Khndzoresk is a town carved into the two walls of a gorge in southern Armenia, and about eight thousand people lived in it until the 1950s. The rock is soft volcanic tuff, and roughly eighteen hundred dwellings were cut into it, many of them two or three storeys. Some could only be reached by a rope let down from above. Water came out of springs in the gorge, so nobody had to leave the cliffs for it. There were schools down here, cheese dairies, even a bar, all stacked among the caves. The same maze made a fortress. The commander Mkhitar Sparapet held it as a base between 1728 and 1730 before he was killed, and his tomb is still in the gorge.
In the 1950s everyone was moved out, to a new village built on the ridge directly above the old one. From its edge you look straight across at what was left behind: both slopes pocked with dark openings from the streambed up to the rim. Getting into it means the bridge. The span is long enough to bounce and sway under you with every footstep, with the gorge floor a long way below, and from the middle both cave-riddled walls face you at once. On the far side you duck into homes, stables and storerooms hollowed back into the tuff, some still black with the soot of the last hearths. Tall pyramid spires of the same soft rock stand between them, with more dark mouths opening in the cliffs above. Two seventeenth-century churches, St Hripsime and St Thaddeus, outlasted the village around them, and their bare cool interiors are still in use. The bridge is younger than the emptying by sixty years. It went up in 2012, built by hand by people from the village on the ridge — the one everybody had been moved to.