Older than Rome, staring straight at a volcano across the border
One of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities, founded in 782 BCE — every clear day, Yerevan looks directly at Mount Ararat, the biblical resting place of Noah's Ark, even though the mountain itself now sits just across the closed border in Turkey.
Founded as the fortress of Erebuni in 782 BCE by Urartian king Argishti I — older than Rome by several decades — Yerevan became Armenia's capital only in 1918, after centuries of Persian, then Russian, control. Soviet-era urban planner Alexander Tamanian redesigned the entire city center in the 1920s around a circular plan radiating from Republic Square, the pink-and-yellow volcanic tuff stone still visible across downtown.