Subdivisions of Armenia in Armenian and Russian: marzer and towns

How the Armenian and Russian names are built

Every province name ends in marz, and the place name before it stands in the genitive: Aragacotni marz is the province of Aragatsotn, Širaki marz that of Shirak. The genitive ending is usually -i; Lori takes -ou and becomes Loṙou marz. ISO 3166-2 gives the bare form, so Aragacotni marz, Aragac̣otn and Aragatsotn are three spellings of one province.

The romanisation on this page follows a scholarly system with ǰ, č, Dz and a raised comma for aspiration (k̕, t̕). ISO 3166-2 uses ISO 9985, which differs in detail: Vayoc̕ Dzori marz here, Vayoć Jor in ISO, Vayots Dzor in English.

Russian forms an adjective from the place name and adds область, oblast’: Арагацотнская область. Some Russian forms differ from the Armenian ones beyond spelling. Hrazdan is Раздан, Razdan, and the district of Yerevan called Davt̕ašen in Armenian is Давидашен in Russian.

From Soviet districts to marzer

The provinces were created on 11 April 1995, when the districts (raions, Armenian šrǰanner) of the Soviet period were combined into ten marzer, with Yerevan kept apart as the capital. The 37 districts in the lists are those that went into the provinces. They have not been administrative units since 1995.

Below the provinces the country is made of communities, hamaynkner, either urban or rural, each formed by one or more settlements; Yerevan is a community of its own and is divided into twelve districts. ISO 3166-2:AM lists the same eleven codes; its only recorded change, on 26 November 2018, corrected the label of the romanisation system.