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East of the Turkish city of Kars lies a complex of lonely medieval churches. Octagonal towers, crumbling walls, and fallen columns lay scattered across vast grasslands. In the gorge that drops away to the Akhuryan Riverwhich forms Turkey's border with the modern state of Armeniais an ancient bridge, broken in the middle.

These ruins are all that remain of Ani, the cosmopolitan capital of medieval Armenia, one of the earliest kingdoms to adopt Christianity as its state religion in the early A.D. 300s. The site of a fifth-century fortification, Ani was chosen to be Armenia's capital in the 10th century. It became home to as many as 100,000 people, and was so richly endowed with sacred buildings that it came to be known as the "city of 1,001 churches."

Its strategic position along trade routes between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea made it an attractive possession, condemning it to centuries of invasionand eventually, a long period of abandonment.

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Ani's cathedral was completed in A.D. 1001 by Trdat the Architect (who also reconstructed the damaged dome of the Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople). Its ribbed vaulting would not be seen in European cathedrals until at least two centuries later. During Ani's sacking by the Seljuks in 1064, it was converted into a mosque; but returned to Christian usage in 1124. Its dome was destroyed in the earthquake of 1319.

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