Armenian Vishaps (Dragon Stones): Ancient Monoliths of Water and Ritual
- apeach5
- Sep 29
- 7 min read
High in the Armenian highlands, the landscape shifts with dramatic suddenness. The lowlands give way to jagged volcanic ridges, steep pastures dotted with wildflowers, and terraces where the remnants of ancient field systems cling stubbornly to the slopes. Snowfields linger in sheltered hollows, and from these, streams tumble in sudden bursts of crystal-clear water, carving miniature valleys through the volcanic rock. The air is thinner here, colder, scented with mountain herbs and the faint smoke of shepherds’ fires. Wildlife is scattered and cautious: the bleating of sheep carries farther than the footsteps of humankind, and birds wheel in thermals above the ridges, scanning the landscape for unseen movement.
It is in these upland pastures—where summer shepherds still drive their flocks to graze—that one comes across the vishaps: tall stone pillars, some five metres or more in height, carved with fish, hides, and hybrid forms. Rising from the slopes like frozen spikes of stone, these towering monoliths command immediate attention. They are carved with astonishing intricacy: curling fish, the outlines of animal hides, and hybrid forms that defy easy categorisation. At once naturalistic and symbolic, these motifs hint at a worldview where water, fertility, and the animal realm were deeply entwined with human life and ritual.
Scholars have long speculated about their purpose. Some suggest they marked sources of life-giving water, guarding the springs and rivers that sustained scattered highland communities. Others argue they served a ceremonial role, acting as loci for ritual offerings, animal sacrifices, or seasonal gatherings. Yet, despite decades of study, their full meaning remains elusive, shrouded in the mists of prehistory.
The placement of the vishaps is never random. Many occupy ridges overlooking rivers or lakes, their carved forms facing the flow of water, as if watching over it. Others cluster near volcanic outcrops, linking stone, earth, and water in a symbolic network that resonates with the animist sensibilities of early societies. In a landscape shaped by both geological upheaval and human endeavour, the vishaps emerge as points of convergence—spiritual, practical, and aesthetic.
Walking among them, one feels a conversation stretching across millennia. The carved fins of fish and the twisting forms of hybrids seem to thrum with the memory of rituals long vanished, as if the stones themselves remember the hands that shaped them and the offerings once laid at their base. These stones are not merely artefacts; they are living echoes of a worldview in which the natural and supernatural flowed together, where the currents of rivers mirrored the currents of human life.
They stand where water first gathers, at the mouths of springs or beside narrow channels of meltwater. Today many are toppled or half-buried, yet their presence remains commanding. The Armenian word vishap means “dragon” or “serpent.” Later legend made them the haunts of monstrous beings who controlled storms and lakes. The stones, however, are far older than the myths, their carvings a record of a time when water itself was set at the centre of community life.
First Impressions
Encountering a vishap is disorienting. Imagine a fish, long and detailed, carved along the length of a standing stone high above any river. Or the outline of a skinned bovine stretched across the surface, legs splayed like a hide pegged out to dry. These are not decorative flourishes but deliberate, repeated motifs. Out of roughly 150 vishaps known across Armenia, fish dominate, suggesting that these were more than markers: they were symbols of the flow of life in a region where summer water determined survival.
The stones themselves are made of local andesite or basalt. Their scale is impressive—not only for their height, some over 18 feet—but for their locations. To raise such weight in high-altitude pastures was no casual act. It meant hauling tonnes of rock uphill, coordinating labour, and embedding it into a seasonal landscape.
Stones and Springs
The placement of vishaps makes their relationship with water unmistakable. Nearly all are located beside springs, streams, or channels where snowmelt is gathered and directed. In the highlands, summer pastures depended on these flows. Down in the valleys, early farmers channelled the same meltwater to irrigate crops. Carving a fish onto stone and planting it at the source was not only symbolic but practical: it marked, protected, and sanctified the community’s most vital resource.
To erect a vishap was to declare that the spring was not just a physical feature but part of a shared cosmology. The fish carved into the stones become more than depictions—they embody water itself, flowing down to herds, fields, and households. The stretched hides may speak to livestock, the other partner in this ecological triangle. Together they inscribed a world where water, herd, and mountain were bound into a single system.
Here, the vishaps echo what I have observed at Bryn Celli Ddu in Wales: stone as participant rather than passive marker. At Bryn Celli Ddu, the fish-shaped lintel complete with gills points towards the flow of the nearby River Braint, as if the tomb itself acknowledges the river’s presence, tracing its movement in stone. Similarly, the vishaps’ fish and hybrid carvings feel less like symbols and more like beings inhabiting springs and streams, shaping the land as humans shape stone. One senses a continuity of attention: a prehistoric awareness that stone, water, and human labour exist in a single animistic network.
