Old Khndzoresk is an entire town carved into the walls of a gorge in southern Armenia. Families dug their homes straight into the soft tuff cliffs, and by 1900 more than eight thousand people were living inside the rock. Written records trace the place back to the 13th century, and by the close of the 1800s it had grown into the largest village in eastern Armenia. People went on living in the caves right up to the 1950s, when Soviet authorities declared them unfit and moved everyone to a new village on the ridge above. The last resident is said to have left his cave in 1958, and the honeycombed slopes have stood empty ever since. From the rim they look like a hillside full of dark windows with nothing behind them.
The gorge is walkable again thanks to a 160-metre suspension bridge, hung about 63 metres above the streambed and opened in June 2012. A businessman born in the village paid for it, and the people of Khndzoresk put it up by hand, carrying the concrete sections down on horseback without machinery. Cross it and the path on the far slope begins. There the path threads past arched cave mouths, pyramid-shaped rock pinnacles and two seventeenth-century churches, St Hripsime and St Thaddeus, still standing among the green. Nearby lies the tomb of Mkhitar Sparapet, a commander of Armenia's eighteenth-century liberation struggle. Some cave walls still carry soot from the fires of the families who lived here. It takes about an hour to walk the loop down, across and back up, and the climb out is the hard part.