Varagavank

Varagavank was an Armenian monastery on the slopes of Mount Erek, 9 km southeast of the city of Van, in eastern Turkey. The cloister was established in the mid eleventh century by Senekerim-Hovhannes Artsruni, the Armenian King of Vaspurakan, on a previous religious site. At first filling in as the necropolis of the Artsruni rulers, it in the long run turned into the seat of the ecclesiastical overseer of the Armenian Church in Van. The religious community has been portrayed as one of the extraordinary devout focuses of the Armenian church by Ara Sarafian and the most extravagant and most commended cloister of the Lake Van region by Robert H. Hewsen.

Amid the Armenian Genocide, in April– May 1915, the Turkish armed force assaulted, consumed, and decimated a great part of the cloister. A greater amount of it was wrecked during the 1960s, albeit a few segments are as yet surviving. Raffi makes reference to the religious community in volume two of the novel Sparkles. The conspicuous writer Hovhannes Tumanyan composed an article about the religious community in 1910, on the fiftieth commemoration of Mkrtich Khrimian getting to be father of Varag and the cloister's ensuing restoration as an extraordinary focus of training and culture.