Ask.com Encyclopedia. Gharghavank (also Zoravor Church) is located on the outskirts of the village of Zoravan on the lower slopes of Mount Ara in the Kotayk Province of Armenia.
To get to the church, turn left immediately after the small cemetery before reaching the village and go up the dirt road that follows closely next to the cemetery grounds. At the fork, keep following left up past the cemetery along a poorly maintained dirt road. After traveling some distance, the church will be perched upon the hillside to the right. Gharghavank may actually be seen from the main highway in the distance, but is hardly distinguishable from the other ruins of more modern structures scattered nearby. A short walk up the hill leads to the church and an ancient cemetery a little further up the hill. The Garlo Well Temple and Tholos Structural Mechanics. The Garlo Well Temple and Tholos Structural Mechanics At the end of 2010 I was made aware of a Bronze Age archaeological site in western Bulgaria known as the Garlo well temple.
On first seeing the site's imagery I recognized a type of “true” tholos structure that was very well known to me from my research on the geo-chronology of tholos construction in the greater Mediterranean and Europe. It was doubtlessly one of the many Late Bronze Age Nuraghic well temples built in the tholos style on Sardinia, but it was in a completely unexpected place – Bulgaria. At that time no Nuraghic well temple had ever been definitively identified outside of Sardinia. For a short period I questioned whether this could be true and waited for confirmation from the archaeologists before giving it a more serious look. Plan of Tholos. Tholos tomb of Minyas. The Mycenaean tholos tomb, known as the Tomb of Minyas, the mythical king of Orchomenos, near the ruins of the prehistoric settlement of Orchomenos and the city's later theatre, is one of the largest and most important monuments of its kind.
The tomb, which was probably built for the members of the royal family of Orchomenos in 1250 BC, was plundered in antiquity. The monument was visible for many centuries after its original use and even became a place of worship in the Hellenistic period. It was probably a famous landmark until at least the second century AD, when Pausanias visited Orchomenos and described the tholos in detail (9, 38, 2-3).