Since we've already seen a glimpse of the Cascade, a building complex, let's take a closer look. It was originally planned in the 1920's when it was proposed by Alexander Tamanyan. The idea was a cascading waterfall and terraced garden to join two parts of the city, the City Center and Victory Park. He died, however, before the implementation of it. Oddly enough, in 1970, 34 years after his death, the Soviet Union returned to the idea of building it. The city's new chief architect, Jim Totosyan and others modified the design. Our Armenian guide said that the Cascade links the Downtown to residential areas in the hills of Yerevan.

The actual building of the Cascade complex took many years and involved many delays. Moscow had to help with the funding and such things as funding the Olympic Games in Moscow, curtailing funds, the 1988 earthquake, and the fall of the Soviet Union, all slowed the progress. Eventually, the project received philanthropist funding.

The Cascade is functional today, though work continues on it. The architectural changes included the addition of extensive staircases, exhibition halls, courtyards, internal escalators, and various sculptures in the gardens. We spent quite a while here and started at the bottom. There are 572 stairs to get to the top. Our group took the escalators which are hidden underneath the stairways. I was the only one that took the stairs, but I alternated between the stairs and the escalators. I probably walked about 300 stairs.

I suppose the biggest disappointment was that there were no waterfalls or hardly any water at all when we were there. I imagine it would have been fantastic to see that. The entire structure was magnificent, but we probably spent the most time viewing the sculpture garden portion of the complex. The sculptures are from three Brits, a Czech couple, a Spaniard, and a Colombian artist.

There was a wide variety of sculptures in the garden and I'll just let them speak for themselves. I would only add that Fernando Botero, the Colombian artist, seemed to like plumpness in his sculptures. Can you guess Botero's creations?

The view from the top was even more fantastic, thanks to Mount Ararat.