Historic site · Khndzoresk, Goris Community, Syunik
Old Khndzoresk
Հին Խնձորեսկ · Khndzoresk cave village · Khndzoresk swinging bridge
An abandoned cave village cut into the slopes of a gorge near Goris, with around 2,000 rock dwellings and a swinging footbridge across the ravine.
Where it is
39.5007, 46.4330
Why go
Old Khndzoresk is a village built into a gorge rather than beside it. armenia.travel counts about 2,000 cave dwellings, each housing between 12 and 25 people, and notes that more than 8,000 residents lived here around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with homes, schools, churches and even a bar among the rock-cut rooms. It was partly inhabited until 1958. A visit is a walk among the dwellings and across the swinging footbridge that spans the ravine. It pairs naturally with Old Goris and Tatev on a Syunik itinerary based in Goris.
Near Old Khndzoresk
Historic site
Old Goris (Kyores) Cave Dwellings
The abandoned cave quarter of Kyores beside modern Goris, on the left bank of the Vararakn river, where the original town grew in and around a natural cave system.
7 km · straight-line distance; driving distance and time differ
Monastery
Bgheno-Noravank
Reduced to a single small church dated 1062, this Syunik monastery stands on a triangular promontory above wooded gorges east of Bardzravan, its walls carved with ornamental borders and biblical reliefs.
14 km · straight-line distance; driving distance and time differ
Monastery
Great Hermitage of Tatev
A walled hermitage where the Tatev stream joins the Vorotan river, begun in 1660 to replace an earlier hermitage lost to an earthquake, and screened from view by walnut and fig trees.
19 km · straight-line distance; driving distance and time differ
Monastery
Tatev Monastery
Tatev's churches and defensive walls stand on a basalt promontory above the Vorotan gorge in Syunik, reached by road or by the Wings of Tatev cable car from Halidzor, and in the 14th century housed a noted university.
21 km · straight-line distance; driving distance and time differ