AKNALICH, Armenia — Under a cloudless sky this week, the radially segmented white domes of this town’s new Yazidi temple seem to capture the sun, which Yazidis regard as the sacred source of energy and truth.
Golden suns top each of the domes that tower over the lone cupola of an adjacent sanctuary whose completion seven years ago made it the first Yazidi temple in the post-Soviet world.
The lavish new edifice of polished granite and white Iranian marble opened its doors on September 30 to worshipers of the Yazidi religion, a historically vulnerable minority that suffered mass killings and abductions in its Middle Eastern ancestral heartland earlier this decade.
“Our happiness is without limit,” says Romik Avdoyan, a Yazidi from nearby Artashat who is visiting the temple for the first time with his wife.
“Now ordinary Yazidi people can come here and get blessings. It’s a very special moment for our people,” he says. “We’ve come through 74 genocides and now look at this.”
The budding facility is the latest sign of robust support for the endogamous Yazidi community in this southern Caucasus nation of around 3 million, where Yazidis are thought to number 30,000-50,000 and make up the largest minority.
To the south of Aknalich, in the distance but visible beyond the border with Turkey, stands one of Armenians’ most cherished landmarks, Mount Ararat.
Much nearer — in fact just kilometers to the northeast in this seismically active landscape — loom the three cooling towers of an aging Soviet-era nuclear plant at Metsamor.
During an early morning visit this week, Quba Mere Diwane, hailed as the world’s largest Yazidi temple, seems finished except for some marble tiling around the building.
At least two of a handful of groups of visitors are Yazidis from Russia’s Black Sea region of Krasnodar.
At one point, a group of unknowing tourists is admonished for entering the temple through a side door without first removing their shoes.
A squat banquet hall nearby is already being used for Yazidi wedding celebrations.
A cemetery and its shrines — many of them black granite with portraits of the deceased — occupies a large section of the stony ground at the center of the complex.
Some of the roughly four-hectare site will house a seminary and museum.
Plans for the expanded complex at Aknalich reportedly began around the time that the more modest temple was completed.
That was two years before the systematic massacre and enslavement of thousands of Yazidis by Islamic State (IS) fighters in northern Iraq that thrust their ancient religion into the international spotlight in 2014.
The United Nations has since labeled the IS actions a genocide.
Tens of thousands of Yazidis who survived the IS assault in Iraq or Syria are still stuck in makeshift refugee camps in Iraq and Turkey, with many more resettling in Europe.
“Finally we feel that people around the world are recognizing us, that people will notice our culture for something positive,” Hasan, a Russian Yazidi visiting Aknalich from Krasnodar to see the temple, tells RFE/RL. “Let everyone know that there is a big church in Armenia and it is welcoming everyone.”
The domed temple at Aknalich was designed by one of Armenia’s most prolific architects of religious buildings, Artak Ghulyan, whose newly built Armenian Apostolic churches dot Armenia, with more in Russia and Jordan.
Mushegh Ghulyan, of Ghulyan Architects, tells RFE/RL that it was heavily inspired by Lalish, Yazidis’ holiest temple and a site of pilgrimage in northern Iraq.
“The main goal was to create a new, richer look for the biggest Yazidi temple in the world and remain native to traditions at the same time,” he says.
Its seven minor domes reportedly mirror Yazidism’s belief that God entrusted the world to the care of seven “mysteries” or angels.
“The white marble stone is from Iran, which emphasizes the eastern, non-Armenian character of the building,” Ghulyan says.
Armenian-born Yazidi businessman Mirza Cholai Sloyan is said to have
financed the temple complex. One source claimed Sloyan made his fortune
in the TV industry after emigrating to Russia.
Reached on his Russian mobile phone after the temple’s unveiling this
week, Sloyan declines to confirm his investment or discuss the project
in any way.
Yazidi activists point proudly to Sloyan’s naming of a shopping mall in
Moscow, Shingal, after the historical Yazidi region in northern Iraq,
better known as Sinjar, that was a hub of IS militants’ 2014 violence
against the group.
A statue on the temple grounds at Aknalich pays tribute to the victims of the Sinjar massacres five years ago.