New Athos Cave was opened to visitors in 1975. The total length of the route inside the cave is about 2 km; it passes through 8 halls, the walls and ceilings of which are richly decorated with sinter formations: stalactites, stalagmites and stalagnates. The air temperature in the cave is always constant - +11 degrees. (We recommend taking a sweater or light jacket with you.)
Mini-metro trains to the depths of the cave depart approximately every 20 minutes as excursion groups form. On days when the flow of tourists does not dry up even in the evening, late flights are possible, but it is better to plan your visit to the underground kingdom no later than 18.00.
During the high holiday season - from May to October - the cave is open to visitors every day, and from the end of October - on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays.
How to get there
Getting to New Athos is easy. The city stretches along the coast, transport goes along the central highway. From nearby settlements there are minibuses, both direct and those that go towards Psou and Gudauta. Buses and minibuses run from the central square of Pitsunda and from the Sukhum railway station. The road is good - 20 minutes and you are in New Athos. Tourists heading to the New Athos caves need to get off at the Rakushka stop and take the New Athos Monastery, visible from everywhere, as a landmark.
Ticket prices
In front of the entrance to the caves there is a three-story light building. They also sell tickets there (adult ticket - 500 rubles). In addition, if you want to take photographs in the cave itself, you must purchase a special permit for photography inside - 50 rubles, otherwise you may be fined 1000 rubles. Ticket sales close at 5:00 p.m., and the long queue can make you wait for an hour or more. During this time, you can look at New Athos with panoramic binoculars for 10 rubles. - one minute.
Underground route
For the opening of the cave, a special transport system was also built, which began to carry tourists around the halls of the cave. The gathered group is invited to board the carriages of a narrow-gauge railway, which makes an intermediate stop in the “Abkhazia” hall. The road is electrified, the rails are under voltage (300 V). After the train arrives, you need to wait for other tourists to exit from the opposite side, and only after that you will be allowed to enter the carriage.
The doors of this underground metro cars open manually. The total length of the narrow-gauge railway is about 2 km, the route of the underground excursion is 1.4 km. In the New Athos Cave, the metro takes visitors to a depth of 160 meters. The excursion lasts about an hour and a half, all this time you are accompanied by a guide, telling the history of the cave and each room separately. It's cold inside the cave, a constant temperature of +11 degrees, so don't forget to take warm clothes with you. The cave is wet in places, so comfortable, non-slip shoes are a must for visiting it.
Map of the New Athos caveHalls of New Athos
Hall "Anakopia"
The lowest hall of the New Athos cave. Length - 150 m, width - 50 m, height - more than 20 m. There are two underground lakes - Anatolia and Goluboe. The mirror of the lakes lies at 36 m above sea level, their average depth is more than 25 m. Once the water level in the lakes rose, and the waters flooded most of the hall. Traces of these floods have been preserved - dark brown horizontal stripes from the surface of the lakes almost to the ceiling. Now the cave waters exit through a drainage tunnel into the Manikvara River gorge.
Hall of Mahajirs
The largest hall of the New Athos cave is named in honor of the memory of the Mukhajirs - Abkhazians, who were forcibly resettled to Turkey and the countries of the Middle East. Among the piles of dark stones of the cave rises the White Mountain. Near the mountain there are white columns of nascent stalagmites, a little further there is a dark depression with yellow fangs of limestone blocks. Sometimes you can see a cold, muddy lake here.
The calcite floor of the side gallery is torn in places, and through the holes you can see the second bottom, along which a transparent stream runs almost silently.
Hall "Nartaa"
The hall is covered with clay layers. At the lowest point of the hall, at 36 m above sea level, there is a “living” lake of the cave - colonies of crustaceans live in it. In the cracks of the clay floor there is a beetle that has no eyes. On the southern wall of the hall you can see fancy figures made of stones. Near the Nartaa hall there is a Corallite Gallery, the walls of which are covered with corallites - snow-white balls stuck to each other in hundreds of thousands.
