Armenia's Stonehenge and the gateway to the deep Syunik gorges — where 7,500-year-old standing stones meet one of the most dramatic landscapes in the Caucasus
Sisian is a small town in the Syunik Province of southern Armenia, in the high volcanic plateau between the Zangezur range and the Bargushat River gorge. The main draw is Zorats Karer (also called Karahunj or 'Stonehenge of Armenia') — a Bronze/Iron Age megalithic complex of 223 standing basalt stones, some perforated with small holes thought to be aligned with astronomical phenomena, spread across a hillside 3km from town. Whether Karahunj is genuinely a prehistoric astronomical site or simply a funerary complex with incidental stone holes is debated, but the landscape setting — windswept ba…
The Zorats Karer complex has been dated by different researchers to anywhere between 5500 BCE and 1500 BCE — the perforated stones sparked international attention in the 1980s when Soviet astrophysicist Paris Herouni proposed astronomical alignments that would make the site older than Stonehenge. Mainstream archaeology is more cautious but confirms a prehistoric funerary site with genuine sophistication. The broader Syunik region has been continuously inhabited since the Chalcolithic period, and the Sisian area contains numerous burial mounds, petroglyphs, and cave complexes. Sisian town was…