Travel in the East

Among the Ruins in Kurdistan

The little red Russian Lada rattles as the wind whistles in through cracks in the window. A lone, gorgeous, female baritone billygoats up and down the notes of the Turkish musical scale accompanied only by the occasional heart beat of a drum.

"Who is this singer?" I ask Erkan, our mustachioed driver.

"Aynur," he answers. "The most beautiful Kurdish voice in the world!"

The music echoes the landscape. Bare, stark, stunning. From horizon to horizon, barren steppe is scattered with lone boulders jutting out of the red earth like megaliths. Fields filled with patches of bright yellow and purple wildflowers roll off toward mountains in the East, and every so often we sweep past a village of mud-brick houses with women in scarves herding flocks of geese from yard to yard. This is another world, a manifestation of all my wildest imaginings about the fabled East.

We arrived in Kars yesterday, a city on Turkey's border with Armenia, occupied through the centuries by Seljuks, Persians, Armenians, Georgians, and others. The wide European streets betray its forty years as a Russian city at the turn of the century. Upon entering the lobby of our hotel, our driver, also the hotel manager, greeted us with a loud cry of "Welcome to Kurdistan!" This is Turkey's far eastern edge, the Kurdish territory everyone warned us about back in Istanbul. "There are terrorists everywhere," one female student whispered ominously. "The PKK control the East," assured another woman who had never left Istanbul. "And they like to target foreigners."

Kurds are on everyone's minds. For the first time since the foundation of the Republic, the government is talking of dealing with the "Kurdish Problem" with sweeping reforms. The excitement and pride among the Kurds of Kars is palpable. But the Kurds are not the only minority out here in the sticks. Ani, the dramatic ruins of one of the greatest cities of a long lost medieval Armenian empire lies just thirty miles east and serve as a reminder of a once thriving community that has vanished from Eastern Turkey.

Back in the tenth century, Ani was the cosmopolitan capital of the Bagratuni Kings of Armenia, and a major stop on the Silk Road. Nicknamed "The city of 1001 churches and forty gates", it hosted, at its peak, a population of well over 100,000 and rivaled Constantinople and Cairo in power. It is also the city which, in 1921, the Turkish National Assembly famously ordered their general in the east, Kazım Karabekir, "to wipe from the face of the earth." Karabekir ignored this command, but accusations continue from Armenians that through both neglect and willful destruction, the Turkish government is trying to carry out that order so that no trace of their presence remains in Anatolia. But relations between Turkey and Armenia are thawing. The Turkish president is attending soccer matches in Yerevan and the Ani ruins are once again open to tourists without any need for special permits.

Our first view of the city is it's great fortress wall and the Lion's Gate. Stop. Imagine here, the pilgrims flocking in to see the Patriarch; the China traders passing along the Silk Road, loaded down with bolts of cloth; the Mongol horsemen and their khan, galloping through with swords swinging. And now, nothing--a grand entrance onto wind and wasteland. There is no one here but us. The color of the stone ramparts is the color of the land, orange with patterns of black diamonds. Through the arch opens a view of the ruins within, crumbling cathedrals and churches of the same orange and black overgrown with weed and grass. The sky is completely bare of cloud. A reverse swastika, like you find in temples in Japan--a mark of Asia, crowns the arch of the gate.

We cross through.

I am a little disappointed at first. There is no gut-clenching moment of awe, no wave of amazement. But as I follow the wall down toward a clutch of churches, the rock below opens up and I realize we are perched on the edge of a deep gorge, the red canyon of the undulating Arpa Çayı river that forms the border between Turkey and Armenia. My gaze sweeps down the canyon walls. The crumbling towers of the 800 year old Church of St. Gregory sit on an outcrop overlooking a dizzying fall into the water below. The river churns--the white rapids silent at this distance. The cliffs are dotted with delicate Queen Anne's Lace and blood red poppies and on the other side of the river, in Armenia, there are cave dwellings carved into the walls along the shore. On another rugged cliff top, the Convent of the Virgin teeters over the Arpa Çayı, its stately red domes sharp against blue sky.

Erkan, the Kurd, said we would need no more than two hours to tour the ruins, but after four, I have not tired of the views. The quiet of the lost city seeps into my skin. These rocks and ruins have a spirit that bewitch. One of the most impressive places is the remains of the Zoroastrian fire temple. Almost nothing is left, yet the four columns standing in the midst of the ruined metropolis, itself alone in a vast barren plateau evoke a sudden awareness of the vastness of time. Of Asia and the dawn of history. Zoroaster, Ahura Mazda, the ziggurats of Persia. My skin prickles. There seems to be a place just out of sight, perhaps around a corner, where a magic door lets flood in all the myth and mystery of Prehistory, when humans were crawling out of the dream-fog of stories and legend.

Visiting Ani is walking into an Indiana Jones film--the ruins are so remote and unguarded its easy to imagine you have only just discovered them. It's part of the thrill, yet part of the problem, too. Why in the world aren't there teams of archaeologists excavating the place, erecting protective fences and "keep off" signs? As late as 2006, treasure hunters were digging up graves, church floors, and old houses on the market street and making off with potentially precious artifacts. The World Monument Fund has three times listed the city as one of the top endangered sites in the world.

It's hard to know what to think of the Armenian accusations of Turkey's deliberate and malicious neglect. On the surface, it does seem as if there's an effort to suppress the memory of the former Armenian presence. The Armenian script in many of the churches has been painted over with whitewash. Ani itself is scattered with garbage and graffiti scars every available wall and fresco. Yet, many of Turkey's remoter sites suffer the same vandalism. The Turkish Government's vision for the east is probably clearest in its intention to build a dam that will flood the valley containing Hasankeyf, a four thousand year old still living city that has been inhabited by no less than nine major civilizations. And in terms of valuing history, Armenian visitors to Ani aren't much better. Some of the graffiti is in spray-painted Armenian script.

Politics, history, and cultural quarrels aside, Ani is a haunting place, the quiet bones of one of the greatest metropolises in history, and yet one I've never come across in any school history book. It's a complete unknown and somewhat alien, like the ruins of a city on Mars--not a far leap, given the red of the rock. I remember myself as a small town Southern boy, curled up on his bed in his family's Florida trailer reading fantasy and science fiction novels, dreaming of far places. Ani is one of those stories come alive. It's almost as if I fell asleep then and tumbled into those pages to blink awake here, years later, on alien soil. I am utterly foreign here in my suburban Americanness, with my Alabama football T-shirt, so small against the great sweep of history, a blip of thirty eight years amongst a millennia of immortals and lost kings.

On the ride back, the sun is setting, and the whole landscape turns much redder. The rocks are like glowing coals. Erkan plays Aynur again. Then he flips on the radio and starts channel surfing, settling finally on the news. They're talking about the upcoming reforms. The Nationalist Party leader is screaming in a Jack-Palance gravelly voice that accommodating Kurds will destroy the nation. Erkan frowns and sighs.

"I know what they tell you in Istanbul," Erkan says. "But we are a good people."

"I know," I say.

"We just want to be able to study in our language. Learn our own culture."

"Fair enough."

He nods, pleased. "Good things are coming for Kurds, I think."

"Inşallah," I tell him. "I hope so."

by Jeff Gibbs