The other monastery buildings

The monastery of Tatev had a university which was one of the most important in Armenia and was well known abroad also. It was a centre of humanistic studies, arts and architecture, writing and minor sciences.

The library of the monastery was one of the most important in the Country. Unfortunately the ten thousand manuscripts that where kept in the monastery where partially destroyed by the Turks in the XVth century. The buildings connected with the above mentioned functions, the rooms of Father Superior and the vaulted-hall refectory with kitchen and warehouses form an almost complete circle around the main religious buildings.

According to historical data, all these premises were completely rebuilt in the XVII-XVIIIth cc., after the 1658 earthquake. Although the literature about Tatev is quite abundant, there is no precise documentation that can help us to acknowledge with certainty the original functions of every single secular use building. Different hypothesis can be formulated on the basis of the shape and dimension of the rooms.

From ancient pictures we can see that some of the rooms in the south and north blocks where connected by wooden external balconies, now destroyed.