This talk takes an ecocritical approach to intersections of text, architecture and landscape in the 10th-14th centuries in the region of Vayots Dzor, which was during the middle ages a central province of the kingdom of Syunik. I will explore the medieval idea of the sacred desert, as established in biblical imagery and expanded in the vitae of the so-called desert fathers, founding figures within medieval Christianity and in the ideologies of monasticism especially.