The government will spend 213 million AMD this year to renovate and restore ten cultural monuments in Armenia this year. Samvel Mosoyan, who heads the Agency to Preserve Historical and Cultural Monuments attached to the Ministry of Culture, said that 10-15% of the country’s 24,300 monuments are in need of immediate attention. He told Hetq that such work was being carried out in stages given the scarcity of available government resources. Mkrtich Minasyan, President of the Union of Architects, confessed that the work could not be carried out by government means alone and suggested that the All Armenia Fund allocate some of its resources to the restoration of cultural monuments. Mr Minasyan said he was amazed that new churches were being built when other historical religious sights were in ruins. He was also concerned that there was almost no foreign language literature on Armenian historical and cultural monuments and that what exists in Armenian is sorely lacking.