Visiting the Ararat region of Armenia early in 2013, I was constantly being made aware of the country’s painful history, and the degree to which it continues to hang over and dominate the present. On my first morning, I woke up to a beautiful clear day, and there, from my motel terrace, looming over the landscape, was the towering, snow-covered bulk of Mount Ararat, symbol of Armenia. Noah’s Ark is said to have come to rest in the Ararat range. Armenian legend has it that Noah’s great-great-grandson, Hayk, was the founder of the Armenian nation. The Armenian word for their country, Hayastan, derives from his name. Yet Ararat is not part of modern Armenia, but of neighbouring Turkey. I was staying right up against the border, a border which is closed, cutting Armenia off from lands which its people still consider to be rightfully their own. The presence of Ararat today seems almost to mock the Armenians who, so close by, cannot go there, unless they undertake a long, round-about journey through a neighbouring country.
A school teacher in a village close to the border asked me whether I had been to eastern Turkey? Was there any sign of the Armenian heritage there, he asked? He said he hoped that Kars, Erzerum, Van, would all one day again be part of Armenia. I visited a museum dedicated to the Armenian poet Paruyr Sevak, in the village of his birth, Zangakatun. Sevak had died in a car accident in 1971, and is widely revered in Armenia. As well as exhibits linked to the poet’s life, including his desk, and his couch, along one long wall of the museum was a huge mural. The mural showed Sevak pulling aside a curtain, revealing the suffering of the 1915 genocide, when over a million Armenians from eastern Turkey were sent on forced death marches away from their ancestral homeland. This was part of a policy of the wartime Turkish authorities to remove nations they considered to be fifth columnists aligned with their enemies. It was a murderous policy, accompanied by numerous massacres. The mural showed a cast of evil characters, including a Hitler-like figure, and pig-faced humans who the museum guide told us represented the Young Turks, who had seized power in the dying Ottoman Empire shortly before the First World War. The guide explained that Sevak pulled aside the curtain on the Armenian tragedy.
This sense of injustice permeates modern Armenian life and dominates the national consciousness. Many other countries perceive that they are the victims of historical injustice, that they have lost territory that rightfully should have been theirs. But it is hard to think of anywhere where history has left such an indelible mark, such a debilitating legacy that poisons the country’s relations with its neighbours and impedes its quest for a better future. Turkey has for years resisted international pressure to acknowledge the genocide. But for some Armenians such an acknowledgement does not seem adequate. One young woman told me she was not interested in an apology. For her, nothing less than the recovery of Armenia’s lost territory would suffice. And she wanted Turkey to pay Armenia compensation for the deaths of their long dead kin. I asked her whether she seriously imagined such aspirations were remotely realistic? What did she expect to happen to the people currently living in the regions of eastern Turkey she coveted, far more numerous than the entire population of present-day Armenia? Would they be expelled, in an echo of the treatment meted out on Armenians a century earlier? Who knows, she responded, what might be possible in future.
I visited the monastery of Khor Virap, or ‘Deep Well’, within sight of the border fence. The monastery was built over a deep pit where St. Gregory the Illuminator is said to have been imprisoned for 13 years by the pagan King Tiridates III. St. Gregory is credited with converting the Armenians to Christianity in 301 AD, making Armenia the first state officially to adopt Christianity. At the monastery’s centre is a little church with the conical tower typical of Armenian churches. It is surrounded by a defensive wall, with turrets. I peered down into the deep pit where St. Gregory is said to have been imprisoned, and thought better of descending.
Across the border too, in modern-day Turkey, the landscape is dotted with Armenian churches, most of them now in ruins. They attest to the formerly Armenian character of the region. Most notable is the medieval Armenian capital of Ani, now a field surrounded by a wall, and dotted with ruined churches. Right up against the border with Armenia, not far from where I was now staying, I had visited Ani in 2010. It is understandable that Armenians mourn their lost lands, and the ghosts of their massacred ancestors. Turkey should acknowledge the injustice, the suffering it heaped on other peoples, Armenians, Greeks and others, during the traumatic founding of their modern state on the ashes of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire. But while Armenians cannot be expected to forget their past, they do need to come to terms with it and deal with their neighbours in the present. An accommodation with Turkey needs to be found. As Serbs and Albanians grasp for a modus vivendi over Kosovo, only a little over a decade after their recent war, surely after a hundred years Armenians and Turks can find a way to look to the future.
