Ani, Where Khachkars Lie Face Down in the Dust
Visiting one post-Soviet state, you can then recognize it in all others – the similar patterns of urban planning and the identical buildings, structures, roads, pipes, wires, tiles, etc. However, an outsider delving inside under the extreme familiarity of the material environment finds an extreme “strangeness” of social interactions and practices. The “Outside In” series is about emplaced paradoxes and nuances. It spotlights the mundane in Armenia’s peripheral locations, where the seemingly unspectacular encounters with people and things allowing us to capture the unique features of the territory.
From Kars, the last stretch to Ani takes around 40 minutes by car along a road cutting through a flat, tawny plateau. The landscape looks almost indistinguishable from the Armenian side; only the road signs and licence plates remind you that you are in Turkey. You pass a village trying not to hit geese wandering across dirt roads, drive along fields scattered with rubble that must once have belonged to Armenian settlements, and finally arrive at a modest parking lot. Buy a ticket. Walk through a gate. And suddenly, without much ceremony, medieval Armenia opens before you with the Bagratid lion still carved into the city walls.
I am not given to superlatives, distrusting them as rhetorical shortcuts. But I will say this plainly: Ani is one of the most extraordinary places I have ever been to.
At its height in the 10th and 11th centuries, the city held perhaps one 100,000 inhabitants, comparable to London or Constantinople at the time. It was the capital of the Bagratid kingdom, seat of an Armenian golden age of architecture, scholarship, theology, and trade, wealthy enough to construct walls within walls, a citadel, and a cathedral so ambitious it took decades to complete. The Cathedral of Ani, begun in 989 and consecrated in 1001, still stands. Partially. Its dome collapsed long ago, the nave is roofless, but the walls endure. The decorative stonework – blind arcading, carved ornament, the severe refinement of Armenian medieval architecture – remains unmistakable. You can undeniably see the Armenian essence of this place.
Much of what the world knows about Ani comes through the work of Nikolai Marr, the controversial Russian and later Soviet orientalist who led excavations there beginning in the 1890s, when Ani still belonged to the Russian Empire. Marr documented churches, inscriptions, streets, and entire quarters of the city before war and borders transformed Ani into a frontier ruin. His enormous publications on Ani remain indispensable despite the later infamy of Marr himself, whose linguistic theories would become one of the stranger episodes in Soviet intellectual history. Standing among the ruins, it is difficult not to think about how fragile both civilizations and their preservation can be.
The peculiar route one must now take to reach Ani has older origins than the border closure of the 1990s. Ani became inaccessible from Armenia through the military and diplomatic settlements of the early 1920s, when the collapsing First Republic lost Kars, Surmalu, Mount Ararat, and Ani itself to Kemalist Turkey. Armenian negotiators pleaded unsuccessfully to retain these places for historic and symbolic reasons. The treaties that followed – Treaty of Alexandropol signed by Alexander Khatisyan the then Prime Minister of the Dashnak-lead First Republic and then Treaty of Kars signed by the Soviet Armenia represented by Askanaz Mravyan and Poghos Makintsian – fixed a border whose absurdity remains visible today. Both Ararat and Ani are foundational to Armenian identity, both are clearly visible from the Armenian side, and yet both remain physically outside Armenia.
What the Signs Say
Ani sits in the Kars province of Turkey and has been administered as a Turkish archaeological site since the founding of the republic. UNESCO World Heritage status arrived in 2016, bringing increased international attention and some restoration funding. The Turkish state presents Ani as a shared heritage site, a monument to the civilizations of Anatolia. This framing is not entirely wrong. Byzantines, Seljuks, Georgians, Mongols, Russians all left traces here. But the effect of such framing, subtle yet consequential, is that Armenia becomes one voice among many, rather than a pivotal one.
The signage at the site participates in this framing. Buildings are labelled with dates and architectural features. What appears less consistently is the simple statement that this was an Armenian city. The Cathedral of Ani is identified. Armenian inscriptions are photographed endlessly by tourists who often have little sense of what language they are looking at or why it appears here. The Church of the Redeemer, split dramatically in half by lightning in the mid-20th century, stands as one of the site’s most photogenic ruins, but its Armenian dedicatory inscriptions require prior knowledge to interpret. I watched a group of tourists photograph the church, consult their guide, and move on without, as far as I could hear, any mention of Armenia at all.
I should be careful here. I am a Slavic woman visiting an archaeological site in Turkey with a scholarly rather than ancestral connection to Armenian history. I have no inherited grief attached to Ani. What I do have is the professional habit of noticing when information is arranged to produce certain conclusions. And the information at Ani is arranged in a way that makes Armenia appear incidental, one civilization among many that passed through Anatolia, rather than the culture that built the city itself.
