A Quick Look Around the Tatev Monastery

[00:00:00]I'm in Tatev, uh, a little village, uh, well, let's see, it's hard to describe exactly where it is. Kind of close to the Iranian border, uh, and very close to the border with Arts that is currently controlled by Azerbaijan.

[00:00:17]Actually, the mountains right there in front of me. Turn it around. The other side of those mountains is controlled by Azerbaian.

[00:00:28]But uh this is the site of the famous Tatev monastery. We're going to go down there right now and check it out. So tell me about Tatev.

[00:00:41]She's never been here. He's never been here, but you know about it. My first time here. I've heard so much about it.

[00:00:47]Um and I'm actually very grateful that I have a chance to come here and explore it because I don't know much about it unfortunately. So I'm going to learn.

[00:00:56]So, you've lived here your entire life and you've never come to Tatam. Yes.

[00:01:01]Isn't that so common? People that live in places that tourists go visit don't go see the places that tourists go to, but they know of places that tourists don't know about. What places should we go visit that tourists don't go to?

[00:01:16]Don't know places you go camping. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There are actually well my favorite places to go camping are near very ancient churches in Armenia that are not known at all. Um uh I really like one of them is called Shativank. The other one is called Aratas. Uh those are really beautiful churches. So my favorite see that's the thing like Armenia has so many incredible beautiful churches that they get lost. I mean, you can go see one every day and you'd be busy for a couple of years or something, probably. Yeah. Right. There's so many.

[00:01:53]I love you. So, we're ready when you're ready.

[00:01:55]So, we're I'm just going to walk right in right now and we're going to take a real quick turn around Tatev the monastery. Here goes.

[00:02:17]That's the the main church. And I believe there there was an older one over here or something. But another one up there. I'm going to run. You guys go ahead. I'm going to run up up here. So, I'm going to run up these stairs cuz you can get a really good view. This is This whole monastery is like something out of Lord of the Rings.

[00:02:42]And you'll see why here in a minute. I'd really like to come spend about a week here. Okay, here's the view, man. With the fall colors.

[00:03:08]It's pretty amazing.

[00:03:19]Have you ever been here before? I have.

[00:03:21]Yeah. In the This is the first time I've been here in fall. Oh, yeah. The colors are incredible. Yeah.

[00:03:30]Yeah. It's so nice.

[00:03:37]So there's like a they built these monasteries out on uh very difficult to access places to keep them from being sacked by the Mongolian hordes and things like that. you know, when you're building this thing over a I don't know a thousand years ago or something, you had to think that way.

[00:04:09]You had to think tactically and uh build the build the monastery in a place that was safe. That's why a few weeks ago or I guess over a month ago now when I was in Greece and we went to Meteora, you see those huge pillars of rock thousands of feet high with little monasteries perched on top of them. And that's why they had to defend themselves. And the best defense for them since they didn't have weapons uh was to make themselves inaccessible. Here we go inside the church. I'm going to be quiet.

[00:04:56][Music] [Music] [Music] You always back out of Armenian churches and cross yourself. That's the tradition.

[00:05:43]There are ancient cotars carved into the stone all along. Look at [Music] this. Really amazing.

[00:06:19]carving on that door is amazing.

[00:06:30]I'm going to take you to one of my favorite spots in here.

[00:06:37]We're going to walk down into these tunnels now. Look at that view.

[00:07:09]I can sit here and look at this view forever. It's incredible. You can hear the water rushing down below. There are some rivers that form just massive waterfalls. Hopefully tomorrow morning I can fly my drone down there. won't be too foggy or too windy or something like it has been the last couple times I've been here. And look at this chamber.

[00:08:29]A tiny little hole we got to crawl out of.

[00:08:49][Music] This place was a seminary also for many years.

[00:09:04]I believe this was the kitchen because there's a an oven in the floor right there. I don't know if you can even see any of this. There was another room over here.

[00:09:21]Probably a a chow hall. The doors are all so short, but I guess people were shorter back then, too.

[00:09:30]I call this the ref reectory refactory. Check this out. This door.

[00:09:39]Listen to [Music] this. Makes that squeaky noise.

[00:10:00]And there's a secret tunnel here. Let's see if I can put some light on it. It goes outside. Actually, you can climb down into I will blow together. More this way.

[00:11:06]Long way down.

[00:11:29]So pretty awesome.