Bagavan (also spelled Bagawan; ) was an ancient locality in the central part of Armenia in the principality of Bagrevand. The site is located in the village of Taşteker to the west of modern Diyadin, Turkey. Situated on a tributary of the Euphrates at the foothills of Mount Npat, to the north of Lake Van, Bagavan held one of the major temples of pre-Christian Armenia. After the Christianization of Armenia, Bagavan became the site of a large church and monastery. Pillaged in 1877 by the Kurds, it was completely destroyed after 1915 during the Armenian genocide.
Bagavan (also spelled Bagawan; ) was an ancient locality in the central part of Armenia in the principality of Bagrevand. The site is located in the village of Taşteker to the west of modern Diyadin, Turkey. Situated on a tributary of the Euphrates at the foothills of Mount Npat, to the north of Lake Van, Bagavan held one of the major temples of pre-Christian Armenia. After the Christianization of Armenia, Bagavan became the site of a large church and monastery. Pillaged in 1877 by the Kurds, it was completely destroyed after 1915 during the Armenian genocide.
==Name== The name Bagavan literally translates as "town of the gods". The etymology was given by Agathangelos, who explained the word as being Parthian, the equivalent of Armenian dicʿ-awan. Movses Khorenatsi held it as bagnacʿn awan ("town of altars"). The name, written as *Bagauana, is recorded in Greek by Ptolemy as Sakauana. Bagavan was most likely connected with one of the Old Persian words for sanctuary, such as *bagina- or *bagastāna-.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).