Monument to Alexander Tamanyan, Soviet-era monument in Kentron District, Armenia
The Monument to Alexander Tamanyan stands at the start of Tamanyan Street, on the axis of the opera house he designed. The architect, carved in basalt, leans on a long rectangular block resting on two smaller stones; the left stone stands for old architecture, the right for the new, and Tamanyan bridges the two. The granite pedestal bears his name, an Armenian ornament, a plan of Yerevan and a line by Yeghishe Charents.
Tamanyan drew up the first master plan for Yerevan in the 1920s, giving the city its grid of wide avenues and ring roads that still frame its layout today. The monument was erected later to mark his contribution, and it stands near the Cascade, a complex that continued to develop along the lines he originally envisioned.
The granite pedestal bears Tamanyan's name and a national Armenian ornament, and in its right corner is a drawn plan of Yerevan. Beside the plan is carved a line by Yeghishe Charents: "He must have seen a sunny city." The sculptor said the left stone is old architecture and the right one the new era, with Tamanyan bridging them.
The monument stands at the corner of Tamanyan and Moskovyan Streets, close to the Cascade steps, and is easy to reach on foot from the city center. It sits in an open area with no barriers, so you can walk around it from any direction and get a close look at the carved details on the base.
A poem by Yeghishe Charents is carved into the granite platform, invoking the image of a sunny city in a few lines of verse. This combination of architecture and poetry on a single monument is rare in Yerevan and gives the work a dimension that goes beyond a simple tribute to a public figure.
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