Khndzoresk: the cave village near Goris, its 160-metre swinging bridge and the story of the people who lived in the rock until 1958

From the edge of the gorge, when you arrive, you do not understand what you are seeing: two slopes of pale tuff full of black holes, hundreds of them, at different heights, some with a door, a window or a stone chimney on top, and below a thread of water with poplars. This is old Khndzoresk, a village in southern Armenia where people lived in caves cut into the rock until the 1950s, when it had a school, shops and several churches, and which the Soviet state emptied and moved up to the plateau, where the new village stands. A 160-metre swinging bridge, strung in 2012 by a local man who made money, crosses the gorge from side to side, and is the reason everyone comes now. This guide tells the history, the bridge, the caves and the practical side.

The history

The volcanic tuff of Syunik can be cut with simple tools and holds, and in the gorges of Goris and Khndzoresk people have lived in caves since the Middle Ages at least: the name, from khndzor, apple, or khor dzor, deep gorge, does not help with dating. What is known is that in the 18th and 19th centuries the village grew to be the largest in eastern Armenia, with some 1,800 houses and 8,300 inhabitants in 1913, two-storey caves with the stable below and the dwelling above, carved courtyards, ovens, tanneries, two schools and shops, on a slope they climbed up and down with wooden ladders. In the 1720s it was one of the refuges of Davit Bek and his general Mkhitar Sparapet, who organised the Armenian resistance against Persians and Ottomans from here; Mkhitar died in 1730 and is buried beside the church of Saint Hripsime, which you see on the slope. In the 1950s the Soviet state decided people could not live in caves and built the new village on the plateau; the last families moved up in 1958 and old Khndzoresk was left as it is.

The bridge

The swinging bridge was paid for by Zhora Aleksanyan, a businessman born in the village, and opened in 2012: 160 metres long, 63 metres above the floor of the gorge, steel cables and a plank walkway with railings that sways as you walk and more when there are people on it. It joins the two slopes of caves and saves the descent and climb through the bottom, but above all it is a viewpoint: from the middle you see the two pierced walls, the church and the river below. Anyone with vertigo can go down the stepped path and cross along the bottom; it is longer and you see the same from below.

The caves and the churches

On the far side of the bridge begin the paths that climb among the caves, and you can enter the ones that are open: there are single-chamber caves with the soot of the hearth on the ceiling, and others with several rooms, with niches for lamps, carved mangers and chimneys opening onto the slope. The church of Saint Hripsime, of 1663, in stone, with the tomb of Mkhitar Sparapet beside it, and the smaller church of Saint Thaddeus are the whole buildings that remain, with the 19th-century school and a spring. With a torch you see more, and watch where you step, because there are caves with sunken floors and openings without railings. The whole circuit, with the bridge, the caves and the way back, takes two or three hours.

How to get there and what to combine it with

The new village is 8 km from Goris on the Stepanakert road, and from there a track drops to the car park on the edge of the gorge, where a hut charges a small fee for the bridge and a stepped path goes down in a quarter of an hour. From Goris you go by taxi or car; from Yerevan it is 240 km, four hours, passing the Orbelian caravanserai on the Selim pass if you go through Vayots Dzor. The usual thing is to sleep two nights in Goris and split it: one day Tatev with its cable car, 30 km away, and another Khndzoresk in the morning and the Armenian Stonehenge of Zorats Karer, next to Sisian, in the afternoon; the caves of old Goris, in the town itself, can be seen at any hour.

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