Archives Page

I just set up an archives page and customized the template that came with wordpress. But linking to it by:

https://www.example.net/?page_id=5

is not very pretty, is it? Is there a way I can link to it by something similar to:

https://www.example.net/archives ?

With “normal” pages this is done by publishing them, but since I can’t publish without breaking the page (it’s a template) how can this be done? Do I have to manually write a rewrite expression in my .htaccess file or…?