Khndzoresk
Interesting facts
- In 1730 Mkhitar Sparapet was killed by Khndzoresk villagers fearing reprisals; when his head reached the Ottoman pasha in Tabriz, the pasha had the killers beheaded for treachery.
- His tomb in the gorge is the focus of Sparapet Day, a national day of remembrance held every 12 September and attended by Armenia's top leaders.
- The inscription on the tomb gives the wrong year of death, 1726, and records that he came from the region of Ganja and died young with his aim unfulfilled.
- Visiting in 1735, Catholicos Abraham Kretatsi marvelled at women climbing ropes to caves 20 to 30 metres above the ground with children or baskets strapped to their backs.
- Houses were stacked up the slopes so tightly that the flat roof of one dwelling often served as the courtyard of the house above it.
- The village is first mentioned in writing by Stepanos Orbelian, the thirteenth-century chronicler of Syunik.
- Folk etymology links the name to khndzor, the Armenian word for apple, while another explanation derives it from Khordzor, meaning deep gorge.
- According to local tradition, the village was founded by two hunter brothers fleeing from Nakhichevan, who followed a deer into the gorge and decided to settle there.
- The painter Martiros Saryan urged Soviet Armenia's parliament to protect Old Khndzoresk as a vast museum of antiquity, saying few places in the world were so miraculous.
- Khndzoresk's folk minstrels were renowned enough to travel as far as Tabriz to compete in song contests performed in Persian.
Why it is worth it
Old Khndzoresk in southern Armenia is a village carved into the walls of a deep gorge: hundreds of artificial caves cut into the rock pillars and cliffs on the slopes of the Khor Dzor, the "deep gorge". For centuries people lived, kept animals and stored food in these dwellings, linked by paths and stairways that climb from ledge to ledge. Seen from the rim of the canyon, the cave openings pock the rock towers like honeycomb.
The cave village remained inhabited until the 1950s. At its peak, in 1914, Khndzoresk counted more than 8,300 inhabitants, making it one of the largest villages in the region. In the 1950s its people moved up to the plateau and built New Khndzoresk on the edge of the gorge, and the old caves came to be used as stables and storerooms. In the gorge stand the seventeenth-century church of St. Hripsime, the small cave church of St. Tatevos and the Anapat hermitage, where the eighteenth-century military leader Mkhitar Sparapet, a hero of the Armenian resistance in Syunik, is buried.
A steel suspension bridge spans the gorge between the new village and the old one. Built in 2012, it is 160 metres long and hangs about 63 metres above the floor of the canyon, swaying gently underfoot as walkers cross towards the cave dwellings. Khndzoresk belongs to the municipality of Goris in Syunik Province and lies at about 1,580 metres above sea level; Goris itself, a small town of stone houses below its own cave-riddled cliffs, is the main centre of this mountainous corner of the country.
Getting there
Khndzoresk lies about 8 km from Goris. The nearest airport in a straight line is across the border in Azerbaijan; within Armenia the main international gateway is Zvartnots International Airport (EVN) near Yerevan, about 188 km away in a straight line and considerably farther by road. Goris is on the main highway that runs south from Yerevan through Syunik Province.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Wings of Tatev 15.9 km · aerial-tramway
- Tatev Monastery 21.6 km · monastery
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Khndzoresk is a village in the Goris Municipality of the Syunik Province in Armenia. The village is located to the east of the Goris-Stepanakert highway, on the steep slopes of Khor Dzor, which the village is named after, according to tradition.
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