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When Tosya Gharibyan asked her husband to dig a basement under their house to store potatoes there, she had no idea that the underground labyrinth that he was eventually going to produce would be One of the main tourist attractions of Armenia. In the village of Arinj, outside the capital, Yerevan may not look like much, but today it attracts visitors from around the world after a job of love twenty-three years old by the late husband of Tosya, Levon Arakelyan
In the cold and tranquility, Tosya leads tourists through corridors that connect seven rooms adorned with Roman columns and ornaments, such as those of facades of the Armenian churches of the Middle Ages
. "Once he started digging, it was impossible to stop," she said of the project started in 1995. "I had a lot of arguments with him, but he is become obsessed with his plan. "
Levon worked eighteen hours a day, stopping only to take a nap and then rushing to the cave, confident that he was guided "by the sky".
"He never drew up any plans and told us" He sees in his dreams what he must do next, "his widow told AFP
. For more than two decades, he dug a 21,000-square-foot (217-square-meter) space 21 meters deep. – I only use hand tools.
"My primary memory of childhood is the hammering of my father's hammer heard at night from the cave," said his 44-year-old daughter Araksya
. He passed through a superficial layer of black basalt, but a few meters deep, Levon reached a softer tufa stone and work progressed.
He pulled out 600 trucks of rocks and dirt using only portable buckets. Levon died in 2008 at the age of 67 from a heart attack after destroying the last wall that separated two tunnels.
Read also: The longest cave in Asia has many wonders
– "Amazing place" –
A decade after the completion of the project, Tosya also runs a small museum commemorating the work of her husband. the village of some 6,000 people
The underground complex has several analogues in the world.
An eccentric man named William Henry "Burro" Schmidt spent more than three decades digging a half-mile tunnel to haul gold through a granite mountain in California, starting his job in the early 1900s during the state gold rush.
In Ethiopia, a man named Aba Defar began carving churches on the mountainside after claiming the divine inspiration of years of dreams. The cave is prominently featured in travel brochures, regularly attracting visitor buses.
Milad, a 29-year-old Iranian tourist, described the labyrinth as "an astonishing place"
. spiritual and physical abilities of a person can be. "
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