How urbicide shaped Yerevan: VMedia showed what remained off-camera from Macron's visit - video
On the VMedia platform, a new video has been released titled “How Urbicide Shaped Yerevan: The History Macron Missed,” in which French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to Armenia serves as a pretext for discussing the city’s largely forgotten historical heritage.
The authors draw attention to the fact that during Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Yerevan, he and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan allowed themselves several relaxed moments: Macron performed “La Bohème,” the classic song by Charles Aznavour celebrating Parisian street life, while Pashinyan accompanied him on drums. The leaders strolled through the Armenian capital, Macron went for runs along its streets, and stayed at the Marriott hotel—all these gestures were meant to underscore the “special relations between two sisters,” as Yerevan and Paris call each other.
However, no one mentioned one detail: the hotel where the French delegation stayed was built on the ruins of a destroyed medieval Muslim fortress—the palace of the Yerevan Khan (Sardar’s palace), the report notes.
It is through this lens that VMedia proposes to view the process of the large-scale disappearance of the historical appearance of old Yerevan.
The report recalls that the history of the Yerevan fortress dates back to the early sixteenth century.
In 1504, Safavid Shah Ismail commissioned his commander Revangulu Khan to build a fortress on this territory. It was erected over seven years on the rocky bank in the southeastern part of the Zangi River and named after Revangulu Khan—Revan, and later Yerevan. In October 1827, the Erivan fortress was captured by Russian troops under the command of General Paskevich, and the Yerevan Khanate was annexed to the Russian Empire. The fortress was not destroyed until the formation of the Armenian SSR on this territory. After that, the systematic destruction of the fortress began, of which no traces remain today.
Macron’s visit becomes a kind of prism through which the authors propose to look at what for many years remained hidden in plain sight—the near-complete destruction of a place that artists, military men, and travelers of the past called an eastern wonder.
The contrast drawn in the video produces a quiet but devastating impression. Montmartre with its windmills and cobblestone streets looks practically the same as in Renoir’s paintings. The Yerevan equivalent—the fortress, the khan’s palace, famous for its crystal hall and stained-glass interiors, as well as the mosques—were systematically demolished, mainly in the 1960s. The resulting situation looks almost absurd: while “La Bohème” was being recorded in Paris—a kind of declaration of love for street life and urban memory—old Yerevan was being consigned to oblivion and destruction.
The video compiles notable primary sources: nineteenth-century paintings by Franz Roubaud and Prince Grigory Gagarin, early photographs of palace interiors, and military lithographs. These are not mere illustrations—they are testimonies. One particularly telling detail stands out: on the site of Sardar’s palace, once called the most beautiful building in the entire East, there now stands a cognac factory.
VMedia does not exaggerate or resort to sensationalism in presenting the material. Perhaps it is precisely the restraint of the presentation that gives the material its special force. The channel covers issues of history and politics in the Caucasus, and this video is one of its most ambitious works: part architectural elegy, part invitation to view the recent history of the region through the lens of history.
