I rented a car in Ankara and drove to and around Cappadocia--Göreme, Sari Han, Ihlara Gorge, Kaymakli. From there I headed east to Nemrud Dag, a mountain top with giant sculpted heads, and south to Sanliurfa and Harran. I drove to Lake Van at the eastern end of Turkey and skirted Mount Ararat north to the medieval capital of Armenia at Ani. Then I descended to the Black Sea, Trabzon, and Sümela Monastery. I followed the coast of the Black Sea west and then cut south to Amasya and the Hittite ruins at Hattusas, before returning to Ankara.
After turning my car in, I took a bus south to Antakya and another bus to Aleppo in Syria.
I didn't go to the archaeological site of Çatal Höyük, but I suspect there is nothing there but some foundations of houses. It was an agricultural village 100 miles southwest of what is now Ankara, and it dates from 6500 B.C., about a thousand years after agriculture was first invented. Agriculture of the type that dominates Europe and North America today originated in Anatolia, according to current theories, and spread from there east, west and south. As population grew, new land to the west was cleared by successive generations, until the technology had spread to shores of the Atlantic Ocean and farmers had overwhelmed the hunters and gatherers who could occupy that land only a fraction as densely. According to less popular theories, they carried their speech with them, spreading the Indo-European family of languages to its worldwide distribution today.
The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations down the hill from the Citadel in the Old Town of Ankara is one of the two best museums I visited in my trip through the Middle East. Housed in a 15th century building and surrounded by a lovely garden, its collection is small but of very high quality. Among its many remarkable pieces, the one I found most stunning was a wall painting from Çatal Höyük that could barely be made out, even with the help of the explanation. In the foreground were the horizontal straight lines representing the houses of a village. In the rear was an erupting volcano. Painting goes back 30,000 years or more, but all the cave paintings we have are of isolated figures of animals or people. This may be the earliest landscape painting ever discovered. In all likelihood, it represented an actual event that the painter had seen. If so, then it is the earliest report we have of an actual event by an eyewitness. This painting is an exclamation of awe--an exclamation that we hear now across eighty-five centuries--awe at an event that would awe us still today, uttered by a person who lived in a village very much like the agricultural villages in Turkey a century ago, and who may well have been an ancestor to many of the people living in Europe, India and Iran, the Americas, and Australia today.
The history of Anatolia is obscure until the 1700s B.C. when the Hittites burst upon the scene to occupy center stage for the next 550 years. Scholars knew of brief references to the Hittites in the Bible, and then in Egyptian inscriptions. But the heart of the civilization wasn't discovered until 1905, and its full importance was not realized until 1915 when the Czech scholar Friedrich Hrozny cracked the code with the brilliant hypothesis that Hittite was an Indo-European language, and the thousands of cuneiform tablets found in Hattusas could finally be read. At its furthest extent their empire covered most of Anatolia and much of Syria. They produced a respectable literature. Around 1600 a Hittite army marched down the Euphrates valley and conquered Babylon. In 1275 B.C., we know from an Egyptian inscription that they battled and defeated the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II at Qadesh in present-day Syria.
The first of the Hittite ruins I saw were at the small village of Alaca Höyük, at seven in the morning as the village was just waking up. The site has an impressive gate with carved lions and a bas-relief of a priest pulling a goat to the altar, but otherwise the site is just a small area of stone foundations. But it was my first Hittite ruin, and I was thrilled.
I drove on to Hattusas, which was their capital, and here you could get a sense of how great the empire was. Not from the sort of magnificent architecture you see in Luxor in Egypt, because Hattusas, like Alaca Höyük, is little more than stone foundations. You can see why it lay unknown for thirty centuries. But it is lots of stone foundations. When I drove up to Yerkapi Gate at the top of the hill and looked back, I could imagine the huge city spread out below me down the hill and into the valley. Behind me was an artificial wall of earth topped by a defensive stone wall. Just below me were the foundations of half a dozen large temples. On a peak in the distance were the royal palace and citadel. Down at the bottom of the hill in the flats were the foundations of the Great Temple, surrounded by the foundations of the houses of a large residential area. It is one of those places that you have to bring a little knowledge to, and a lot of imagination, and that perhaps is why I was the only tourist there for two hours that morning, but for me it was a glorious morning of time travel 3500 years into the past.