Hall of Speleologists. Hall named after Givi Smyr
The Speleologists' Hall is the highest hall of the cave, its height reaches 97 m. From the round bottom of the hall, littered with boulders, sheer walls rise upward, converging at a great height into a dome. The stone vault of the hall is dotted with many tectonic cracks and oval holes. These are the mouths of karst wells opened by ancient collapses, the so-called “organ pipes” - the lower part of the karst systems through which water and air enter the cave. Bats live in this room - relatively low air humidity and moderate temperature create favorable conditions for them.
In the southern part of the Speleologists' Hall there is a passage to the hall named after Givi Smyr, which is located above the other halls of the cave. The floor of the hall is covered with frozen waves of cream-colored limestone. The most important decoration of the hall is the magnificent stone jellyfish.
Hall "Ayuhaa"
The length of the hall from north to south is more than 100 m. Along the dark yellow ten-meter walls of the hall, black horizontal stripes stretch along the entire length - depressions in the rock filled with clay particles. Such cracks in the limestone separate the ancient lower strata from the younger upper strata. But both of them were formed hundreds of millions of years ago. The hall is decorated with hundreds of stalagmites made of translucent orange and red calcite.
Apkhartsa Hall
This small hall has excellent acoustics - the arrangement of ledges and niches in the walls and ceiling create amazing conditions for the sound of music. There is music in the hall, sometimes artists of the Abkhaz State Choir give concerts, performing Abkhaz folk songs.
Apsny Hall
In front of the entrance to the hall there is a four-meter stalagmite, and in the hall itself there is an unusual cave “waterfall”. From a thirty-meter height, a huge frozen stone shaft “falls” from a hole in a high steep wall. Water flows along the smooth surface of calcite “waves”. There is always maximum air humidity in this room.
Helictite grotto
The grotto is distinguished by the amazing beauty of rare sintered forms. The wall is covered in sparkling white calcite, backed by orange, lilac, greenish and yellow stalagmites. The patterned floor consists of many small trays with thin walls. These are gours, the remains of puddles that once stood here.
The main wealth of the grotto is helictites. It is still unclear why these mysterious cave formations grow sideways and upwards. The ceiling of the grotto is covered with thousands of small helictites of various colors - from dark red to light pink. Some helictites reach more than 10 cm in length. Excursions in the Helictite Grotto are not conducted, since the presence of humans changes the temperature and humidity of the air, which can lead to the death of the unique formations.
- The discoverer of the cave in 1961, Givi Shalvovich Smyr, has been the director of the New Athos caves complex since 2001.
- The largest hall of the cave is the “Speleologists” hall. Its length is 260 meters, height - up to 50 meters, width - up to 75 meters. However, this length is obtained only if we consider the “Speleologists” hall and the “Disappearing Lake” hall as one hall. But even in this case, contrary to popular belief, it will not be the largest hall in Abkhazia. This is only the third largest cave hall in Abkhazia (after the “Throne” hall in the Snezhnaya cave (length 309 m, width 110, height 40 m) and the “X” hall (also in the Snezhnaya cave - 270 m by 70 m with a height of up to 58 m)).
- The New Athos cave is also not the largest cave in Abkhazia either in terms of length or volume of the cavity. In terms of volume, it is significantly inferior to the Snezhnaya cave, and in terms of length it is not even among the ten longest caves in Abkhazia.
- The highest hall of the cave is the “Moscow” (“Temple”) hall. Its height is 54 meters.
- The most beautiful halls of the cave are the Givi Smyr Halls, “Anakopia”, Helictite Grotto and Corallite Gallery (Gallery of “Stone Flowers”).
- One of the attractions of the Anakopia hall is Lake Anatolia. The area of the lake is 1000 m², depth 26 m, water temperature 10 degrees Celsius. Also in this hall is the “Blue Lake” measuring 1250 m².
- In the “Helictite Grotto” hall, reserved for scientific work, there is a large number of drip-drip formations - helictites. Here is the stone waterfall “Apsny”, which is 20 meters high and 6 meters wide (in the photo).
- The New Athos cave has 4 entrances, 3 of which are artificial (in the “Anakopia” and “Apsny” halls they enter the underground railway stations), as well as a drainage gallery specially made from the “Disappearing Lake” hall. The only natural entrance through which they initially entered the cavity can be seen in the ceiling of the Anakopia hall. On the surface, this exit is adjacent to the village of Esher, in the form of a deep hole.
