Studies and Evaluations of Structure Behaviour and Seismic Stability of Hovhannés-Garabéd Monastic Complex

The present paper considers the architectural, structural and seismic capacity aspects of the St.Hovhannés-Garabéd (St. John the Baptist) monastic complex (XIVth c) which mainly consists of a church,a mausoleum and a bell tower, as well as of minor service spaces, presently destroyed. The complex is located on 2000m height above sea level in the southern mountain region of Vayq in the south of Armenia on a specific soil site. At present the bell tower and mausoleum are seriously damaged and the plan of the church is strongly deformed. Due to the lack of major historical data on the circumstances and date as to when the church endured such damage, evaluations and complex studies were carried out with respect to architectural and engineering aspects in the frame of collaboration between the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and the National Survey of Seismic Protection of the Republic of Armenia.Phenomena like landslide or collapse of the earth crust, with resulting damages for the masonry structure of the buildings, must be taken into account along with the mechanism of collapse of the masonry caused by horizontal accelerations. Major subsequent adjustments can make our intervention useless if we focus only on the monument and not on the earth below in our evaluations. Therefore we must also focus on the stratigraphy of the terrain, which provides us with data on the material composition of the land