Tomb of Prince Prosh

The right-hand door from the gavit leads to the second rock-hewn church—Prince Prosh’s tomb and the burial place of his family. The rough stone slabs on the floor mark their graves.

The walls of the chamber are richly carved with reliefs. On the northern vault, a bull’s head holds ropes in its mouth, tethered to the collars of two lions. Between them is an eagle clutching a lamb in its talons. This intricate heraldic emblem is believed to represent the coat of arms of the Proshyan (Haghbakyan) family.

Elsewhere on the walls are depictions of mythical creatures—sirins, half-bird, half-woman figures from medieval folklore—as well as carvings of Saints Thaddeus and Bartholomew, Armenia’s earliest Christian missionaries.

The tomb’s structure includes a notable flaw: in the upper left corner above the entrance, a hole in the rock suggests a miscalculation by later builders, who, while carving a second underground level, accidentally broke through the ceiling of this chamber.

The monastery came under the ownership of Prince Prosh Haghbakyan, a governor under the Zakaryans and a noble of the Haghbakyan line. Under his patronage, the Proshyans expanded Geghard with a series of ambitious constructions: this second cave church, the family tomb, the Papak and Ruzakan gavit, a hall for gatherings and study (which collapsed in the mid-20th century), and numerous monk cells.

The room extending northeast from the gavit became the family’s burial chapel, or zhamatun, in 1283. Hewn almost perfectly square into the mountain, its walls are deeply incised with symbolic reliefs. Adjacent to it is a smaller chamber featuring another version of the Proshyan coat of arms: an eagle clutching a lamb. This composition—featuring lions’ heads chained together and flanked by upward-looking dragon heads where the lions’ tails should be—has an archaic, almost pagan character. The relief sits atop a vaulted entrance on the northern wall, echoing pre-Christian imagery.

Inside the church, a khachkar beside the altar apse depicts a male figure holding a staff, likely Prince Prosh himself. Another man, shown in profile, blows a raised horn while gripping a downward-pointing spear—perhaps a guardian of the tomb or a symbolic figure from Armenian epics.