- The action of the novel “The Blind” by D.S. takes place on the territory of the cave. Ermakova from the series "Metro-2033".
One of the most impressive and memorable excursions in Abkhazia was a visit to the New Athos cave, located under the slope of Mount Iverskaya, in New Athos, next to the famous monastery (about which there may be a separate photo report). The cave is the largest in the republic and in the entire Western Caucasus, its age is 2 million years. It was opened half a century ago and there was even a mini-metro there to make it more convenient for tourists to get there.
As usual, due to laziness and frivolity, we didn’t read or see anything about this cave before the trip, relying on chance. In addition, I generally imagined them somewhat differently, because... The only time I visited them was with Glavbraza a couple of years ago, on the outskirts of Adler - in the Akhshtyrskaya cave. It was, of course, beautiful and interesting there. But, as it turned out later, comparing these two caves was like comparing... well, for example, a hut with a skyscraper. Those. in their open spaces, volumes and scope they differ incommensurably! Natalya had never been to caves at all.
In general, as usual, at the beginning of the excursion, at 10-00, my wife and I approached the stop where a familiar minibus was waiting for us, which took us to New Athos.
Having entered the city, we rose a couple of hundred meters above sea level, passed the New Athos Monastery and unloaded near the steps leading to the entrance to the cave:
The cave is a huge karst cavity with a volume of about 1 million m³ and consists of 11 halls. Some (2 or 3) are closed because... have not yet been fully explored, and the rest represent a “trail” almost 2 km long.
If the air temperature outside was around +25 and the sun was shining, then inside the cave it was damp and cool, but not +11, as our guide promised, but several degrees higher. However, the local “cave” guide explained this difference by saying that during the summer-autumn season, due to the sharply increased flow of tourists to Abkhazia, so many people managed to pass through here that the temperature inside the entire space rose and this does not bode well for the local “microclimate” nothing good. Vopschem, Muscovites and other Russians inhaled. But because The tour of the cave lasted more than an hour - we warmed ourselves up a little, having previously taken outerwear with us.
Having gone inside, into the very first hall, we were quietly amazed... The height from the “floor” to the “ceiling” here was at least a hundred meters, and the hall itself was more than a hundred meters long and almost as much wide! The most beautiful places were illuminated by several spotlights, but the far corners were almost invisible, and the guide immediately warned not to lag behind so as not to remain in pitch darkness (when moving “from hall to hall,” the spotlights were turned off to save electricity and it became completely unseeable).
In general, the height of the “halls” here ranges from 36 to 170 meters.
In the first “hall” a lake was discovered at the bottom and people immediately rushed to take pictures of it. By the way, its size is more than 1000 sq.m., and the water temperature is always +10.
In general, all this splendor wildly reminded me of a scene from the first part of the film trilogy “The Lord of the Rings”: when the Brotherhood, after their unsuccessful attempt to cross the snowy pass through Caradhras, decides to take a risk - to go through the dungeons of Moria, the ancient kingdom of the gnomes, captured by goblins:
After long wanderings around Moria, the detachment entered the Hall of Chronicles, where they were attacked by orcs. The squad was able to get out, but on the bridge of Khazad-Dum they are overtaken by the ancient demon Balrog. Having entered into a fight with the Balrog, Gandalf and his enemy fall into the abyss, the rest flee:
However, the filming of “The Lord of the Rings” did not take place here.)
Well, we, trying to take a picture of something in the pitch darkness, slowly followed our guide further...
Towards the end of the excursion, we came across a mini-souvenir where you could buy tiny pieces of stalactite for huge sums of money. By the way, I tried a couple of times, when no one was looking, to break off a piece from those places that were next to our “path,” but I never succeeded. I recommend that those who decide to visit the New Athos Cave take with them pliers or a small chisel with a hammer: if you wish, you can save a couple of hundred, or even thousand, rubles on souvenirs. Joke.
And here we are on the surface - at the exit from the "metro". From here you can see stunningly beautiful views of the monastery, the park and our actually Russian Black Sea!
Excellent weather allowed us to take pictures of local landscapes, but more about them in the next photo report..
To be continued................................. .......
(c) Uncle Vova
Abkhazia, October 2015
Some are interested in its Christian churches and shrines: the New Athos Monastery, the grotto of Simon the Zealot.