In 390 B.C. Xenophon was one of 10,000 Greek mercenary soldiers who marched with a Persian general to the heart of the empire to do battle in rebellion against the Persian emperor. They marched across the Cilician Gates, a pass in the Taurus Mountains in southern Anatolia, and continued on to Mesopotamia, where their Persian general was killed. They then, under Xenophon's leadership, beat their way back to Greece the length of northern Anatolia, through the wildest parts of the country, battling the fierce inhabitants at every mountain pass.
Sixty years later, Alexander the Great marched the same route through the Taurus Mountains on his way to conquer the known world.
I took a bus from Ankara to Antakya, and I hoped we would go through the Cilician Gates in daylight. It was dusk when we did. When the road reached the Taurus Mountains, it turned east to follow the base of the range, and then it turned south to follow a canyon up through the bare fractal mountains.
It was dark when we passed by Iskenderun, where Alexander defeated the Persians in the Battle of Actium, sealing the fate of the Persian Empire.
After the death of Alexander his empire was carved up by his various generals. The successors of Ptolemy ruled in Egypt after that, and the successors of Antiochus ruled Syria from Antioch. But in Anatolia Macedonian control quickly evaporated into a chaos of contending states. Starting in the late 200s B.C. for about 150 years, ascendancy was achieved by the kingdom of Pontus in central Anatolia, based in Amasya, until defeated by the Romans under Pompey.
Then as now the city was built along the two banks of a green river, called Yesilirmak (Green River). On the north side of the river the old Ottoman houses remain, balconies hanging over the river. Rising behind them are steep cliffs, and halfway up the cliffs are very large caves excavated from the stone to be the tombs of the kings of Pontus, a stunning site from a distance. I climbed up to look inside, but little remains today besides the bare chambers.
I like to read the original accounts of the great travelers of the past. There are not so many from the classical era, but there are a few writers who set out to describe the whole known world--Herodotus, Claudius Ptolemy, and Strabo. I've read everything that remains by these writers. Strabo was born and grew up in Amasya, several centuries after the era of the kings of Pontus, after Pompey had incorporated the region into the Roman Empire. As I stood on the ledge in front of one of the cave tombs, I realized that Strabo would have grown up looking at this very tomb from his home across the river.
In southeastern Turkey there is a small and fertile region surrounded on three sides by mountains high enough to protect it from its neighbors. I glimpsed it first when I drove past a tumulus where the queens of the Kingdom of Commagene were buried, and continued over a low pass. Flat green fields spread out with a pleasant river meandering in their midst. At the head of the valley was a village with a bridge from Roman times crossing the river just as it emerges from a steep-walled canyon.
Commagene was contemporaneous with the kings of Pontus. It was on the border between the Antioch-based Seleucid Empire of Alexander's successors and the Parthian Empire, which controlled the trade routes of Persia. A local governor asserted his independence from the Seleucids around 150 B.C. Looking down from the pass, I could see how the topography favored this. Isolated, prosperous, and easily defended, the small kingdom thrived for a hundred years. Pompey swept through Anatolia with his Roman army, but Commagene's king had the good sense to ally with him, and Pompey left the king in charge of a client buffer state.
This king's name was Antiochus, and he was a megalomaniac. Little remains of his capital and his palace beyond some stone foundations, a couple of pedestals, and a syncretic bas-relief of him in Persian dress shaking hands with a classically nude Herakles. But his true legacy is on the top of the highest nearby mountain, Nemrud Dag. He had a tumulus of crushed rock built 150 meters above the mountain's summit and surrounded it with giant statues of the gods, himself among them as an equal. Today a dozen or so of their huge eight-foot high heads are standing at the base of the tumulus, one of the most remarkable sights in Turkey.