The Khachkars
Khachkars, Armenian cross stones, are among the most distinctive forms of Armenian material culture, produced from roughly the 9th century onward. At Ani they are everywhere. Or rather, they are everywhere somewhere beneath your feet. I found the first one accidentally while walking near the Church of Saint Gregory. It lay face-down in the grass. At first, I assumed it had simply fallen, the way stones do over centuries. Then I noticed another. Then a third. All face-down.
A local guide whom I overheard explained matter-of-factly that many khachkars at Ani had at various points during the 20th century been repositioned this way. Face-down. This is not a neutral act of conservation. A khachkar placed face-down is a khachkar silenced. The carved surface, the cross, the inscription, the entire communicative purpose of the object is pressed into the soil and stepped over. I stood there for some time. There is not much one can say in response to this. You note it. You photograph the blank stone back. You understand that you are standing above a face that is not permitted to look upward.
The destruction and removal of khachkars has a long history in both Turkey and Azerbaijan. For instance, satellite imagery documented the systematic erasure of the medieval Armenian cemetery at Jugha in Nakhichevan, where thousands of khachkars were bulldozed into rubble. In Artsakh, following the Azerbaijani military offensive of September 2023, there is documentation of systematic destruction of Armenian cultural heritage: churches defaced, inscriptions removed, and khachkars broken. The logic is consistent across cases and perpetrators, and it is not the logic of neglect. Neglect is passive, stones fall, grass grows over inscriptions. The face-down or broken khachkar requires someone to mistreat it. The defaced inscription requires a tool. These are not the consequences of time but of intent: to ensure that a place from which the people have been removed is also removed from the people, so that the removal appears not as an act but as a condition. Not something that happened. Simply the way things are. This is what I thought about, standing in the grass at Ani above the stone that was not permitted to face upward – that somewhere in Artsakh, something similar is happening now, or has already happened, to stones that were upright just recently. The timeline compresses. The method of silencing history does not change.
Remaking Heritage
UNESCO World Heritage status is usually discussed as a form of protection. What it also does, somewhat paradoxically, is stabilize a particular narrative. Turkey’s nomination dossier for Ani described the site through the language of multicultural layering and “outstanding universal value” that UNESCO encourages and rewards. Within this framework, Armenian becomes an adjective rather than a subject: Armenian church, Armenian inscription, Armenian architecture. The city itself is no longer Armenian. It is merely a place where Armenians once were.
This framing circulates remarkably efficiently. It appears in guidebooks, tourism materials, travel writing, and the brief summaries visitors absorb before arriving. The tourists I watched at the split church were not negligent or malicious. They had simply absorbed the interpretive framework available to them.
There has been genuine restoration work at Ani, and some of it is careful. The cathedral walls have been stabilized. Pathways are maintained. The site is orderly and well-managed. I do not want to suggest neglect. What I want to suggest instead is that restoration and erasure can coexist perfectly well. A church may be preserved while its inscriptions remain untranslated. Khachkars lie half-buried in dust beside carefully restored and elaborately narrated Seljuk structures. The stones survive. The story they tell is administered.
One Thousand Years
The Cathedral of Ani was consecrated in 1001. This fact sits strangely in the 21st century. One thousand years ago the city stood at the height of its power. Its population expanded, merchants crossed its gates, architects produced some of the most sophisticated stonework in the medieval world. One thousand years later, I walked through the cathedral’s roofless nave while pigeons circled overhead and a huge Turkish flag hung above the citadel in the distance.
I do not know what the correct emotional response to Ani is. I think, at first, I felt rage. Most immediate and perhaps justified emotion to cultural erasure. But there was also something quieter; the vertigo of standing inside deep time and understanding, viscerally rather than intellectually, that civilizations end. Not always naturally. Sometimes cities are actively unmade, their population removed, and their stones left to be overgrown with grass.
What Ani produced was not only architecture. It produced theology, literature, music, manuscript traditions, and a school of stone-cutting so refined its techniques are still studied today. The Armenian medieval renaissance, of which Ani was the crown, was one of the remarkable cultural summits of its era. The stones themselves testify to that, if one knows how to read them and if they are permitted to speak. Standing at the edge of the site before leaving, I looked back once more at the cathedral. In the late afternoon light the walls turned golden, almost the same color as the plateau itself, as though the building had emerged organically from the landscape rather than been constructed upon it.
The border was only three kilometres away over the river. On the Armenian side, I could see the red-blue-orange flag, and I knew that there was still a road sign pointing toward Ani, which is the closest many of those who live in Armenia will get to it.
