SQUARES AND PARKS

1850s–1860s, 1924, 1960s

Andrei Sakharov Square is located at the intersection of Vardanants, Nalbandyan, and Pushkin Streets. It is connected to Republic Square via Nalbandyan Street and plays an important role in the urban composition of Yerevan’s city center.

In the Master Plan of Yerevan prepared by Academician Alexander Tamanyan in 1924, the square was designed with expanded boundaries on the site of Panah Khan Square of the Persian period and the New Square (1850s–1860s) of the Russian period.

Development of the square began in the late 1920s and was largely completed during the 1930s. The first building erected on the square was the State Insurance Building of the Armenian SSR (1929–1931; architects: Karo Halabyan, Mikayel Mazmanyan, and Gevorg Kochar).

Of the historic buildings, only the two-story structure at the corner of Nalbandyan and Vardanants Streets has survived. It originally housed the Imperial Palace and the Provincial Treasury (1901; built of black tuff; architects: Vasily Mirzoyan and N. Kitkin).

Until 1991, Sakharov Square bore the name of Bolshevik revolutionary and Baku Commune member Meshadi Azizbekov. In 2000, a bust of the world-renowned physicist, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Nobel Prize laureate, public and political figure, and one of the creators of the hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov, was erected on a cylindrical basalt pedestal at the site of the former monument (architect: Levon Ghalumyan; sculptor: Tigran Arzumanyan).

Sakharov Square is one of the central squares of Yerevan.