Redicovering the ancient wonders of eastern Turkey
A high, clear late summer day found me walking through groves of wild pistachio and pomegranate trees in north-eastern Turkey. I was heading out into the mountains in search of a remote Armenian church, one of the most beautiful early Christian buildings in the region.
The bus had dropped me on the outskirts of the village of Digor, and as I set off on foot, the ravine closed in around me. Soon though, emerging from the gorge, I found myself walking up into sunlit meadows, the air tinct with the scent of warm, wild sage. The rich grazing land was alive with herbs and wildflowers, hollyhocks, verbascum and wild fennel. Flights of grasshoppers erupted underfoot.
An hour later, one of the masterpieces of early Armenian architecture rose before me, perched on a ledge in the gorge. The rotunda of St Sergius was perfectly circular, with two tiers of rolling arcades of blind arches rising to a superb conical cupola. This was shaped like an old-fashioned lemon juicer, but hugely enlarged and built of gorgeous honey-colored stone.
This wonderful structure was built in 1029, just before the Normans invaded England and the Seljuk Turks erupted into Anatolia. It was astonishing to find so gorgeously sophisticated and perfect a piece of architecture in what is now such a remote location, but the building came with a tragic tale of loss and destruction.
For the rotunda was originally one of five early churches perching in the gorge of Khtzkonk, about 15 miles south-west of the medieval Armenian capital of Ani. The site was allegedly dynamited by the Turkish army in the 1950s. In photographs taken at the beginning of the century, all five of the churches can be seen, along with other monastic buildings and a small group of black-cowled Armenian monks standing proudly in front of them. After the First World War the area was closed off to visitors and was not reopened until the 1960s. When art historians returned, only the 11th-century rotunda was still intact; the rest of the monastic buildings had been levelled and the stones removed. Peasants told a visiting Frenchman of border guards arriving with high explosives. Further evidence was contained in the remaining building when I reached it: the cupola was untouched, but the side walls had been blown outwards in four places where small charges appeared to have been laid.
It was sites like this that first drew me to eastern Turkey as an undergraduate, 40 years ago. All over the eastern half of the country, the astonishingly lovely ruins of lost churches could be found hidden down distant goat tracks. On the walls were decaying frescoes, the colors running from the feathered wings of flights of seraphim and the long beards of the Desert Fathers. Many boasted superbly cut sculptures of biblical scenes: images of David and Goliath and Noah’s Ark and the Last Judgement. Any of these would have been celebrated national monuments in Europe, but here they were then apparently only visited by local shepherds. Indeed, even now, a solitary herds boy, singing to his cows, was the only soul I saw on my walk from Digor to St Sergius.
Maybe it is the sheer number of lost civilizations that give the region such an intense feeling both of wonder and of melancholy
The 1980s and ’90s were a troubled time in eastern Turkey, with a bloody, full-blown PKK insurgency in the south-east, and corresponding repression from the Turkish army. Moreover, attacks on Turkish diplomats by Armenian militants had led the authorities in some areas to remove Armenian remains from view; there were reports of the smashing of inscriptions and khachkar memorial stones. Other Armenian monuments were left to decay and collapse, with some falling into severe ruination.
But if this destruction was ever active state policy, it is good to report that it is emphatically now no longer the case. Returning to Eastern Anatolia for the first time in several years along with my family, and driving around the region’s spectacular monuments for a fortnight last summer, it felt a very different world to that I remembered from my travels on the same roads in the mid-1990s.
The island monastery of Akhtamar, the Iona of Anatolia, is a case in point. The gorgeous 10th-century Armenian Cathedral of the Holy Cross lies on an island close to the southern shore of Lake Van. It was originally built by King Gagik I Artsruni of Vaspurakan as his palatine chapel; it later evolved into a celebrated Armenian monastery. In 1915, the church was looted and the monks massacred amid the Armenian genocide. The cathedral was almost bulldozed in 1951, and when I first saw it in 1986, it lay abandoned and neglected. But it has now been beautifully restored, the buildings stabilized, and the frescoes and sculptures preserved for posterity.
It is a similar case in the city of Van, which sits by the edge of the lake, about 20 miles from Akdamar. Here for centuries the great kings of the Iron Age Urartu Kingdom ruled from a palace perched atop the ancient citadel, commanding from that eminence a vast kingdom that stretched all the way from the Caucasus to the eastern bank of the Euphrates. Its kings left behind cuneiform inscriptions in the Urartian language, which many believe to be an ancestor of Armenian. The citadel is now well maintained and just below it is the excellent Van Museum, which opened in 2019.
The ruined medieval Armenian capital of Ani also now appears well looked after and the World Monuments Fund has embarked on a major conservation program. Ani was built by the Armenian Bagratid Kings between 961 and 1045, and under them it grew to be one of the world’s largest cities, mediating the trade of east and west, with a population of well over 100,000 at a time when London was about one-tenth the size. But it was conquered first by the Byzantines in 1045, then by the Seljuk Turks in 1064, seven years before the Battle of Manzikert, which opened the gates of Anatolia to the Seljuks.
To get to Ani from the city of Kars, we drove across open plains, the flat grasslands soon punctuated by the distant domes, cupolas and spires of the many remaining churches and palaces tottering in various stages of ruination. To one side of the former city runs a steep, plunging gorge, with some of the most beautiful and dazzlingly frescoed churches built into the slope leading down to the Arpaçay river, today the border of Turkey and Armenia.
