Tork Angeghya
The giant who carved rocks and stirred the seas
Tork was the son of Paskam, the grandson of Hayk. He was an ugly, tall, coarsely built man with a flat nose, deep-set eyes, and a stern look. Because of his extreme ugliness, he was called “Angeghya.” King Vagharshak of Armenia appointed this powerful and gigantic Tork as the governor of the western part of the Armenian world and named his clan the “House of Angegh.”
Tork was endowed with immense strength. He would take smooth granite boulders, split them however he liked, carve them with his fingernails, smooth them like planks, and carve eagles into them using only his nails.
Khorenatsi reports that during the Great Flood, when Xisuthros (Noah) sailed toward Armenia and encountered land, one of his sons, Shem, went northwest to observe the country. He reached a small plain near a long mountain, through which a river flowed toward Assyria. He stopped near this river and stayed for about two months. He named the mountain “Sim” after himself and returned to where he came from.
One of Shem's younger sons, Tarban, separated from his father and settled on the banks of that river with his thirty sons, fifteen daughters, and their spouses. The province was named “Taron” after Tarban, and the place where Tarban lived was called “Tseronk,” meaning that this was the place where Shem's son and grandchildren first scattered and separated from him.
This ancient tradition explaining the place names of Taron or Mush is linked to the myth of the Great Flood—the mythological history of the first inhabitants of Armenia in the post-flood period—and testifies to the deep antiquity and divine origin of the name Tarban-Tarawn-Taron.
Once, on the shore of the Pontus Sea, Tork encountered enemy ships. He attacked them, wanting to sink them, but the ships quickly retreated into the depths of the sea. Seeing that he could not reach them, Tork tore hill-sized rocks from the mountains on the coast and threw them after the ships. The rocks he threw caused severe turbulence in the sea; many of the ships sank to the bottom of the sea, while the remaining ones were pushed back many miles by the crashing waves.