Legends on Location

Warm mineral water runs through the rock below, and above it a bridge spans the gorge that nobody built. Satani Kamurj in the Vorotan gorge is called the Devil’s Bridge because a stone arch, layered out of travertine by hot springs over millennia and sitting exactly where a bridge was needed, demanded an explanation from the people here. The explanation came out accordingly.

The telling happens at the place where the story happened. That is the whole structure of this day: drive there, stand there, listen, look.

The legends involved are older than Christianity in this country. Vahagn, born of fire, set out to slay the vishaps — the dragons of the highland, whose name the standing dragon stones still carry. Hayk the archer felled the Babylonian Bel with a single arrow and gave the people their name; Armenians still call themselves Hay. Ara the Beautiful fell in a battle an Assyrian queen waged over him, and Mount Ara north of the plain carries his name.

Every one of these stories exists in several versions, and they contradict each other. The guide tells you both and says which was written down where. What is history and what is interpretation stays open — at Ughtasar, where hunters and animals are struck into black rock, no less than at Zorats Karer, whose stone circle near Sisian is read sometimes as a burial ground and sometimes as an observatory.

Wind is the enemy of this day. On an open field the back half of the group hears nothing, and talking louder does not fix it. So we look for a wall, a hollow or the lee side of a rock, even where the view is worse.

It is worth reading little beforehand. The stories land harder when they turn up for the first time in the place they belong to.