I drove up a long steep cobblestone road to get there just in time for sunset. A lineup of tourist vans was there as well. With the horde of people, as a young Israeli man I talked to said, it was like trying to meditate at a football game. But there is usually a reason popular destinations are popular. The giant heads seemed to come alive in the orange declining light, beneath the whir of the helicopter bringing in a dignitary for the view.
Antakya, the ancient Antioch, was, after Rome and Alexandria, the third largest city in the Roman Empire. It was the effective capital of the east, and a center of Hellenistic culture.
It is a bit frustrating to visit it today, because the ancient city is so little in evidence. There are a few sights here and there, like St. Peter's Church. It is located in a cave that St. Peter is supposed to have preached in. The church is more modern, renovated most recently for a visit several years ago by Pope John Paul II. From the plaza in front of the church there is a view of the city, and the slope above it, now barren, that the ancient city covered. But it is not like Rome, where you can wander through a forum, a coliseum, and the ancient baths.
I went to the Antakya Archaeological Museum, where they have perhaps the best collection of Roman mosaics anywhere. On my way out I fell into conversation with an elderly gentleman who spoke excellent English and knew the history of Antioch well. He had spent his life in the tourist industry, but he spoke with the love and knowledge of a scholar. He described the ancient city to me. Its center is where the center of the modern city is, on the other side of the Orontes River. This side no one lived on; it was devoted to cemeteries. The city spread up the hill to the walls I could see fragments of on the high ridge. I could get the best idea of the ancient Roman Antioch wandering around the neighborhood near the Greek Orthodox Church, because there the streets followed the pattern they had in ancient times. The houses were not all that different as well.
I spent the afternoon exploring that neighborhood, trying to block out the cars and telephone lines and imagine the streets filled with men in togas.
In Cappadocia I went to the Göreme Open Air Museum, actually a natural and historical site they put a fence around. Chalky paths wended between large cones and into small chapels that had been carved in them in the Byzantine era. There were mediocre paintings on the walls of some of the chapels, and one chapel at the top of several flights of stairs carved into the cliff had a magnificent collection of wall paintings--the nativity, the Three Wise Men, the Last Supper with a large whole fish for an entrée, and the Crucifixion.
I left there and went down the road to an area called, at least on one map, the Valley of the Swords, perhaps because of the sharp cones. I climbed a hill topped by dozens of the cones and explored. There were tiny monk's cells over a thousand years old, small chapels, crude paintings. I sat on a promontory and watched the rocks and eroded hillside opposite go through shades of gold, orange, and purple in the setting sun.
In Kaymakli, a little south of Göreme, there is an entire underground city carved out of the volcanic tufa. Apparently it was easy to do, and good defense against the invading Muslim armies. I spent half an hour duckwalking through its low narrow passageways from cell to cell, following red arrows in and blue arrows out. It was like the maze of a computer game, without the dragons.
I ended my stay in Cappadocia by descending from the treeless plain into a forested canyon, Ihlara Gorge, and walking along a beautiful stream. It was the most pleasant natural site I visited in Turkey, but it was more than that. Every several hundred yards you could take a path up to the base of the cliff, and there would be a small chapel or two carved out of the rock, some with impressive façades, some with the remnants of once excellent Byzantine paintings.
Nearly all the paintings are defaced, literally and figuratively. The Muslim conquerors scraped the faces off because they did not believe in the depiction of human or animal forms. Even before that, the Byzantine Empire went through its own period of Iconoclasm in the 700s, when icons and paintings were destroyed in an attempt to return to the purity of the original Christianity. Mostly these barbarians just destroyed the faces. It has been the modern barbarians called tourists who have carved their initials in the gowns, and the camels, and the mangers and crucifixes. We have not advanced much in our appreciation for the artistic achievements of the past.
It is perhaps a measure of how turbulent the history of Anatolia has been that the Byzantine monks in search of peace had to retreat to such inaccessible places. The monastery of Sümela is a case in point. To get there, after a few misses, I turned off the main road south from Trabzon. The road climbed up a spectacularly steep and narrow canyon for 16 kilometers. I reached the park entrance, passed up a parking lot for the timid, and in first gear continued up a very steep one-lane, drop-off-the-edge road to the monastery three kilometers away. The last kilometer was on packed mud, puddled by the rain. I parked there, and hiked up another 400 meters in the drizzle in the gray declining late afternoon light, up a stone staircase and along a cliffside forest path to the entrance. Another long stone staircase up, and the monastery, spectacularly carved into the face of the nearly inaccessible cliff, broke into view.