Others are more interested in the natural attractions of New Athos. In particular, the famous New Athos Cave, which is undoubtedly one of the most popular and visited attractions in Abkhazia.
The place is really very beautiful and unusual. In the cave you can see underground lakes that have never seen sunlight, and photograph bizarrely shaped stalactites and stalagmites that are neatly illuminated with all the colors of the rainbow.
From this article you will learn how you can get into the cave, how much it costs and what you should consider when going there.
New Athos Cave: description, photo, operating hours
A huge cave hidden in the depths Iveron Mountain and was opened quite recently - in 1961. And in 1975, the first train carrying tourists passed through an artificial tunnel leading to the cave. The train itself is unique, because... it has a non-standard size: the narrow gauge of the railway track + the low arches of the cave tunnel set such parameters.
Local residents used to call a large failure on the slope of Iverskaya Mountain the Bottomless Pit. The huge well, whose steep walls were lost in the darkness, was avoided for a long time. And only in 1961, a brave local boy, Givi Smyr, dared to go down into the hole. But it was impossible to get to the bottom without special equipment. Therefore, only when speleologists descended after Givi Smyr did the darkness of the cave, cut through by the light of lanterns, begin to reveal its secrets. And she revealed a real miracle underground, which was named after its location - the New Athos Cave.
How the cave works and ticket prices
Now this place is so popular that visiting the cave has been streamlined to allow everyone to experience its beauty. Let into the cave only in groups. Take this point into account when planning your trip. If you are going to this place at the height of the season, in August, your chances of buying tickets for the next show are slim. You'll have to wait a couple of hours. However, this is not a problem; in New Athos you will have something to do during this time. I will talk about this at the end of the article. Conversely, during the low season, you may have to wait until there are enough applicants (minimum 40 people).
Once an hour, tourists are taken to the cave on a special train and, at the end of the route, taken back on it.
During the high tourist season, from June to September inclusive, the cave is open daily from 10 to 18 o'clock, and at the height of the season - with July 1 to September 30 - e daily, seven days a week, from 9 to 19.00
In low season - from October 1 to June 1:
the cave is open 4 days a week: Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday from 10.00 to 18.00
Tickets cost 500 rubles for an adult. Children under 8 years old are admitted free of charge.
The duration of the route is one and a half hours, and therefore it is better to go to the toilet in advance (there is none in the cave, the nearest one is across the road, for a fee).
It is also important to note that the cave is cold. Temperature approx. +14 °C, and therefore warm clothes will not hurt you, because after +30 outside in the cave you will feel quite cold. The cave is also wet in places, so comfortable, non-slip shoes such as sneakers are what you need to visit it.
What awaits you in the cave: photo
The cave itself is very large, its length is about 3 kilometers . A route with a length of almost 1.5 kilometers.
The entire route is well equipped: a 1.4-kilometer-long pedestrian path with observation platforms has been built and artistic lighting has been installed.
All rooms are sounded. This is what the cave diagram looks like:
The journey into the underworld begins with a ride on the “cave metro”;
All interesting objects in the cave are highlighted. You don’t even need to have a rich imagination to see these cave monsters:
And if everything is in order with your imagination, then mysterious images of underground inhabitants will haunt you in every room:
Do you see that crocodile lurking at the bottom of the cave?
Underground lakes are sometimes full of water, but in the summer they most often either dry up or their level drops significantly:
But the cascades of stalactites and stalagmites do not disappear anywhere and amaze with their monumentality:
But these pebbles are displayed on stands in the cave:
This cave “diamond” is called calcite. The inscription claims that if you wear calcite as a talisman, it preserves health and prolongs life.
By the way, at the entrance to the New Athos cave there is a sculpture "Golden Fleece" , which has a symbolic meaning.
The Golden Fleece is a sign of prosperity; it was for it that, according to ancient legend, the Argonauts swam. The sculpture itself reflects the myth of a sister and brother who went on a long journey on a golden ram. It is believed that whoever touches the sculpture will have good luck and untold wealth in the near future. So don't miss the chance!
After visiting the cave, you will probably want to refresh yourself. You can do this in the nearest cafe, which offers a wonderful view of the New Athos Monastery:
What is the best way to get to the cave and what can you combine it with?
