9-20-13. Kars, Turkey
I left my hotel in Ankara about 5:30, and walked the familiar route to the airport bus, guided by the light of a full moon. Like those artists who only find beauty in the faces of sleeping models, I liked the city best when it was empty. It was stirring by the time I left – the airport bus crawled through increasingly heavy traffic – but I successfully navigated the airport, and made the flight to Kars without incident. Since the Kars airport has only three gates, I was soon out the door. There, to my surprise, I found the guide I had contacted a few weeks before, willing (for the right price) to take me to Ani immediately. I agreed, threw my baggage in the back of his minivan, and was soon rolling over the steppe at 100 Kph.
My guide Celil (who spoke good English) pointed out various landmarks along the way, notably some fortifications built in the nineteenth century to ward off the advance of Imperial Russia. I was most impressed, however, by the emptiness of the surrounding countryside. Along the forty-odd kilometers to Ani, we passed only three small villages, each no more than a cluster of warped and weather-beaten houses, huddled as though for warmth. Due to its high elevation and distance from the sea, Kars province is the coldest in Turkey, with winter temperatures sometimes falling into the thirties below zero. Already, in the third week of September, the harvest had long been gathered, and fresh snow glittered on the surrounding hills. The bleak fields, dominated by thunderheads drifting over from Armenia, seemed already wrapped in the quiet that comes before a snowstorm.
Accustomed to the landscape, Celil was more taken with the local wildlife. Every time we passed a steppe eagle diving for a snake or perched on a telephone phone, he would slow the car to admire it. As he proudly informed me, there are 255 different species of migratory bird in Kars province; had I shown more interest, he would probably have named them all. When not gazing fondly after some scruffy hawk, Celil was busy avoiding terrestrial members of the animal kingdom: cows ambled down the middle of the highway, sheep grazed alongside, and Kangal mastiffs with spiked collars watched impassively as we drove by.
Then, just beyond the straggling houses of a largish village, we came to the walls of Ani. After administering a well-rehearsed orientation speech, Celil told me to meet him at the local restaurant whenever I was finished. A few clusters of visitors – maybe a dozen in all – were visible within the gates. Otherwise, I had the ruins to myself. Like Constantinople, Ani is built on a natural peninsula, with deep gorges in place of the sea. The eastern gorge, filled with the roar of a fast-flowing river, forms the modern border with Armenia; the western, though nearly as deep, channels only a small stream.
In the tenth and eleventh centuries, this wedge of land between housed more than 100,000 people, the largest city between Baghdad and Constantinople. Capital of Bagratid Armenia and a western terminus of the Silk Road, Ani, city of a thousand and one churches, was a splendid place, secure behind impregnable walls, rich with the trade of east and west. Even under the conquering Seljuks and occupying Georgians, the city retained much of its wealth and prominence; but after the thirteenth century, new waves of invaders and recurrent earthquakes gradually dispersed its inhabitants and ruined its buildings. Ani has been abandoned for more than five hundred years and – with the exception of a Russian mission at the beginning of the last century – remains almost totally unexcavated. Tense relations with the Soviet Union and independent Armenia, which enfolded the site in a military zone, combined with geographical isolation to virtually exclude visitors until restrictions were relaxed a few years ago. Even now, when Ani receives a slow but steady trickle of tourists, a sense of total isolation broods over the ruins. Though not all of the surroundings are scenic – the Turkish village is untidy, and an old Soviet military base shares the Armenian border with an active limestone quarry –I have never visited a more evocative place.
I entered through the Lion gate, once of the eight that still pierce Ani’s sixty-foot city wall. The ruins lay stretched out before me, hulks of masonry looming like icebergs from a level sea of rubble and dry grass. Following a recently cleared path, I moved roughly clockwise through the site. Pausing only to take pictures, the full circuit took three and a half hours. After a few minor ruins, I came first upon the Church of the Redeemer, probably the most photographed building at Ani. It owes this fame to a freak of its preservation. Some decades ago, exactly one half of the domed church collapsed, leaving what looks like an architectural cross-section. Regrettably, a recent stabilization campaign has swathed the ruins in an unsightly tangle of props and scaffolding, effectively ruining my photo-op.