I explored all the chambers. In one there were once magnificent paintings, but they had been defaced by Muslim conquerors and covered with graffiti by modern barbarians. I wondered what perspective on the world it takes to feel you can destroy in a minute a painting that has been there for a thousand years.
The Book of Genesis tells us that Abraham's father Terah took Abraham and his other son Lot out of Ur in Babylonia to the city of Harran, which is now, by an accident of modern history, just inside Turkey's border with Syria. Abraham then left there for the Promised Land. Harran today probably does not look much different from what it looked like then. It is not large. It is just some sandy streets among mud adobe houses around a ruined fortress. But the houses are unique. Their roofs reach up in a beehive shape, presumably to alleviate the heat in the summer. In the courtyards of the houses are raised platforms the people sleep on in the summer, for the cooler outside air and off the ground to get away from the scorpions. The population is entirely Arab.
Nearby are the ruins of the oldest university in the world, built in the 700s by the Umayyad caliph in Damascus. As I approached it, I was accosted by the two teenage boys in coats and ties who wanted to be my guides. ``That tower was built after Christ seven hundred and thirty-four." ``The Mongols destroyed this city after Christ one thousand two hundred and sixteen." In an attempt to avoid them, I latched onto little Ibrahim, who would walk me to all the tourist sites without the irritating chatter.
Mostly the Byzantines resisted the early Muslim attempts at conquest. They lost the Levant, but they held onto Anatolia, although eastern Anatolia was a frequent battleground. It was finally the Seljuq Turks that broke the back of Byzantine rule in the east.
The Seljuq Turks were one of a succession of tribes to sweep out of Central Asia and dominate the Middle East for a short spell. In 1071 the Byzantine emperor marched east to the vicinity of Lake Van to push them back. The Seljuq Turks faded and then turned and dealt the Byzantine army a defeat they never really recovered from. At their peak the Seljuq Turks controlled Persia, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia. Then they splintered into contending kingdoms, succumbed to the Mongols a century and a half later, and left almost nothing to show for their efflorescence. More precisely, all that remained of significance was one small splinter group that later grew to great prominence--the Ottoman Turks.
There are not a lot of architectural monuments to Seljuq rule. The one site I did see was the Yellow Caravansarai, or Sari Han, in Cappadocia. ``Caravansarai" is a word that has always evoked for me deep mystery. Caravansarais were only the motels of their day. But that is precisely why the word has such a hold on me. I would have loved to travel in that era, and in the places I do travel, I try to approximate what it would have been to travel then. Mounted on camels, or horses, or donkeys, a large caravan would traverse days of desert and waste. At the end, the caravansarai would materialize out of the haze on the distant horizon, and that evening it would be filled with the smoke of fires and the stench of the people and animals of a dozen caravans, as people ate and drank their fill and traded stories about what lay behind and what lay ahead.
You could imagine all that at the Yellow Caravansarai. To the west you could see the nearby, rapidly growing town of Avanos, but to the east there was nothing but broad dry plains. That is where your caravan would have been coming from. The interior looks as it would have, though perhaps painted too recently, and with the restaurant for tourists a bit too fancy for the rough men of the caravan. A large courtyard, a fountain in the middle, a walkway around the caravansarai walls from which you can observe the countryside, a great arched hall filled with the low tables and cushioned seats of the restaurant, a pleasant respite from the rigors of the road. The throngs were missing. When I arrived, a young European couple was there. They left. I sat down at a table with a cup of tea and wrote in my journal, my own respite from the road. Two beautiful young Turkish women arrived. I lingered, and then left.
The Ottomans began as a minor offshoot of the Seljuq Turks. As various princes set up various principalities, the Ottomans set up one across the Bosporus and not far from Constantinople. Among the principalities, the Ottomans had two distinct advantages.