Most often, tourists travel to the cave from Sochi. From the Psou checkpoint (border of Abkhazia and Russia) it is approximately 90 kilometers or 1.5 hours of travel. There are problems with parking at the cave: there are no free parking spaces, and during the season you won’t find any free parking spaces. So you will have to leave the car somewhere on the driveway.
Bus excursions are also available here, and private guides do not bypass the cave.
Typically, all excursion programs around New Athos include a visit to the New Athos cave, New Athos Monastery, a waterfall and a beautiful abandoned station on the Psyrtskha River, as well as the Seaside Park and the grotto of Simon the Canaanite .
And if you still have some strength left, you can climb Iverskaya Mountain and explore the ancient:
So you can get as many impressions from one trip to New Athos as you wouldn’t get in other places in a week.
Of course, during a regular bus tour you won’t be shown that much. They will take you to a cave and a monastery, but everything else is not included in their program. So we either drive our own car or rent a car. You can rent a car here: Car rental in Sochi
But be sure to check with the rental office to see if you can drive their cars to Abkhazia; sometimes they ask for an additional payment for this, twice the cost of a regular rental). Well, we download the map from the Maps.me application in advance - the Internet in Abkhazia is simply “golden” in price!
If you want to go to New Athos from Sochi with a private guide on his car, I can tell you who is best to contact. Tel. +79384600693, call, you will be given a wonderful and educational excursion. The guys work on all routes in Abkhazia, they don’t mess around, they talk interestingly, in pure Russian, the prices are reasonable.
You can also combine a visit to the cave in New Athos with a visit to the capital of Abkhazia - the city of Sukhum. But then you have to go either very early, or not linger in New Athos.
Enjoy your trip and see you on the blog!
New Athos Cave (New Athos, Abkhazia) - detailed description, location, reviews, photos and videos.
- Last minute tours to Abkhazia
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Nature has generously endowed Abkhazia with countless beauties and unique natural monuments. One of these wonderful natural gifts was the New Athos Cave, which is a worthy competitor to many world-famous underground palaces, for example, the American Carlsbad Cave or the Škocjan Cave, located in Yugoslavia.
History of the New Athos Cave
The New Athos Cave gained public fame relatively recently, half a century ago, when the Abkhaz artist Givi Smyr discovered a strange entrance on one of the sections of the Iveron Mountain and, together with a group of activists, ventured down to a depth of 135 m. It must be said that local residents had long noticed this dungeon and even gave its name is Bottomless Pit, but there were no brave men to explore it. Givi Smyr and his comrades opened the Anakopia hall, later it became known about other halls of the New Athos cave, and since 1975 the first excursion trains began running through the artificial tunnel.
One of the wonderful natural gifts of Abkhazia is the New Athos Cave, which is a worthy competitor to many world-famous underground palaces.
The New Athos cave is a huge dungeon, which is no less than several million years old. The Abkhazian miracle of nature can delight even those tourists who, it would seem, cannot be surprised by anything. Passages branching hundreds of meters deep, sparsely illuminated underground halls and galleries take visitors into the depths of the Iveron Mountain and captivate them with its mysterious life. The underground world of the New Athos cave is very rich: you will find here emerald cave lakes, stone ramparts, and stalactite palaces. Those who go on underground journeys for the first time cannot even imagine how many impressions an excursion under the stone sky of the New Athos underground will give.
A tour of the depths of the caves of Iverskaya Mountain begins with a short ride on a specially designed electric train with a capacity of 90 people.
At first, converted mining trolleys were used to transport passengers on the underground line. The project of this train was developed at the Institute of Coal Industry, and it was manufactured at the Riga Carriage Works.
There are only three stations on the route with a total length of 1.3 km: “Entrance Gate”, “Apsny Hall” and “Anakopia Hall”.
Tourist routes
The New Athos cave consists of 11 explored halls, only half of them are open to tourists.
