In 1985, a 44 year old man named Lyova Arkelyan said that he was visited by a phantom who gave him visions of a temple that he was to build with exact measurements. At this time, her wife Tosya Gharibyan requested him to dig a potato storehouse at the basement of their house; this was a small task that soon became the adventure of his lifetime. Arakelyan used to be in the construction field by day and he had the skills and tools for digging. He started out digging down the soil that was on the surface, it is up until the time he got to the rock which the village regarded as impenetrable, that things got interesting. The parent rock was so hard, any normal man would have given up at this point, but not Arakelyan. During that time, he said exclaimed on the hardness of the trock each time he was trying to dig through. He would dig for throughout the day and a small hole that was abot 20 cm in size and 7 cm deep was all he could manage to dig. “How would he have dug past that?” one would ask, but Arakelyan said that he got unnatural strength from spirits in order to penetrate the rock without thinking too much.
This continued for 10 straight years until he got to the tufa layer that became much easier to get through using his tools. One can imagine that Arakelyan had many tools to realize this vision, but it was all by the use of a five kilogram hammer and a cutter. As he continued to cut and dig, he went further to make carvings and sculptures out of stone that were used as decorations in this tourist attraction. He made sculptures that represented the Armenian capital, a Greek column to name a few that rest beside the staircase. He placed lamps also on the walls to light the path as visitors walked inside the cave and he placed candle holders that were carved in the walls.
Arakelyan saw everything in detail in his dreams and translated it to reality to the exact measurement that he saw in his visions. After two decades, he managed to create a masterpiece that was 21 meters deep covering 300 square meters. The 6 rooms that are connected by narrow stairs were just the beginning as he was continuously getting visions. He was ready for 3 more decades to dig other 74 rooms that were to be decorated differently, that is how far his visions stretched.