The first was their proximity to the collapsing Byzantine Empire. The strength of the ancient walls of the city meant that the conquest of Constantinople itself had to wait for the development of cannons. But as the empire collapsed, the Ottomans could make an end run around the capital and conquer the lands the Byzantines abandoned. In this way they were able to build up their own empire as far as Albania and Serbia.
Their other advantage was that they had the unprecedented good fortune of having ten competent rulers in a row. In the Age of Monarchy, it was pretty much of a crap shoot whether a kingdom would get a competent king. Competence was distributed through royalty about the same as it is distributed through the general population, and the method of selecting a king was not far from random. Strong kings who built up empires were followed by weak kings who lost them. When a succession of strong kings occurred, remarkable things happened. The Duchy of Moscovy had three strong kings in a row in the 1400s and 1500s, and the result was the huge country we know as of Russia. The Ottomans had ten strong rulers in a row!
They finally took Constantinople in 1454, and by the 1500s under Suleiman the Magnificent they were the strongest power in the world. At the same time, they were battling the Savafids to the east on the border of Anatolia and Persia, to the west they were contending with Venice and Spain for control of the Mediterranean, to the north they were knocking on the gates of Vienna in Central Europe, and to the south Ottoman soldiers in the Sahara Desert engaged troops from the West African Kingdom of Bornu in what is now Nigeria.
Suleiman the Magnificent lived too long and became paranoid, and had his one competent son killed for imagined rebellion. That set off a succession of incompetent sultans almost as remarkable as the succession of competent ones. The occasional strong ruler was not strong enough to combat the forces of tradition and corruption arrayed against him.
But inertia and then European geopolitics carried them through for the next three and a half centuries. Powerful neighbors like Austria and Russia chipped away at their domains. Local rulers, as in Egypt, asserted their independence in small increments. In the heart of the empire, in Anatolia, not much development took place.
At the far eastern end of modern-day Turkey, I left Lake Van, drove over some hills, and then came upon a magnificent sight. Beyond the hills was a flat plain, covered with farms and villages. The plain rose gradually and then disappeared in the haze, which looked exactly like sky. Above that was a bank of thick white clouds. Above the clouds there appeared the snow-covered peak of the isolated, 17,000-foot Mount Ararat, as though it were suspended there in the air.
At the foot of Mount Ararat in the town of Dogubeyazit, I visited an Ottoman pleasure palace from the 1600s, called Ishak Pasha Sarayi. It was very dramatic. You walk under arches, beneath the dome, and beside the minaret of the palace mosque. There is a harem of many rooms, with pools in their centers, surrounding a pleasant courtyard. I explored the library and the dungeon as well; the harem looked more pleasant than the dungeon.
In one of the rooms of the harem there were three young German tourists, a man and two women. One of the women was leaning out a window and shouting ``Hallooo! Hallooo!" as though calling to a passing knight for rescue. I came up behind her and said, ``Hi."
The Ottoman Empire declined. Finally in World War I it picked the losing side, and it was dismantled. Britain and France divided up its Arab possessions, and conspired with the last sultan on dividing up Anatolia itself. Various contradictory treaties were signed, guaranteeing this and that to these and those. Greece was to get a large chunk of southwestern Anatolia. Russia was to get a large chunk of northeastern Anatolia for the Armenians, and after the Russian Revolution the Armenians tried to seize it for themselves. There was even talk of Russia getting Istanbul before Britain and France stepped in and stopped such speculation.
But the one strong Turkish general, Mustafa Kemal, later Kemal Atatürk, gathered his armies around him, and from his base in Ankara retook all of modern-day Turkey--that's why it is modern-day Turkey. He realized that the cause of Turkey's fall from glory was that they had failed to keep up with Western Europe's progress. So he introduced modernizations, both superficial and deep. He forbade the fez--superficial. He made Turkey a secular state--deep, for a country that is 99% Muslim.
But since the 1800s it had not been enough for the legitimacy of a realm merely to be under the control of a single regime. There had to be a story. In Europe the story was nationalism. Austria-Hungary was a multinational state, but it disintegrated. In the late 1800s Sultan Abdul Hamid II attempted to revive the empire with Islam as the story. But the remaining but still extensive Christian holdings in the Balkans and in Armenia undercut that story.
