Siunik Marz
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posted on 17/11/08
In addition to the weekly excursions that I do with Birthright Armenia every Saturday to explore the Armenian countryside, once a month they take us on extended weekend trips to places that are farther than a days outing outside of Yerevan.
The first month we went to Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory currently inhabited by Armenians nestled in the mountains in between Armenia and Azerbaijan (Armenian's eastern neighbor). Last month we went the the southern tip of Armenia, the part situated between the main part of Azerbaijan, a broken off island of Azerbaijan called Nakhitchevan, and Iran. Here are some pictures and stories from our three day outing.
The first place we went to was an ancient site called Karahundj (translated as "singing stones"), which is a few hours east of Yerevan by the town of Sisian. Here, in flat rise below the mountains of southern Armenia are over two hundred carefully placed stones that date back to somewhere between 5,500 and 3,000 B.C. They are aligned in such a way that it is believed that they form an ancient astronomical observatory similar to England's Stonehenge. If this is true, it means that this is one of the oldest, if the not the oldest one known. The observatory shows a deep understanding of the cycles of the cosmos and of celestial movements and it suggests that the builders worshiped the star of Sirius as a God.
There are also ancient graves under the stones.
Like many of the sites I have visited in Armenia, Karahundj is simple sitting off the highway with no special markings or people to show you around. If you didn't know about it, you could go right past it an never notice. There isn't anyone there guarding or looking after it. You can touch it, examine it and interact with it which gives you the sense that people trust that if this has survived so long, that it will continue to survive. This site is resting on ground that people have been living on and passing over for milennia. Armenia and I imagine much of the areas surrounding it are places that feel very lived in and comfortable, as if the land has been shaped over the eons to be more suitable for us than more remote parts of the globe.
It makes the experience of visiting it more intimate and it gives you time to consider its significance and feel more connected. It isn't a tourist site with pamphlets and a million people running around, you come there and create your own meaning for yourself. This is the same for many of the old churches (besides the few most visited sites). You just arrive and explore, as if the sites belong to everyone.
This is mainly because Armenia doesn't have the resources or infrastructure for tourism or to secure the sites. I imagine this will change as Armenia becomes more prosperous, which will be good. But I imagine that traveling to these parts of Armenia is slightly more what it was like to travel around before tourist became a big business, much more intimate and mysterious.
There are holes the size of a child's fist in many of the stones, which are level to the horizon and look at different point in the night sky. You can use them to track lunar phases and the solstices. Some point to where the star Sirius would have been thousands of years ago (the tilt of the earth has caused its location to move).
And this stone has a hole that is has been opened, probably because of damage from Christian invaders who tried to destroy pagan temples.