Dargavs Necropolis

High in a mountain valley of North Ossetia, on a grassy slope above the village of Dargavs, stands a cluster of close to a hundred white stone houses with steep, stepped roofs. They are not houses for the living. This is the Dargavs necropolis, known locally as the City of the Dead, the largest of the family burial grounds that medieval Ossetians built in the valleys of the central Caucasus, and seen from the road below it looks like a small, silent town laid out along the hillside.

The crypts were in use from roughly the fourteenth century into the first decades of the nineteenth. Each belonged to a single family, and generations were laid in the same building one above another, which is why the complex is thought to hold remains of thousands of people. There are two main types. Semi-subterranean vaults sit partly in the slope, while the tall above-ground crypts rise up to several storeys, with wooden floors inside and openings at different heights. Their walls are of roughly dressed stone set in lime mortar, and the roofs, the most striking part of the ensemble, climb in a series of projecting slate courses to a pointed peak, so that each tomb resembles a pyramid wearing a stepped hood. A defensive tower stands at the back of the complex.

Burial customs here left their own traces. The dead were sometimes laid in hollowed wooden coffins shaped like boats, together with some of their belongings. Relatives threw a coin at a stone near the crypts: if it struck, the soul was believed to have reached the other world. Local tradition also connects the crypts with a plague epidemic, telling that the sick withdrew into their family tombs to spare the living. The whole ensemble is a protected cultural heritage site, and it should be approached as what it is, a cemetery: the crypts are viewed from outside, and their contents are not to be disturbed.

Getting there

Dargavs lies in the Prigorodny district of North Ossetia, about 29 km from Vladikavkaz as the crow flies; by the narrow mountain road through the Gizeldon valley the drive takes around an hour. Vladikavkaz Beslan International Airport (OGZ) is about 43 km away. Most visitors come by car or on day excursions from Vladikavkaz, often combined with the Midagrabin waterfalls further south.