sacred site of the Yazidis in northern Iraq, its bright stone, conical towers and carefully maintained grounds make it one of the most striking religious sites in Armenia.
The temple is important not only because of its size, but because of what it symbolizes. In a country internationally associated with ancient Christian churches and monasteries, a major Yazidi temple stands as a visible claim to belonging. It says that Yazidi faith is not hidden, tolerated only in private, or confined to memory. It has a place in Armenia’s public landscape, even in a setting shaped by Soviet industry, strategic infrastructure and the layered histories of Armavir province.
Quba Mere Diwane in Aknalish, photo by Mathieu Lemoine
Aknalich also shows how Yazidi identity in Armenia is connected to the wider Yazidi world. The temple’s architecture evokes sacred forms associated with Yazidi religious tradition, especially the conical structures linked to Lalish. For visitors unfamiliar with Yazidism, the site can feel both local and distant: Armenian in its setting, Yazidi in its symbolism, and global in its meaning after the trauma of Sinjar.
The existence of such a temple complicates easy narratives about minority life in the post-Soviet space. Armenia is not free of social problems, prejudice or economic hardship. But the visibility of Yazidi religious institutions suggests a model of minority presence that is more rooted than marginal. The community is not simply asking to be noticed. It has built, commemorated and inscribed itself into the country’s landscape.
Aknalich is not only a monument of stone. It is also a living ritual space. Each spring, the temple becomes the centre of Çarşema Sor, the Yazidi New Year, also known as Red Wednesday. The celebration marks creation, renewal and the return of light. Families gather at the temple, children decorate and break coloured eggs, candles are lit, and music and dance turn the temple courtyard into a communal space of faith and continuity.
The ritual life of Aknalich matters because it shows that Yazidi identity in Armenia is not preserved only through memory of persecution. It is also sustained through celebration, sound, movement and repetition. The zurna, the drum, the circular dances and the gathering of families from Armenia and the diaspora make the temple a place where belonging is performed publicly and collectively.
Inside the Yazidi temple in Aknalish, photo by Mathieu Lemoine
The complex also includes the Ziyarat memorial, dedicated to Yazidi heroes who fought for Armenia. Rather than simply listing names, the memorial places Yazidi sacrifice inside Armenia’s national memory. Among the figures evoked are Jangir Agha, a Yazidi military and social leader remembered for his role alongside Armenian forces during the decisive battles of 1918, and Usub Bek Temuryan, a Yazidi leader who took part in the Battle of Sardarabad and later served in the parliament of the First Republic of Armenia. Their presence at Aknalich matters because it turns the temple complex into more than a religious site: it becomes a place where Yazidi faith, Armenian statehood and shared histories of survival meet.
This became particularly visible in 2026, when Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan visited Aknalich during the Yazidi New Year celebrations. His presence gave the event an unmistakable political dimension, especially in an election year. Speaking of shared citizenship across different faiths and traditions, he presented the Yazidi community as part of Armenia’s civic nation. Yet the visit also showed the ambiguity of recognition: a gesture of respect can also be a gesture of electoral strategy. At Aknalich, faith, memory, citizenship and politics briefly occupied the same space.
Between citizenship and distinctiveness
The Yazidis of Armenia occupy a distinctive position. They are citizens of a state whose dominant national identity is strongly tied to Armenian ethnicity, language and Christianity. Yet they have also been recognized as part of Armenia’s minority landscape, including through mechanisms of parliamentary representation.
This political visibility matters. Armenia’s electoral system provides for representation of national minorities, including Yazidis, Assyrians, Russians and Kurds. For a small community, symbolic representation is not a minor issue. It gives public form to the idea that Armenia is more than a mono-ethnic political community.
Yet representation is not the same as equality, and visibility is not the same as power. Minority politics in Armenia remains shaped by small numbers, limited resources and the dominance of national party structures. Yazidi representatives can raise community issues, but minority concerns rarely sit at the centre of national debate. Questions of education, language preservation, rural development, cultural funding and youth migration remain practical challenges rather than abstract rights.