Fortunately, I was not disappointed at the next monument, the Church of Tigran Honentz. Named for the wealthy Georgian merchant who funded its construction, this building preserves many of its original frescoes. Though centuries of exposure and vandalism have taken a serious toll, the decorative scheme is still discernible. The tall and narrow space beneath the main dome must have been particularly resplendent when the colors were still fresh. Beautiful though the frescoes were, it was the church’s exterior which impressed me most, less for its elaborate sculpture than for its setting on the brink of the eastern gorge. Deeper in the canyon, the ruins of yet another church (the so-called Convent of the Virgins) were visible but inaccessible, too close to the sensitive Armenian border for tourists to enter. From the same vantage point, however, I was treated to a stunning view of the citadel, towering four hundred feet over the rushing river against a dense bank of clouds.
The storm passed west of Ani, but a stray shower swept over the hills just as I reached the Cathedral. Built by two of the greatest Bagratid kings, this is certainly the grandest structure surviving onsite. Though the dome has collapsed, the towering aisles and polychrome walls are still intact, allowing a real sense of the grandeur that once reigned here. Regrettably, my camera, already spattered with rain, was nearly useless in the gloomy interior.
When the shower abated, I jogged a few hundred yards to the shelter of the Menucer Camii, the best-preserved mosque at Ani. Erected in 1072, the year after the battle of Manzikert, this is often claimed as the oldest Seljuk mosque in Turkey. Its polychrome stonework is immediately impressive, as are the views afforded from its windows over the eastern gorge and nearby citadel.
Like the Convent of the Virgins, the citadel is off-limits to visitors. The prohibition is not, however, applied to livestock; dozens of cattle range over keep and circuit walls, cropping grass in the halls where Armenian soldiers once feasted on mutton.
Cresting the hill that rises towards the citadel, I came into sight of the western gorge, its two-hundred foot faces honeycombed with a dense network of caves and cells. Beyond, the featureless steppe rose by rolling hills towards the barren summit of a low mountain range. This bleak horizon was broken by the pyramidal roof of the Church of St. Gregory, a small but well-preserved building near the lip of the gorge.
With a last lingering look at the ruins, I passed back through the lion gate, and found Celil in the last stages of a leisurely lunch. Towards the middle of our drive back to Kars, I noticed an enormous thunderhead coming swiftly from the west. The storm caught us just before we entered the city, giving occasion for some extremely animated driving as locals dashed back and forth across the street to get out of the rain.
After checking into my hotel, I threw my bags into my room, extracted my raincoat, and rushed out to see what Kars had to offer in the remaining two hours of daylight. I needn’t have hurried. A bleak place made bleaker by the weather, the old town had little to offer besides a single tenth-century Armenian church (now a mosque) and the forbidding castle. Ascending the latter’s basalt walls, I was treated to an expansive view of the gray buildings of Kars and colorless steppe beyond. In the direction of Ani, a lingering thunderstorm let down a slanting shroud of rain.
6-13-17
Having spent a memorable afternoon at Ani four years ago, I decided to give the site only a couple hours today. This time, the citadel – long closed for obscure “security” reasons – was open, or at least unguarded. I clambered up for a panoramic view of the ruins: hulks of masonry, adrift in a sea of green.
Next, I made my way to Kumluza, a straggling Kurdish village surrounding the remains of two medieval churches. The view from the village alone was worth the bumpy drive: the ruins of Ani, about five miles away, were pinpricks on the immensity of the steppe. The white crown of Ararat shimmered surreally beyond.
Parking where the village street became too narrow for my car, I walked up to the half-collapsed ruins of a monastery church on the edge of the village. At my approach, a very large and very old watchdog emerged up from a shady corner, barked once, and – having apparently decided that I was not a threat – laid back down. After maneuvering around the dog and a cow lying in the nave to take a few photos, I made my way past more livestock to the small but relatively well-preserved chapel a few hundred yards away. Inevitably, it was serving as a stable.
I spent the rest of the afternoon exploring other medieval Armenian ruins in local villages. None, however, matched the grandeur of Ani.
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