Armenia document photos online

Armenia is one of those rare places where an identity document tries to describe a nation that mostly lives somewhere else. Roughly 3 million people live inside the country, yet the worldwide Armenian diaspora is estimated at 8-10 million - more than double the resident population. To bind that scattered nation together, Armenia recognizes dual citizenship and lets anyone who can prove Armenian roots claim a passport through a simplified procedure, skipping the usual residence and language requirements. Proof can even be a baptismal certificate from the Armenian Apostolic Church. Few passports in the world are designed so deliberately around ancestry rather than address.

• Diaspora Armenia's global diaspora of an estimated 8-10 million people is more than twice the country's resident population of about 3 million, making it one of the most dispersed nations on Earth.
• Citizenship Anyone who can prove Armenian descent can obtain an Armenian passport through a simplified procedure - no three-year residence and no language test - and a church baptismal certificate is accepted as evidence of roots.
• Dual Nationality Armenia banned dual citizenship until a 2005 referendum lifted the prohibition, with the change formalized in 2007, so today you need not renounce any existing nationality to become Armenian.
• Passport Power In the Henley Passport Index for 2025 the Armenian passport ranked 76th, granting visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 67 destinations.
• Currency The Armenian dram, introduced on 22 November 1993 to replace the Soviet rouble, takes its name from a word meaning simply 'money' that is cognate with the Greek drachma and Arabic dirham, and it is subdivided into 100 luma.
• First Christian State Around 301 AD Armenia became the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity as its state religion, nearly a century before the Roman Empire did the same.
• Older Than Rome The capital Yerevan traces its founding to the Urartian fortress of Erebuni in 782 BC, making it about 29 years older than Rome and one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities.
• World Record Armenia's Areni-1 cave yielded the world's oldest known leather shoe, roughly 5,500 years old, and the oldest known winery, dating to around 4100-4000 BC.
• Statehood At its 1991 independence referendum, voters approved breaking from the USSR by about 99%, reviving a statehood first declared as the short-lived First Republic of Armenia back in 1918.