Cave city gateway — Tatev Monastery, the world's longest cable car, and Syunik silk
Goris is a quiet stone-built city in Syunik province, southern Armenia — the gateway to two of the country's most extraordinary sites. Tatev Monastery, perched on a basalt plateau above a dramatic gorge, is reached by the Wings of Tatev reversible aerial tramway (5.7km, world record when opened in 2010) — the descent over the forested gorge is as memorable as the monastery itself. The old city below Goris is riddled with ancient cave dwellings carved into the volcanic rock formations, some inhabited until the 1950s and now a quiet archaeological open-air site. The surrounding Zangezur mountai…
Syunik province has been inhabited since the Neolithic era and was the heartland of the Armenian Kingdom of Syunik, which existed from the 9th to the 11th century. Tatev Monastery was founded in 895 CE and became one of medieval Armenia's greatest centres of scholarship, housing up to 1,000 monks and a renowned school of manuscript illumination; it was damaged by a 1139 earthquake and several Ottoman-era raids but never permanently abandoned. Goris town itself was planned by Russian architects after the region was absorbed into the Russian Empire in 1828; its grid of tree-lined streets and Ru…