TEHRAN – Some 2,500 foreign tourists visited the UNESCO-inscribed Saint Stepanos Monastery in northwest Iran during the first half of the current Iranian calendar year (started March 21, 2017).

Some 2,500 entry tickets for the monastery have been sold to foreign nationals during the period, Mehdi Abbasi, a tourism official, told IRNA on Sunday.

Located about 15 km northwest of the city of Julfa in East Azarbaijan province, the monastery together with St. Thaddeus and the Chapel of Dzordzor have been inscribed on UNESCO World Heritage list as “The Armenian Monastic Ensembles of Iran”.

They are examples of outstanding universal value of the Armenian architectural and decorative traditions yet bear testimony to very important interchanges with other regional cultures, the Byzantine, Orthodox and Persian, in particular.

PHOTO: A view of Saint Stepanos Monastery in northwest Iran

AFM/MQ/MG