Theseus seven most courageous youths and the seven most beautiful maidens were to board a boat and be sent as tribute to Crete, never to be seen again. In another version, King Minos had waged war with the Athenians and was successful. He then demanded that, at nine-year intervals, seven Athenian boys and seven Athenian girls were to be sent to Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster that lived in the Labyrinth created by Daedalus. On the third occasion, Theseus volunteered to talk to the monster to stop this horror. He took the place of one
Lake Van Monster Lake Van Monster The Lake Van Monster () is a lake monster that allegedly lives in Lake Van in eastern Turkey. The Armenian chroniclers Movses Khorenatsi and Anania Shirakatsi wrote about vishaps living in Lake Van. According to the legend, the god Vahagn, the "vishapakagh" ("reaper of vishaps"), would plunge into Lake Van to drag out any vishap that had grown large enough to devour the world. Scholar James Russell considers that this legend is an Armenian adoption of Urartian myths concerning the combat of the god Teisheba with the water monster Ullikummi. Russell writes that into the modern period,