Across the Waters: Fish Stones, Salmon, and the Boyne
The relationship between stone, water, and ritual is not unique to Armenia. Near the spawning grounds of the River Usk in Wales stands the Penmyarth Fish Stone, a fish-shaped standing stone placed near other ceremonial features. Its position beside the river mirrors the way the fish-shaped lintel at Bryn Celli Ddu faces the River Braint, suggesting that prehistoric communities perceived stone and water as co-participants in life and ritual.
Further afield, the Boyne Valley monuments in Ireland evoke aquatic symbolism. The river curves around Knowth and Dowth, where fish-like forms also appear on lintels. Nearby is the legendary mythic Well of Segais, emblematic of wisdom, the salmon of knowledge and the hazlenuts it eats (another link to Bryn Celli Ddu through hazel foundational ritual deposits and one translation of the name). The well is said to be the source of both the Boyne and the Shannon rivers. In these monuments, water and stone intertwine with myth: salmon, currents, and carved stones form a network where ecological, spiritual, and symbolic concerns converge.
Like the vishaps, the Penmyarth Fish Stone, Bryn Celli Ddu, and the Boyne monuments are more than markers. Their forms, orientations, and placements beside vital water hint at a consciousness in landscape design, an understanding that stone and water could embody presence, memory, and ritual authority. Across Armenia, Wales, and Ireland, prehistoric communities recognised the sacred interplay of water, landscape, and human labour, crafting monuments that both marked and inhabited the living world.
In these stones, one senses continuity: carved fish, hybrid forms, and careful positioning by water are gestures of relationship, repeated across time and space. From Mount Aragats to the Welsh valleys of the Usk, and along the Boyne’s tidal rivers, the same awareness emerges: stone, like water, holds memory, participates in ritual, and shapes human experience.
The vishaps may not “look” alive in any conventional sense, but in context—the shimmer of sunlight on flowing water, the slope of the hillside, the way shadows stretch across their carved forms—they assert an unmistakable presence. They are neither sculpture nor text alone; they are interlocutors of the landscape, participants in a dialogue between people, water, and stone.
Movement and Labour
To appreciate their scale is to reckon with the labour they required. A basalt block of five metres can weigh ten tonnes. Dragging such mass uphill into remote pastures was no casual act—it was a collective statement. Unlike valley monuments built near quarries, these stones demanded ascent, a seasonal pilgrimage of effort. Their remoteness, and the physical investment required, reinforced their significance: water, stone, human attention, and myth converged in one performative act.
Afterlives
The story did not end in the Chalcolithic. A millennium and more later, the Urartian kingdom inscribed cuneiform texts onto some vishaps, pressing them into the service of imperial ideology. In the medieval period, crosses were cut, turning them into Christian khachkars. Folklore remembered them as dragons subdued by the storm-god Vahagn, figures of both chaos and fertility. Each layer of reuse bent their meaning, but the stones remained, present, legible, and demanding attention.
Preservation
Time has not been kind. Many vishaps are toppled, broken by frost, or scarred by quarrying. A few have been moved for display or re-erected in modern times. The recent scientific study stressed their fragility, urging conservation before more are lost. These are not local curiosities; they are monuments of early Eurasian monumental practice, carved to inhabit the living landscape.
Reflections
Standing beside a vishap, one senses a dialogue across millennia. Water gurgles from the spring, cold and insistent. The stone rises, carved with the image of a fish that has not swum in these heights for thousands of years. One can feel the same attentiveness traced at Bryn Celli Ddu and along the Boyne: stones mark, focus, and almost respond to human and natural presence. They do not simply commemorate—they inhabit, they watch, they hold the landscape in tension.
For the communities who raised them, water was not an abstract resource but a living entity. Fixing its image in stone was a means of engagement, a way to work with its forces, recognise its role in survival, and encode myth and memory into the landscape. The stones endure not as silent relics but as participants in a network that included humans, herds, rivers, springs, and myth. In them, the boundaries between natural and human, stone and spirit, myth and memory, are porous.
Even now, in a world of maps and infrastructure, the vishaps insist on this relationship. Their presence reminds us that monumental work was not always urban or defensive; it could be ecological, relational, performative, and mythic. They connect the Chalcolithic highlands to the prehistoric landscapes I have walked in Britain and Ireland, suggesting a shared understanding across space and time: that stone can witness, that water can be sacred, and that humans are never quite separate from the other beings—material, immaterial, or mythical—that shape the world around them.
Dr Alexander Peach, November 2025
Resource
Vahe Gurzadyan & Arsen Bobokhyan. Vishap stelae as cult dedicated prehistoric monuments of Armenian Highlands: data analysis and interpretation. NPJ Heritage Science, online at
They are absolutely stunning monoliths obviously chosen for their elegance quite apart from their ritual or topographical purposes. They've long been on my bucket list!