Despite powerful resistance and lengthy delays, a monument projected to become the “world’s largest” Jesus statue is taking shape near Yerevan with a newly scheduled completion date.
Recent photos provided to RFE/RL show construction is under way on a mountaintop pedestal after years of delays. A spokesperson for the project told RFE/RL on March 19 that the “tentative deadline” for completion of the monument is now 2027.
Plans for the statue to be built atop Mount Hatis, a 2,500 meter peak around 30 kilometers northeast of Yerevan, were first announced in January 2022 by controversial Armenian businessman Gagik Tsarukian.
The massive Christ, Tsarukian said, would "show the path to revival and light to the Armenian people," following a devastating conflict with neighboring Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
The aluminium Jesus was originally slated for completion by 2025 but has faced hurdles that nearly scuppered the project.
Soon after its announcement, the Armenian Apostolic Church publicly opposed the project for contradicting Armenian religious traditions. A statement declared that church authorities “do not consider the installation of a statue of Our Lord Jesus Christ acceptable.”
Jesus statues are rejected as idols in Armenian religious tradition. Public monuments to Christianity in the Caucasian country are instead commonly made with carved “Khachkar” cross stones. Rare statues of Christ that do exist in the country, where some 97 percent of the population are Christian and crime is low, have been vandalized.
Armenia’s government voiced support for the privately funded Jesus project as a potential tourist draw in 2022, but before planning consents were finalised, a groundbreaking ceremony on the summit of Mount Hatis in July 2022 reportedly “irreversibly damaged” sections of an ancient fortress.
After the groundbreaking controversy the project was put on ice and in January 2025, Armenia’s culture chief Zhanna Andreasian announced the project could not continue on the summit location where the fortress was located.
The pedestal site was then moved “several hundred meters away” from its original position to a lower peak of Mount Hatis and permits for the project were issued soon afterwards. Work resumed on the pedestal's foundation in September 2025.
In the village of Zovuni, where the Jesus statue sits in three parts awaiting an eventual helicopter airlift onto its long-delayed mountaintop pedestal, Yerevan-based guide Suren Aghabekian told RFE/RL that the statue is "already attracting foreign visitors.” Aghabekian says he recently added a stop at the open-air workshop to his tour itineraries.
The Christ statue and its pedestal are planned to rise a total of 101 meters. By comparison, Brazil’s iconic Christ The Redeemer statue stands 38 meters high and New York’s Statue of Liberty rises 93 meters.
The Jesus project has been widely celebrated outside Armenia, including in a viral social media post in January by Irish MMA star Conor McGregor, who described the statue's design as "magnificent."
Inside Armenia, however, Richard Giragosian, the director of the Yerevan-based Regional Studies Center, says public attitudes to the monument are largely negative. "Both the original idea and the driving force behind the project are rooted in the personal ego of [Tsarukian], one of the more egregious corrupt Armenian oligarchs," he told RFE/RL. The think tank head says many Christians in the country feel the money for the project should have been donated to the church.
In Zovuni, tour guide Aghabekian says most reactions to the sections of Jesus that now loom over the village appear to be positive. "I still think that money could have been used for something more practical. But, at the end of the day, it's [Tsarukian's] money and he can spend it how he wants," he said.
