Vishap

Also Known As: Armenian վիշապ; also višap, vishapner in the plural; probably from an Iranian vi-šāpa, “having poisonous juices”
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Armenian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: The vishap commands water and weather, rising into the sky as a storm and dragging the sun into darkness when it is hungry enough.
Role in Mythos: It is the great adversary of the Armenian Highlands, the thing the warrior god Vahagn was born to cut down, and the name later Armenians gave to the prehistoric carved monoliths standing over their mountain springs.
Relation to Humans: The vishap is dangerous in the way weather is dangerous, wrecking harvests, swallowing daylight, and in some accounts stealing infants from their cradles and leaving its own brood in their place. People answered it with noise, with charms, and with the hope that a god was still hunting.

The water that comes off Mount Aragats in August is cold enough to make a hand ache, and where it surfaces there is often a stone lying in the grass. Not a boulder. A shaped monolith, three or four metres of polished andesite, cut into the silhouette of a fish or of a draped ox hide, with its blunt tail left rough where the quarry work stopped. Herders have driven flocks up to these meadows for longer than anyone has counted, and they have a name for the things they find there. They call them dragons.

The word is vishap, and it is probably borrowed. Philologists trace it to an Iranian vi-šāpa, roughly “having poisonous juices”, a term used of snakes. Armen Petrosyan has argued that before that loanword arrived, the serpent adversary of Armenian tradition carried an inherited Indo-European name, geł, from the root *wel-, the same root that surfaces behind the coiled enemy a storm god fights from Ireland to India. The dragon, in other words, is older than what it is currently called.

Where a vishap lives depends on which vishap. Some are in the sky. Some lie in the deep highland lakes that sit in old volcanic craters and stay bitter cold through the hottest weeks of the year. Some are inside the mountains. During a thunderstorm the arrangement inverts: the heavenly vishaps come down and the lake and mountain vishaps go up, and the noise overhead is the traffic between them. Mount Ararat was named as the chief den, which makes a certain sense for a peak that shudders and steams and occasionally kills, and one summit in the Geghama range still carries the name Azhdahak.

Picture the ordinary version of this. A summer squall builds fast over a crater lake at two and a half thousand metres, the surface goes from black glass to chop in under a minute, the air smells of wet basalt, and the water column that lifts off the lake and walks across the pasture is not a waterspout. It is something leaving.

The vishap’s most public appetite was for the sun. Manuk Abeghyan, gathering Armenian folk belief in the 1890s, recorded that during an eclipse people believed the sun or moon was locked in a fight with the devs and above all with the great dragon that wanted to swallow it, and that since this plainly meant the end of the world had arrived, they were terrified. So they made a din. Copper pots, cauldrons and kettles were banged against each other, sounding something like church bells, and the clanging went on until the light won. That is a whole cosmology expressed as kitchenware.

Against all this stood Vahagn. The fifth-century historian Movses Khorenatsi preserved the fragment of a song, already ancient in his own day, about the god’s birth: heaven and earth in labour, the crimson sea in labour, a reed stalk in the sea giving out smoke and flame, and out of the flame a red-haired boy leaping, with fire for hair, flame for a beard, and eyes that were suns. Khorenatsi declines to give the rest, but he says what the rest was about. It told how Vahagn fought vishaps and beat them. The god’s standing epithet, Vishapakagh, means the dragon-reaper, and reaper is the right word, a harvest verb applied to monsters, as though the things grew back every season and had to be cut again.

Khorenatsi also gives the dragon a bloodline. He identifies the Median king Azhdahak with Astyages and notes flatly that azhdahak means dragon in Armenian, and from that king he derives the vishapazunk, the dragon-offspring, a line settled in the shadow of Ararat and remembered in stories about the Armenian queen Satenik and her entanglement with them. It is a neat piece of work: an enemy nation turned into a nest of serpents, and a real dynasty given scales.

Then there are the stones. A hundred and fifteen of them have been documented inside the Republic of Armenia alone, with roughly a hundred and fifty known across the wider Armenian Highlands and southern Georgia. They run from 110 to 550 centimetres, cut from local andesite and basalt, and they fall into three types: piscis, carved as a fish; vellus, shaped like a stretched bovid hide; and hybrida, which combines the two. All three are worked and polished on every face except the tail, which is the giveaway that they were meant to stand upright and be buried at the foot. They cluster at high altitude near springs, marshy craters and prehistoric irrigation works, and they are heavy. Karakap 3, a basalt example at around 2,800 metres, measures 359 by 116 by 44 centimetres and weighs something near four and a third tonnes. Somebody hauled it up there in a snow-free window a few months long.

Nobody knows what the people who carved them called them. Excavations at Tirinkatar on Mount Aragats, where twelve of them cluster, have radiocarbon-dated the erection of two vishaps to roughly 4200 to 4000 BC, which puts them in the Chalcolithic, thousands of years before anyone wrote Armenian down. One of them had two closely related infants buried beneath it. Another stela, Garni 1, turned up in 1963 carrying a secondary cuneiform inscription of the Urartian king Argishti I from the first half of the eighth century BC, cut into a monument that was already an antique when he claimed it. The name vishapakar, dragon stone, is what the local population supplied later, looking at fish-mouthed monoliths standing over water and drawing the obvious conclusion.

What the vishap can do follows from where it sits. It holds the water, which means it holds everything the water feeds, and it can withhold it. It rides storms and can be a storm. It darkens the sun. It moves between lake, summit and sky without apparent effort, and in the folk material it can substitute one child for another without the household noticing until too late. Poison is built into its oldest name.

Its limits are the limits of weather. The eclipse ends, always, and the noise of the pots is credited with ending it. The rain that a vishap brings also breaks, and the flock comes back down the mountain. Above all it is killable, and by one specific figure: a god of fire born out of fire, whose weapon against a creature of water and cloud is simply that he burns. The vishap is enormous and the vishap is old, and neither has ever been enough.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a vishap in Armenian mythology?

A vishap is the dragon of Armenian mythology, a serpentine monster tied to water and storms. It is described as an enormous snake, sometimes winged and sometimes composed of parts of several animals, and the tradition does not settle on one fixed appearance. Its name probably comes from an Iranian word meaning “having poisonous juices”.

Where do vishaps live?

Vishaps live in the sky, in deep highland lakes, and inside mountains. Mount Ararat was named as their principal home, and a peak in Armenia’s Geghama range still carries the dragon name Azhdahak. During thunderstorms the sky vishaps were believed to descend while the lake and mountain vishaps rose.

Who defeated the vishaps?

The warrior god Vahagn is the vishap-killer of Armenian myth, which is why his epithet is Vishapakagh, “the dragon-reaper”. Movses Khorenatsi preserved a fragment of an ancient song describing Vahagn’s fiery birth from a reed and stated that the rest of the song told how he fought and conquered vishaps.

What are Armenia’s dragon stones?

Vishapakars, or dragon stones, are prehistoric carved monoliths found in the high pastures of the Armenian Highlands, usually near springs. About 115 are documented within Armenia, standing between 110 and 550 centimetres tall and carved as fish, as stretched hides, or as a combination of the two. Excavations at Tirinkatar on Mount Aragats have radiocarbon-dated two of them to roughly 4200 to 4000 BC, long before the folk name vishap was attached to them.