Let's talk about some of them. The very first room that greets visitors is the Anakopia hall with a giant stone rampart falling down from a height of 30 m. The silence that reigns in this hall is broken only by drops of water, every now and then falling off the walls and crashing loudly on the stones. The Speleologists' Hall is distinguished by its overpass, which was built in order to avoid flooding of the tourist trail during heavy floods, and in the Mahajirs' Hall, so named in memory of the Abkhazians forcibly resettled in Turkey, you will encounter the White Mountain and stalagmites.
Practical information
A visit to the New Athos Cave is possible only as part of an excursion group accompanied by a guide. The duration of the excursion is 1.5 hours, they are regularly held during the tourist season - from early May to early November; in winter, the cave is open on Wednesdays and weekends. When planning to travel through the New Athos underground, do not forget that the air in the halls warms up no higher than +14 °C, so you need to take warm clothes with you.
Entrance: 500 RUB (Prices on the page are indicated for October 2018), for children under eight years old admission is free, photo and video shooting are paid separately.
One of the amazing wonders that the nature of Abkhazia is so generous with is the world-famous New Athos Cave. For millions of years it hid its secrets in the depths of the Iverskaya Mountain and was discovered quite recently, just half a century ago - in 1961. And in 1975, the first “cave metro” train carrying tourists passed through an artificial tunnel leading to the cave.
The New Athos cave is a colossal karst cavity with a volume of about 1 million cubic meters, which in its size rivals the most famous dungeons in the world. Huge halls and galleries winding in bizarre meanders stretch for many hundreds of meters.
A little history
For a long time, the attention of local residents was attracted by a large failure on the slope of Iverskaya Mountain. A huge well, the steep walls of which were lost in the darkness, was called the Bottomless Pit. For a long time there were no brave souls who would dare to descend into its black mouth. The first attempt was made by a resident of New Athos, Givi Smyr. In 1961, a special expedition was organized to explore the mysterious Bottomless Pit.
Having overcome all the obstacles of the mysterious failure, the adventurers went down to the bottom. A strong draft of air was felt in one of the small holes, and the cavers one by one squeezed forward. The darkness that swallowed the light of the lanterns spoke of grandiose things. Volumes never before seen underground. This is how the secret of the Bottomless Pit was revealed and a real miracle was discovered underground - the New Athos Cave.
In total, there are 11 halls in the cave, although tourists cannot see them all - almost half of them are closed to the public. The excursion route includes the Anakopia, Speleologists, Nart, Deer, Corallite Gallery, Apkhertsa, Ayukhaa Gallery and Apsny Halls. Music concerts are held from time to time in the Moscow Hall - the acoustics here are amazing. The helictite hall is used for scientific purposes.
Cave plan:
Railway in the New Athos Cave opened on July 4, 1975. Designed to deliver tourists to the cave inside the Apsara (Iverskaya) Mountain during the holiday season (from May to November). It has a length of 1/3 km and 3 stations: “Entrance Gate”, “Apsny Hall” and “Anakopia Hall”.
The “Tourist” electric train is suitable, like in the metro, but small, for 90 people. Everyone takes their seats. The journey into the underworld begins:
The steel door closes behind the tour group - and you find yourself in the “Abkhazia” hall. The lights turn on, the voices of tourists fade away. Long seconds of silence drag on. A colossal cavity opens before you, an immense, unlike anything else, underground world: not a sound, not a movement, not a gust of wind.
It does not sparkle with festive cave decorations, but it is beautiful in its own way. Here the cave looks like a calm, full of grandeur, a mighty giant, immersed in a thousand-year sleep. The colors of the hall are simple and dull - gray rough limestone, brown clay:
All observation platforms are equipped with control panels, a few lights and microphones. Well, here is the first point of inspection, from where a view of the Lake Anacopia. The area of the lake is 1,000 square meters, depth is 26 meters, water temperature is 10 degrees Celsius. By the way, before the opening of the cave and its arrangement, the level of this lake was much higher - along the border of brown and gray, that is, all the observation rooms in this room were under water. However, especially for tourists, a drainage gallery was dug “at the bottom” of this hall, which can also be seen far below.
