The Church of the Holy Saviour, Alexandropol, 1878

This photograph of the Church of the Holy Saviour was taken by Dmitry Nikitin in 1878 and belongs to the collection “Album of the Alexandropol Detachment”.

The church’s architect was Tadevos Antikyan. It was built in 1859–1873 with donations from the people of Gyumri, and its plan closely resembles that of the Cathedral of Ani. The church withstood the earthquake of 1926. In 1932 the Soviet authorities tried to pull down the bell tower with tanks and then blew it up; in 1964 the city’s chief architect Rafael Yeghoyan restored it. The church was destroyed in the earthquake of 1988 and later fully restored. In Soviet times, when the church had been turned into a concert hall, Gohar Gasparyan, the “Armenian nightingale”, sang there.

The photograph shows the stone church with a many-sided drum and a conical dome, and on the left a bell tower with columns. There are Armenian inscriptions on the façade.