Lake Sevan is the largest lake in the Caucasus, a sheet of blue water 1,900 metres up on the plateau of eastern Armenia, so large that the far shore drops below the horizon, and its most famous sight, a monastery on an island, now stands on a peninsula because Soviet engineers drained the lake by twenty metres. From the 1930s the water was tapped for irrigation and power, the level fell, and the island of Sevanavank joined the mainland; the two ninth-century churches on its top, built of dark volcanic stone, are climbed to by a stepped path from the shore, and from their doors the whole lake spreads out to a flat horizon with bare brown hills around it. The drawdown has since been partly reversed by a tunnel bringing water in from another valley, and the lake is rising again, slowly, drowning the beaches that grew on the old lakebed. Sevan is the country's sea. Armenia has no coast, and in summer the shore fills with Yerevan families swimming in water that stays cold, barbecuing and eating the lake's fish.
That fish is the ishkhan, the prince, a trout found only in Sevan and nearly wiped out by the draining and overfishing; it is grilled at the lakeside restaurants and fished, now, under strict rules. Boats leave Sevan town for the middle of the lake, where the monastery peninsula and the hills fall into line behind you and the far shore stops being visible at all. On the western shore, at Noratus, stands the largest field of khachkars left in Armenia, close to a thousand carved cross-stones spread across seven hectares of open grass, each one different, some a thousand years old, the country's medieval art standing in a meadow with the lake behind. The lake sits at the height of a mountain, and the air is thin and bright; the road from Yerevan takes an hour. Sevan is a sea that a landlocked country made for itself, and the monastery on the shore is the mark of how much of it was taken away.