Nearby there is a second lake, which is essentially a continuation of the first. It measures 1,250 square meters. The shores of the lake are not sand, but clay. The only natural entrance through which they initially entered the cavity can be seen here, in the ceiling of the Anakopia hall. On the surface, this exit is adjacent to the village of Eshera, in the form of a deep hole:
Sinter formation "Human Skull":
The largest hall of the New Athos cave is the Hall of Speleologists. Its length is 260 meters, height - up to 50 meters, width - up to 75 meters. All this makes this hall the third largest in Abkhazia:
It was not easy to build an excursion path here. To lay it along the bottom of the hall means to expose it to the danger of periodic flooding. To carry it with a cornice along the steep western wall means to rely on the dubious strength of limestone rocks corroded by karst processes. A third way was found. Over the harsh cave ravines, a 120-meter-long overpass soared to a height of 18 meters:
There is no water now and you can see the bottom of the underground lake:
Path towards Nart's hall:
Hall of Speleologists and a 120-meter underground overpass:
A huge stone bag is covered with powerful clay layers. At the lowest point of the hall, at 36 meters above sea level, there is the third and last “living” lake of the cave. In the water of the lake, slightly clouded by clay particles, colonies of translucent crustaceans feel comfortable, the largest of which grow up to two centimeters in length:
Grotto Deer the lower, Spartan-simple, harsh part of the New Athos cave ends:
The progress increases, and now you are surrounded on all sides by unusual colored cave stones. It seems that the cave has become lighter: the walls have moved, changed color: the gaze no longer falls into a dark void, but more and more often stops at some underground wonder. Here is a whole colony of orange stalagmites, nestled on the scree near the wall. :
This mighty underground gorge, as if cut through the thickness of the mountain by the blow of a giant sword, stretches from north to south for more than a hundred meters. Sheer ten-meter-high walls, a flat horizontal ceiling, and an uneven floor littered with boulders again create the impression of stern simplicity and severity. :
Along the dark yellow walls of the Ayuhaa hall, almost black horizontal stripes stretched along its entire length at different levels. Coming closer, it is not difficult to see that each such strip is a depression in the rock filled with clay particles. A thin metal rod will be immersed in this clay for its entire length. Such cracks in limestone separate the older, lower layers of limestone from the younger, upper layers. But both of them were formed hundreds of millions of years ago. Once upon a time there was a raging river bed here.
The austere hall of Ayuhaa is not without decorations, the most attractive of which are stocky stalagmites. They are composed of translucent, orange and red calcite. There are hundreds of them here, these clean, smooth gnomes, they lined up along the walls, ran down the slopes, pressed close to the excursion path - they escort you to the Iveria music hall.
Stalagmite in the Ayuhaa Hall:
Iveria Hall and the canyon towards the Anakopia Hall:
To the right of the path - :
A few more steps - and you find yourself in a real white-stone palace - the Anakopia Hall! A sloping floor of yellowish, light gray and white cave limestone cascades in wide cascades to the east, surrounded by walls hung with calcite draperies. These amazing “curtains”, once and forever bent into smooth folds, were formed from countless droplets of water flowing down the walls. On the ceiling of the hall there grows a whole forest - only with the tops down - of a wide variety of stalactites.
Login Anakopia Hall:
But “out of competition” in the Anakopia hall is a completely unusual cave “waterfall”, which does not exist on the earth’s surface. From a hole in a high steep wall, a huge, forever frozen stone shaft falls into the hall from a height of thirty meters. Its heavy “jet”, almost bursting into huge drops, rushes to the ground and stops, not reaching it some two meters. But along the smooth, slightly wavy surface of the calcite waterfall, real water flows. It falls down from the cascade and, breaking against the stones, flows in streams from bath to bath, rushing down through cracks and cracks.
The stone extravaganza of the most beautiful hall in the New Athos cave, Anakopia, is beautiful. But this is also the “wettest” hall - the relative air humidity here is always maximum - 100 percent. The fact is that the passage of the cave is crossed in this area by a small but constant underground watercourse. Moisture seeps from cracks in the ceiling, drops down the walls, and water dust hangs in the air. The presence of water saturated with calcium carbonate created this remarkable abundance of sinter formations.
Artfully illuminated with colored lamps, the Anakopia Hall appears before you as a magnificent ceremonial hall of the underground dwelling of good mountain spirits. This treasure trove of natural beauty and bounty offers a photo opportunity for a keepsake. The excursion route ends here, but the wonders of the New Athos Cave do not end.
