Mher

Four kilometres northeast of the fortress rock of Van there is a doorway that has never opened. It is a smooth three-tiered panel cut into a cliff, framed like a real entrance, with steps hacked up the stone to reach it, and behind the frame there is nothing but more mountain. Wind off the lake has been working at the edges for close to three thousand years without softening them. Armenians call the cliff Agravakar, the raven stone, and the panel in it Mheri dur, the door of Mher.

The door is real, and it is much older than the man whose name it carries. Around 820 BC the Urartian kings Ishpuini and his son Menua had the niche carved and packed with cuneiform: a roll of seventy-nine gods with the animals owed to each at the yearly sacrifice, Haldi heading the list and taking the largest share. It was built as Haldi’s gate. Somewhere across the centuries between Urartu and the storytellers of the Sasun mountains the gate quietly changed hands, and Armen Petrosyan states the transfer without decoration. The gate of the chief Urartian god came to be called Mher’s door, and the hero of the epic rode in through it.

That epic is Sasna Tsrer, the daredevils of Sasun, and it ran on breath alone for something like a thousand years before anyone wrote it down. It falls into four branches, one for each generation of a single family: the twins Sanasar and Baghdasar, who found the town; Mets Mher; David, whose single-handed destruction of the army of Msra Melik is the part everyone knows; and last, David’s son, Pokr Mher. In 1873 the priest and ethnographer Garegin Srvandztiants finally caught it. He had been hunting a complete teller for three years, and in a village on the Mush plain he found a man named Gurbo who had not recited it in so long that he had forgotten a good deal. Srvandztiants kept him three days, begged him, flattered him, paid him, and when the mood finally came on the old man he sang it out in his own dialect and the priest wrote down every word. It went to press in Constantinople the following year under the title David of Sasun, or Mher’s Door.

Roughly a hundred and sixty versions have been recorded since, no two agreeing. The tidy four-branch text that Armenian schoolchildren learn was assembled in 1939 by Manuk Abeghyan with Gevork Abov and Aram Ghanalanyan out of sixty separate tellings, and it is a reconstruction rather than a recovery. No single teller ever had the whole thing.

Both Mhers carry an older name than their own. Mher is what Armenian mouths made of Mihr, and Mihr is the Middle Iranian Mithra, son of Aramazd, with a temple at Bagayarich and the seventh month of the calendar to himself. Mithra is the god of the sworn contract; the Iranian word simply means treaty. The elder Mher earned his surname the way everything in this cycle gets earned. A lion had settled across the road that brought grain up to Sasun and the town was starving, so he walked down and pulled it apart with his hands, and after that he was Ariwcadzew, lion-shaped, which happens also to be the animal Haldi was known by. He beat Msra Melik and lifted the tribute. Then he broke an oath over a woman in Msir, stayed seven years, and it killed him. Two men in this family are named for the god of the promise, and both of them die of promises.

David died too, and badly, and before he went he did the one thing worse than dying. Father and son had fought without either knowing the other, and when the truth came out David laid a curse on the boy who had beaten him: no child, and no death. Mher’s own line in the epic is four words long and colder than anything the poem does to him afterwards. I’ll have neither heir nor shall I have death.

The curse took hold slowly and physically. He kept fighting, finished his father’s quarrels, and grew heavier than the world was built for. Kurkik Jalali, the family’s fire-tempered horse, the one that talks and outlasts generations, began to sink. Ground that carried any other rider gave under it to the hock and then to the belly. There is a version in which he comes home and finds his wife Gohar dead on the couch with a note in her hand asking to be carried back to Sasun and buried beside his mother Khandut, and he does it, lifting the body himself and digging the grave himself, and that is the last useful thing anyone lets him do. Immortality had turned out to be a sentence rather than a gift.

So he went into the rock, and he was not dragged. He went by his own decision and on his parents’ advice, because the world had become unjust and there was no longer any place in it for him. Agravakar split, he rode Kurkik Jalali through, and the stone shut behind them. The terms of his release are not military and not heroic. He comes out when the earth is torn apart and remade, when a grain of barley grows to the size of a walnut and a grain of wheat to the size of a rose. Until then the door opens only on the eve of Ascension Day, the same feast the epic began on, when the girl Tsovinar walked the shore of Van and drank from a spring and started the whole bloodline.

His powers are just the family arithmetic pushed one generation too far: the strength, the lightning sword handed down the line, the horse, and now a body that cannot be ended. On paper he is the most complete hero in the poem, which is precisely his problem. He cannot die, cannot father the son who would carry the sword, cannot stand on the ground he was made to defend, and cannot be released by any act of his own. The other bound men of the region keep him company at a distance: the Armenian king Artawazd chained inside Masis, the Georgian Amirani, the Abkhaz Abrskil. What the epic says about the house he came from is one flat line with no consolation in it. Sasun was ruined, and ruined completely.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Mher in Armenian mythology?

Mher is a hero of the Armenian national epic Sasna Tsrer, the Daredevils of Sasun. The name belongs to two figures in the cycle: Mets Mher, called Mher the Lion, and his grandson Pokr Mher or Little Mher. Both take their name from Mihr, the Armenian form of the Iranian god Mithra. Little Mher is the epic’s fourth and final hero.

Why is Mher sealed inside a rock?

Little Mher’s father David cursed him to be immortal and childless after the two of them fought without recognising each other. As his strength grew, the earth stopped bearing his weight and his horse began sinking into ground that held everyone else. With no death available to him and no place left in an unjust world, he rode into the cliff of Agravakar and let it close behind him.

What is the Door of Mher?

The Door of Mher, Mheri dur, is a carved rock niche in a cliff about four kilometres northeast of the Van fortress in what is now eastern Turkey. It is a genuine Urartian monument, cut around 820 BC by the kings Ishpuini and Menua and inscribed in cuneiform with seventy-nine gods and the sacrifices due to each, headed by Haldi. Armenian tradition reassigned the sealed panel to the epic’s last hero as his prison.

Is Mher connected to the god Mithra?

Yes. Mher is the Armenian development of Mihr, which is the Middle Iranian form of Mithra, a pre-Christian Armenian god who was called the son of Aramazd and had a temple at Bagayarich. Mithra is the god of the sworn contract, and both Mhers of the epic are undone by broken oaths, the elder by his own and the younger by his father’s curse.

When will Mher come out of the rock?

Only when the world has been remade as a just and abundant place. The epic gives the sign in farming terms: a grain of barley grown to the size of a walnut and a grain of wheat to the size of a rose. In the meantime the rock is said to open on the eve of Ascension Day, the same feast on which the epic’s first branch begins.

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