Vank Cathedral

In 1604, Shah Abbas I forcibly relocated an estimated 300,000 Armenians to Isfahan during a scorched earth campaign against the Ottomans, prizing their skill in trade and craftsmanship for his empire. From this displacement emerged Vank Cathedral, a mosque-domed church where Persian tilework meets biblical frescoes in gold and blue. The real revolution came later. In 1630, Archbishop Khachatur Kesaratsi returned from a trip abroad having learned the mechanics of printing, and spent years afterward building Iran’s first press by hand, carving the type himself when none could be imported. Eight years and countless setbacks after that initial trip, the clergy finally printed their first book, the Psalms, a job that alone took a year and five months.

The cathedral’s exterior gives none of this away. It is plain brick, low and unassuming, built to resemble the mosques around it rather than compete with them. Only past the entrance does the interior reveal itself: walls stacked with tilework, a dome painted lapis blue, and murals running the full circumference of the room, Christ’s life above, the martyrdom of Armenian believers below, and Judgment overhead where the two bands meet. Four centuries later, the type Kesaratsi cut by hand still sits in the church museum a few rooms from where it was used, a monastery that started as a resettlement camp and ended up printing its own scripture rather than wait for someone else to send it.