Out of more than 150,000 submissions from 3,700 participants in 30+ countries, fifteen winning images were announced today in the thirteenth annual Wiki Loves Monuments photography contest.
The photo of Saghmosavank Church in Armenia has been named among the winners of the Wiki Loves Mountains 2023 contest.
The photo submitted by Hayk Hovhannisyan took the ninth place in the contest.
Thirteenth-century monastic complex Saghmosavank, in Armenia, was under snow when Hayk Hovhannisyan took this hypnotic photo.
“It was a beautiful winter day and I wanted to share the amazing monument of my amazing country,” the author explains.
A jury member noticed that the monument stands out very well despite the white snow, indicating that “there is a nice softness in this photo.”
The photo of Grand Palace in Bangkok, Thailand by Kriengsak Jirasirirojanakorn became the winner. The second-place photo is that of the Fetsund Booms in Norway (photographer: Jarle Kvam). The photo of a church in Jaszczurówka, a small village in Poland, captured the third place (photographer: Jakub T. Jankiewicz).
Recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest photography competition, Wiki Loves Monuments celebrates Earth’s rich cultural heritage — buildings, structures, and other assets that are culturally relevant due to their artistic, historic, political, technical, or architectural importance.
The contest serves as a platform for global collaboration in providing free access to mesmerizing photos of monuments from all over the planet. As part of the competition, photographers donate their images to Wikimedia Commons, the free repository that holds most of the images used on Wikipedia, to ensure that the world’s most visible cultural heritage is documented and held in trust for future generations.
Since the first edition of Wiki Loves Monuments in 2010, more than 2.8 million photos were submitted by over 60,000 participants all around the world. This year, the competition elicited 150,000 image submissions uploaded by 3,700 people.
The 2023 winners come from 11 different countries, including Thailand, Poland, Malaysia, Brazil, Armenia, and others, and were selected from a group of national winners by an international jury of experts.
