YEREVAN, Armenia  Some 20,000 Armenians turned up for the opening of the Cafesjian Center for the Arts last week. They jammed the new sculpture park and the terraced gardens and galleries, including the first exhibition ever in Armenia of the Armenian-born American great, Arshile Gorky.

The center, a mad work of architectural megalomania and historical recovery, is one of the strangest but most memorable museum buildings to open in ages. Imagine an Art Deco version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon stretching nearly the height of the Empire State Building, its decorations coded with Armenian symbolism.

Did I mention the artificial waterfalls?

Built into a gigantic hill in the commercial heart of this capital city, with a staircase that climbs the outside linking the gardens, the place was originally conceived in Soviet times to be topped by a monument to the Soviet revolution. That it has been turned into a contemporary-art center by a rich American is a twist of history whose symbolism is lost on no one here.

There’s no endowment, no professional board, so it may very well soon fall flat on its face, as so much has in this country where widespread corruption, lethargy and years of isolation have led to an unemployment rate around 40 percent, a crumbling infrastructure and almost no middle class.