Day 3: Shaki waterfalls , Tatev monastery, Carahunge,Wine factory tour

Day 3: Shaki waterfalls , Tatev monastery, Carahunge, Wine factory tour

We again packed our breakfast and left for the tour. The tour bus was fully packed.

The first stop was at a restaurant  for coffee break after travelling more than 2 hours. We had our packed breakfast here.The hotel had packed us roasted veggies – eggplant, tomato, mushroom, zucchini and bread, fruits.

After this we travelled further to see the Shaki waterfalls at Shaki Tourist Centre. It was a small walk form the parking place to see the waterfall.

 

 We then visited a site Carahunge. It is also often referred to as the "Armenian Stonehenge”. The name Carahunge is interpreted as deriving from two Armenian words: car meaning stone, and hunge meaning sound. Thus the name Carahunge means Speaking Stones.

This interpretation is related to the fact that the stones make whistling sounds on a windy day, presumably because of multiple reach-through holes bored under different angles into the stones in prehistoric times. They identified the site as a necropolis. This is an archaeological site  where still further excavations are still going on. Here it is called the city of dead people. The people are buried here and the mausoleum-- is surrounded by stones. It was believed these stones will prevent the dead people to come in contact with the living world. When lightning falls on this site it breaks. It is believed this was some astronomical site.

This area has so many such stone  boundaries. Also few stones have holes in them, it is believed that they used to observe the sky through these holes.

Also they have excavated a site where a 14 year old girl was sacrificed.

We then had Lunch at a restaurant. Vegetarians were served a vegetable curry, which we had with bread.

Later we went and took the cable tram to go to Tatev Monastery. This cable tram is the longest in the world and also it is featured in the Guinness book of world records.

We then visited the Tatev monastery complex.

On visiting the complex, in the entrance you can see an underground clay pipe that was used to bring water to the complex.

There is a university that is under reconstruction.
There are 3 churches: Mother Mary, Gregory Tatev, and Gregory Illuminator

There is a library, kitchen with the traditional oven tonish to make lavash bread. Also there is a place to tie horses. The dining hall where the monks ate had a small underground tunnel that connects to a far off place that is shown while travelling in the cable tram. There were 5 tunnels out of which only 1 tunnel is functioning.

There are also many Khachkar that can be seen. There is a long pillar that is supposed to oscillate. It is believed that the students used to wish here before their exams at the university, if the pillar moves in their favour, they will do their exams well. Another belief is this used to swing in the direction in which the enemies came and hence giving a clue. The third belief is it was a Pagan temple before as all these temples had such pillars.

Later we drove back to Yerevan. On the way back we had a wine tasting tour at  Hin Areni Wine factory. They explained how wine is made and showed us their equipments. We were also given white wine, red wine, rose wine to taste.

We also bought honey from the road side shops outside the factory.

We reached Yerevan around 11 pm.Then we took taxi to reach Aghababyan’s hotel. We had dinner with all the stuffs that was available in room .We had bought some fruits and also we brought few Packed readymade meals from Bahrain.