A new reception center offers golf buggies for those who don’t wish to walk about, as well as a café offering hot sweet chai. Although there is no mention on the official signboards either of the Armenians or Bagratids it is not hard to find out about its history. Indeed, the style of some of the later churches with their stalactite muqarnas and squinches, along with other features usually associated with Islamic architecture, hint at a more complex past, one of long years of Armenian and Turkish coexistence rather than simply the battles and massacres recorded in the history books.
Most heartening of all was Diyarbakir. When I was last in the city in 1994, researching my book on the demise of eastern Christianity, From the Holy Mountain, it was at war: the PKK uprising had scarred the town and left it tense and angry. I saw someone being shot by police almost as soon as I got off the bus. Today all that seems, on the surface at least, a distant memory. The bazaars were packed and bustling, the major monuments were well-restored and local families seemed relaxed as they picnicked on wooden charpoys in chaikhanas under the shade of Chinar plane trees by the banks of the slow-flowing Tigris. When I was last there, the roof of the last Armenian church had fallen in and I interviewed what I was told was the last survivor of the Armenian genocide. Today, the church is restored, runs a good café, sells good local wine and has a congregation of 50.
Although anti-Armenian sentiment persists in Turkey, I left in a mood of surprising optimism, with a sense that in a region often associated only with bloodshed, sometimes wounds do heal. Sometimes, things do get better.
One of the pleasures in travelling in the east of the country these days is the amount of digs and new museums uncovering and displaying the region’s complex and diverse past.
Göbekli Tepe is one of the most important archaeological digs anywhere in the world. In the southern plains of Turkish Mesopotamia, are 12 extraordinary sites, which together have good claim to be the oldest known human settlements anywhere. Göbekli Tepe, declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 2018, may be the most famous of these, but archaeologists have recently begun finding new settlements like Karahan Tepe that are believed to be even older, if initial radiocarbon dates are to be believed.
Both sites lie near the town of Şanlıurfa (more usually known simply as Urfa), and were built between about 9000BC and 7000BC. This was soon after the end of the last ice age, when woolly mammoths may still have roamed these plains. The settlement at Göbekli Tepe preceded the Pyramids of Giza by 7,000 years, preceded writing by 6,000 years, and the Ziggurat of Ur and the Indus Valley Civilization by 5,000 years. The only domesticated animal at the time these were built was the dog.
These settlements have also yielded the oldest known sculptures of humans: apparently naked figures of men with erect phalluses. Unfortunately, given how long their construction precedes writing, we have no way of understanding what the images may represent and what stories or mythologies they are telling, although they are clearly linked to some sort of fertility cult.
It is evident from the sculptures, however, that this was not a garden of Eden where mankind lived alongside nature in peace and harmony. Instead, the images of fierce looking leopards, boars and lizards conjure up a dark epoch of ancient history, fascinating but feral. The animal images are particularly frightening, and hint at a period of history when the natural world was looked on by our species as a predatory place. Most fascinating of all, given the antiquity of the site, is the fact that until at least the mid-20th century locals from the area still regarded these hills as sacred, and tied strings to the sole tree on top of Gobekle Tepe whenever they hoped for a child. The hill was known locally in Kurdish as Girê Mirazan or “the wishing hill”.
A new visitor center at Gobekli Tepe is due to be finished by the end of this year, but many of the finds from the site are displayed in the wonderful Şanlıurfa Museum, opened in 2015. Nearby Gaziantep, meanwhile, now boasts the Zeugma Mosaic Museum, opened in 2011 on the site of a former tobacco factory, which has established itself as one the world’s greatest museums of mosaics.
Urfa, ancient Edessa, is said to be the original home of Abraham, and his cave and pools are still popular places of pilgrimage. The town lies between the Tigris and the Euphrates but culturally is a mix of Turkish, Syrian, Iraqi and Iranian civilizations, and lies at the crossroads of all these different worlds. The Şanlıurfa Museum reflects this mix. There are busts of grand Palmyrene ladies, perhaps courtiers of Zenobia, mysterious and semi-veiled, and Hittite stelae showing long lines of bearded men in peaked witches’ caps. Semi-pagan Seljuk friezes show the Lord of the Beasts, alongside Arabic tombstones, Roman putti and early Christian fonts covered in tangles of vine scrolls.
Maybe it is the sheer number of lost civilizations that found their foothold here, only to fall, then disappear with little trace, that give the region such an intense feeling both of wonder and of melancholy. Everywhere is that sense of beauty in wreckage, a sensation somehow concentrated in the dark parabola of Mithridates tomb-sanctuary, with its twin pillars set against black mountains, and the single arch of the Roman Severan Bridge.
You feel it too in the Ozymandias-like sarcophagi of generals whose names are now erased but who once made continents quake, and in the classical galleries of the museums of Urfa and Gaziantep, where one enters a marble world of pristine stillness and silence. You see it in the statues of provincial governors and their wives with their fashionable coiffures and elaborate jewelry. Above all, you feel this sense of elegy in the humanity of these smooth, clean, classical faces, so good-looking, so well-educated, so full of wit and strength and power — and now so completely forgotten.
We look at them in awe, trying to catch some fleeting glimpse of the world they knew: the triumphal processions, the victories, the love and the power and the glory. We listen for the tramp of sandals and the blare of the legionaries’ trumpets and auxiliaries’ war carnyx, but the marble eyes stare us down. They give nothing away, taking their secrets to their marble graves.
