Amaras Monastery, Stone monastery in Sos, Azerbaijan

Amaras Monastery is a stone complex in Sos with fortification walls, a main church, and an underground burial chamber. Western staircases lead down to this burial space situated beneath the ground level.

Founded at the start of the fourth century by St. Gregory the Illuminator, Amaras became the burial place of his grandson St. Grigoris. In 489 King Vachagan III renovated it and built a chapel for the relics. Plundered by the Mongols in the thirteenth century, destroyed in 1387 during Timur's invasion and demolished again in the sixteenth century, it was rebuilt in the seventeenth century and served as a Russian frontier fortress in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Amaras was the seat of one of the eight dioceses of the Albanian Church at the time of King Vachagan III's Council of Aluen (488 or 493). Mesrop Mashtots, inventor of the Armenian alphabet, established there the first school in Artsakh using his script. The monastery is the burial place of St. Grigoris, grandson of Gregory the Illuminator.

The monastery stands near the village of Sos, in the Khojavend District. Since September 2023 it has been under Azerbaijani control, and the Armenian population has left the region, so access and conditions for visitors are uncertain. The tomb chamber beneath the altar of the 1858 Church of St. Grigoris is reached by twin flights of steps at its western end; the barrel-vaulted space is 1.9 m wide, 3.75 m long and 3.5 m high, and now lies entirely underground.

The tomb chamber under the altar of the 1858 Church of St. Grigoris measures 1.9 m wide, 3.75 m long and 3.5 m high, with a barrel vault. Its eastern end holds a blocked passage, showing there was once a second entrance from that side, unusual for Armenian church architecture and compared by archaeologists to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.