Saints Paul and Peter Church

Saint Paul and Peter Church stood in Yerevan's old Shahar quarter, built as a three-nave basilica in the style common across Armenia in the 5th and 6th centuries. Armenian sources date its founding to the 5th century, with repairs and rebuilding recorded in the 7th century, the 12th century, and again a full renovation in the 19th century.

By most accounts it was not an architectural showpiece. What mattered was its size and structural solidity — it functioned as one of the anchor churches of the city center, part of a cluster of churches that together gave old Yerevan its Christian character.

The church did not survive Soviet urban planning. Sources give slightly different dates for its end — one records demolition in November 1930, another places it between 1933 and 1936 — but the outcome is the same: it was pulled down over the objections of architects Alexander Tamanian and Ashkharhbek Kalantar, and the Moscow Cinema went up on Abovyan Street in its place. Nothing of the original structure remains on site today.

The church stood in central Yerevan, in what is now the area around Abovyan Street, on the site occupied today by the Moscow Cinema building.