Atatürk's story was that Turkey was the land of the Turks. But there were three problems with this story--the Greeks, the Armenians, and the Kurds. The Greek problem was taken care of in early 1920s with massive exchanges of population between modern Turkey and modern Greece, accompanied by untold suffering and occasional massacres. Kurdish nationalism and its consequent suppression waited another half century before becoming a crisis.
The Armenians were another matter entirely. Accounts differ. Some historians say that the Turks and the Kurds allied to slaughter between 600,000 and 1,500,000 Armenians between 1915 and 1923. This is disputed. The Turks say it didn't happen. The Armenians say it did. But the first time I heard about it was from a Turkish acquaintance of mine in college, who bragged that the army had simply surrounded the Armenians, marched forward, and slaughtered everyone in their path. I hesitate to say that this historical note was in the context of what America should do about the civil rights problem, but I think it was.
Much of my trip around eastern Turkey was through the lands formerly occupied by Armenians.
Lake Van was one of those places I had wanted to see for a long time. It is out there at the eastern end of Turkey, nearly to the Iranian border, not far south of the Caucasus Mountains, home of the ancient Urartu and then of the Armenians, but always in a wild land contested by passing hordes and established empires. It seemed like one of the far ends of the Earth to me.
It did not disappoint. My first glimpse of it, as I came over a hill and approached the town of Tatvan at the western end of the lake, revealed a body of water of perfect blue surrounded by brown hills. I drove along the lake. I stopped to taste it. As I took a boat out to an island, a storm was gathering across the lake and as I returned from the island a rainbow arced before us. That evening as I climbed over the ruins of an Ottoman castle in Van at the eastern end of the lake, the sun set over and reflected in the waters of Lake Van, purple below turbulent dark gray clouds. My last glimpse of it in the early morning light the next day was deep royal blue beyond golden fields of grain.
In the town of Gevas halfway along the lake, I drove to the central plaza, went into a bus company office, and said ``Adharan", the name of the island I wanted to go to. A Kurdish man popped up, short, stocky, with a five o'clock shadow and a Fuller brush moustache, and offered to find me a boat. He spoke no English. He got in my car, and we drove to a hotel on the shore of the lake. He found someone who ran a boat over to the island, and we left.
The church of Ahtamai Adasi is a remnant of the long era when Lake Van was under Armenian control. It is a small church. The paintings in the interior are defaced and covered with graffiti. But on the exterior are some of the most magnificent bas-reliefs I have seen anywhere, depicting scenes from the Bible. There is a ship. Jonah is being thrown off, and a ``whale" is beside the ship waiting to devour him. Well, I said ``whale". The artist had never seen a whale, so in fact it is a large fish with the head of a pig. Next to it is the whale spitting Jonah up. On the other side of the doorway are David and Goliath, David holding a slingshot with lambs at his feet, Goliath twice as big as David and armed to the teeth.
I arrived in the city of Van late that afternoon and drove directly to the Rock of Van. This is a large rock outcropping at the edge of the lake and has been the site of fortresses ever since settlements existed there. I climbed up worn, rugged stairs at the west end of the hill, imagining they had been carved in the rock by the Urartu, the capital of whose empire this was in the 900s and 800s B.C. The ruins of the castle at the top of the hill were Ottoman. The south side of the hill was a steep cliff. At the base was a flat plain on which there were two small mosques. But the plain was much more remarkable for what wasn't there. Before 1920 it had been the Armenian city of Van, but when the Turks under Kemal crushed the Armenians of Van, they leveled the entire Armenian district of the city, except for the two small mosques in their midst.
Several days later in Amasya, I stood in front of the cave tombs of the kings of Pontus and looked over the city, lining the Green River (Yesilirmak) and hemmed in by hills. On the near side of the river was the old Ottoman town, with the old Ottoman-style houses. On the far side the houses were all twentieth-century. But that was strange. Why didn't people build on the far side of the river before that?
