Ānī, “the City of 1,001 Churches,” was a mediaeval capital whose ruins lie on the Arpaçay River east of Kars in present-day Turkey, on the border with Armenia.

Archaeology has revealed that Ānī was inhabited from the second millennium B.C.E., but the first written record is from the first century C.E. Strabo refers to the Aenianes, a people who inhabited the region of Širak and likely gave their name to the city Aeniana (11.7). Ānī first appears in Armenian literature in the sixth-century histories of Ełišē (136) and Łazar…