There is also the question of how Yazidi identity is named and understood. In the Soviet period, Yazidis were often administratively confused with Kurds, a classification that many Yazidis reject because they see themselves as a distinct ethno-religious community. In Armenia, the distinction between Yazidis and Kurds has political and personal significance. It is tied to religion, language, self-identification and historical memory. For outsiders, the categories may seem technical. For the communities concerned, they are deeply personal.
Memory after Sinjar
The 2014 genocide of Yazidis in Iraq transformed global awareness of the Yazidi people. The destruction of villages, mass killings, sexual slavery and displacement produced a new international vocabulary around Yazidi suffering. It also connected Yazidi communities across borders in a shared moment of mourning and political mobilization.
In Armenia, Sinjar resonated strongly. The events were geographically distant, but emotionally close. For a community whose own history includes persecution and refuge, the violence in Iraq was not an isolated tragedy. It belonged to a longer pattern in which Yazidis have repeatedly had to defend their existence, faith and dignity against forces that sought to erase them.
But Armenia’s Yazidi history should not be reduced to Sinjar. The community’s roots in the South Caucasus long predate the 2014 genocide. Its memory links different geographies of suffering and survival: the Ottoman borderlands, the Caucasus, Iraq, Yerevan, Aragatsotn and the sacred landscape of Lalish. Memory does not stay within one national frame. It moves with people, rituals, monuments and stories.
This is one reason why Armenia’s Yazidi sites matter beyond Armenia. A village square in Shamiram, a temple in Aknalich or a memorial in Yerevan may appear local, but each belongs to a wider map of displacement and endurance.
The quiet politics of coexistence
In Armenia, the Yazidi presence is often described through a language of loyalty and coexistence. Yazidis have served in the Armenian armed forces. They live in villages alongside Armenians. Their community is generally seen as integrated into the state, while retaining its own identity. This narrative is important, but it should not be romanticized.
Coexistence is never only a matter of goodwill. It depends on institutions, local relationships, economic conditions and the ability of minorities to transmit their culture without fear of assimilation. In rural Armenia, where resources are limited and many young people leave, the preservation of identity becomes inseparable from development.
A temple can symbolize continuity, but everyday continuity requires people to stay, work, marry, speak, teach and remember. A monument can honour the past, but the future of a community also depends on whether its young people can imagine a life in the villages where their families are buried.
This is where the Yazidi story speaks to broader questions in post-Soviet Armenia. What does minority belonging mean in a small state marked by war, emigration and geopolitical pressure? How can a country built around the survival of one historically persecuted nation also make space for the memories and identities of others? And how can diversity be protected not only through monuments and parliamentary seats, but through the ordinary infrastructure of village life?
Another way of seeing Armenia
For visitors, the Yazidi presence offers another way of seeing Armenia. It draws attention away from the usual itinerary of monasteries and geopolitics, toward villages, minority cemeteries, temples, roadside monuments and the social geography of Aragatsotn. It shows that Armenia’s landscape is not only Christian and Armenian, even if those layers are dominant. It is also Yazidi, Assyrian, Russian, Kurdish and Soviet, marked by movements of people whose histories do not always fit neatly into national narratives.
This does not diminish Armenia’s national story. It enriches it. The existence of Yazidi Armenia is a reminder that small countries can contain multiple memories, and that belonging does not always require sameness.
Under Mount Aragats, identity is not only written in stone churches, borders or state symbols. It is also written in village squares, backgammon tables, temple towers, cemeteries, memorials and the names of communities that have survived by making a home in difficult places.
In Shamiram, the men continue their game. The mountain remains in the background. The scene is ordinary, almost silent. But perhaps that is the point. The Yazidis of Armenia are not only a subject of tragedy, religion or minority politics. They are part of the country’s everyday life. Their story is not separate from Armenia’s story. It is one of the ways Armenia can be understood more fully: as a place of refuge, memory and coexistence, but also as a place where the work of belonging is never finished.
