Sanahin is a village in the northern province of Lori in Armenia, now considered part of the city of Alaverdi

Alaverdi

Alaverdi formerly Manes, is a city situated in the northeast of the Armenian province of Lori, not far from the border with Georgia. This mining and industrial city with approximately 16,500 inhabitants -down from 26,300 of the 1989- situated at the bottom of the Debed river gorge, is one of the...

 (the cable car

Aerial tramway

An aerial tramway , cable car , ropeway or aerial tram is a type of aerial lift which uses one or two stationary ropes for support while a third moving rope provides propulsion...

 that connects it with the Alaverdi centre is supposed to have the steepest climb in the whole former USSR). The village is notable for its monastery complex (Sanahin Monastery

Sanahin Monastery

Sanahin Monastery is an Armenian monastery founded in the 10th century in the Lori Province of Armenia.The name Sanahin literally translates from Armenian as "this one is older than that one", presumably representing a claim to having an older monastery than the neighbouring Haghpat Monastery...

), founded in the 10th century and is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site

World Heritage Site

A UNESCO World Heritage Site is a place that is listed by the UNESCO as of special cultural or physical significance...

 along with monasteries in Haghpat

Haghpat

Haghpat is a village in the Northern Lori province of Armenia, close to the city of Alaverdi and the state border with Georgia.It is notable for Haghpat Monastery, a religious complex founded in the 10th century and included in the UNESCO World Heritage List along with monasteries in nearby Sanahin...

.

Notable people

Sanahin was also the birthplace of the two well-known Mikoyan brothers. Artem Mikoyan was a well known airplane constructor, and one of the "fathers" of MiG

Mig

-Industry:*MiG, now Mikoyan, a Russian aircraft corporation, formerly the Mikoyan-Gurevich Design Bureau*Metal inert gas welding or MIG welding, a type of welding using an electric arc and a shielding gas-Business and finance:...

. Anastas Mikoyan

Anastas Mikoyan

Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan was an Armenian Old Bolshevik and Soviet statesman during the rules of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev....

 was the politician with the longest career of any member of the Soviet Politburo

Politburo

Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...

. He was involved in negotiating the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, was an agreement officially titled the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union and signed in Moscow in the late hours of 23 August 1939...

, was a member of the Soviet delegation trying to improve relations with Josip Broz Tito

Josip Broz Tito

Marshal Josip Broz Tito – 4 May 1980) was a Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman. While his presidency has been criticized as authoritarian, Tito was a popular public figure both in Yugoslavia and abroad, viewed as a unifying symbol for the nations of the Yugoslav federation...

's Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....

, and played a major role in the Cuban Missile Crisis

Cuban Missile Crisis

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a confrontation among the Soviet Union, Cuba and the United States in October 1962, during the Cold War...

negotiations. A fraction of visitors to the monastery also stop at the small nearby museum in the former school, run by Mikoyans' relatives.