Haunted by History
By Owen Matthews
| NEWSWEEK
Published Sep 4, 2009
>From the magazine issue dated Sep 14, 2009
The ruins of the ancient Armenian capital of Ani are haunting, and
haunted. On what is now a windblown patch of grassland enclosed in
colossal walls and dotted with ancient cathedrals, there was once a
great city. You can still see the ghosts of its streets outlined in
the turf, and inside the granite churches you can make out the fading
faces of saints and kings painted on the ceilings more than a
millennium ago. On one side of the city, a dramatic single-span
bridge, now ruined, brought the Silk Road across the gorge of the
Akhurian River. On the other, the road wound on across the Anatolian
plains to Constantinople and the great trading cities of the
Mediterranean.
Once, Ani was close to the center of the world. Today, it feels like
the end of the earth.
Only a few determined tourists make it to this remote patch of
borderland on Turkey’s frontier with Armenia (it’s just four years
since it became possible to visit the site without special permission
from the military). In its heyday, being at the crossroads of empires
made Ani as large and as wealthy as Venice. But for most of history,
that crossroads has also been a cursed place. The Seljuk Turks took
Ani from the Armenians in the middle of the 11th century. After that,
it’s hard to name an Asian conqueror who didn’t stop off at Ani-the
Mongols, Tamerlane, the Persians, the Ottomans, and the Russians all
tramped through.
But the ghosts I’m talking about are much less ancient than the
medieval walls and churches-and less serene. The Anatolian plateau
around Ani witnessed some of the worst slaughter of World War I. On
the orders of a megalomaniacal commander, 90,000 Ottoman soldiers
froze to death fighting the Russians in the snowy passes. Meanwhile,
Ottoman troops and vigilantes were deporting the region’s Armenians
for allegedly sympathizing with the Russians. More than a million died
on forced marches to Syria. Today, no Armenians remain in what was the
cradle of Armenian culture since pre-Roman times.
I don’t believe in ghosts. But maybe I believe in the spirit of a
place. And in Ani, and all over ancient Armenia-now eastern
Turkey-there’s something missing. There’s a feeling that the place has
been abandoned by history, and by the people who made the place’s
history. Lately, though, the governments of both Turkey and Armenia
have been feeling their way toward reconciliation. Turkey’s refusal to
acknowledge the 1915 massacres as genocide matters less to the
Armenians of Armenia than it does to Armenian expatriates. The locals
care much more about cross-border trade, cheaper electricity supplies,
tourism-the nuts and bolts of daily life. And the elements of
diplomacy have been falling into place: a friendly soccer match, an
equally friendly return match, and presidential visits. A few soccer
matches don’t efface the murder of a whole population from memory. But
perhaps Ani supplies a clue as to how the future world might
look. Ani’s two greatest cathedrals served Christianity for less than
70 years before being converted to mosques by the Seljuks. But the
Turkish conquerors left most churches as they were, side by side with
new mosques. Like all the great trading cities of the medieval world,
Ani was a promiscuous mix of faiths and peoples-a crossroads, a
meeting point, a place of equal footing. Perhaps with the opening of
the border, this corner of the world could start to become a
crossroads again, instead of a lonely dead end.
nt