Later that evening the two Turkish high school students, Esra and Çari, said that this used to be the Armenian section of town. When they ``left" in the early 1920s, they burned their houses behind them, so that no one could take them over.
I wondered who really burned the houses, and what led to the people leaving.
In the far northeastern corner of Turkey are the ruins of the medieval capital of Armenia, the town of Ani. I thought I had allotted plenty of time to see it. I turned off the main road near Kars shortly after one in the afternoon onto the thirty-kilometer spur to Ani.
In a village along the way I saw a monument to the 500 Turks massacred by Armenians in this village in 1918. No mention of the million and a half Armenians massacred by the Turks.
About twenty kilometers along I had to stop at an army checkpoint, and a soldier asked me for my ticket. I had none. He walked back to his cabin to call his superior, and when he returned he had the look of ``No" on his face. I had to drive back to Kars and get a ticket at the tourist office in the center of town.
At least he made it sound simple. I figured half an hour to Kars, half an hour to get the ticket, and half an hour back. I would be back by three, with two hours to see the ruins. I drove 130 kmph on a rough narrow road designed for 90 that fell off at the edges and had frequent tractors pulling wide-load wagons, all the while however reminding myself that this sight was ``not to die for". I got to Kars at two, but it was not obvious where the center of town was. Several wrong turns, several questions to pedestrians with contradictory answers, and I finally found what looked like a main street. I went into a hotel and asked the clerk where the tourist office was. He explained the whole process to me, and showed me on my map where everything was. At the tourist office I would get an application. I had to take that to the police station and they would issue a permit. Then I had to go to the museum and they would sell me the ticket. I drove to the tourist office and double-parked. But it was Saturday, and when I went in, there was no one there. Outside I asked a policeman where I could get a permit. No problem, he said. Just go to the police station. So I went to the police station. The officer there said he could not give me a permit without the application. I had to go back to the tourist office. But there is no one there, I protested. A man behind me said there was someone there, and he would take me there. He was a tour operator. I followed him back to the tourist office and upstairs to a man behind a small table in front of the men's room door, looking for all the world like a washroom attendant. He filled out the application and signed it. When I returned to the police station, a different officer was on duty, and he was determined to make me go through my paces. He asked where I had been, where I was going, what hotel I was staying in. He compared the signature on my application with that on other applications. I relaxed and let him play his power game, and eventually he gave me the permit. I took it to the museum. There the only man in evidence was on his way to tea. I pleaded with him, and reluctantly he sold me the ticket. 130 kmph back, and I was at the old city walls at 3:30.
There I was told I couldn't take my camera in. Ani is right across a river from the Republic of Armenia, and if the Armenians see anyone taking pictures, they said, they set off dynamite. But, I was told, I could buy some pictures from this gentleman here. ``How did he take them without dynamite being set off?" I asked, but got no answer.
The area enclosed by the walls and the river is immense, but most of it is now rubble, with occasional discernible foundations, and about a dozen churches standing in reasonable condition. The Church of the Redeemer has half a dome left. The Church of Saint Gregory has good paintings inside. The Convent of the Virgins is dramatically situated on a sheer cliff halfway down the gorge separating the two countries. A now ruined bridge once spanned the river, but no more. The dome of the Cathedral collapsed shortly after it was built, but otherwise the building is standing strong. There is a mosque that was built soon after the Seljuq Turks conquered Ani from the Armenians in 1050. The Seljuqs were newly converted and had no architects and no clear notion of what a mosque should look like, so they didn't object when the Armenian architect they enlisted built a mosque that looks very much like an Armenian church, with a minaret that looks very much like a church bell tower. I climbed up the minaret, feeling my way in the dark uncertainly from one worn step to the next. I wandered over the foundations of rooms in the Palace and the foundations of shops along the main street. I stepped over rubble to the Church of the Holy Apostles, which the Seljuqs converted into a caravansarai. I entered another Church of Saint Gregory, a ruined shell, and yet another Church of Saint Gregory.
The official story as to why so many restrictions surround a visit to Ani is that it is right by a hostile border. That made sense during the Cold War, when many Turks were probably like my Turkish acquaintance in college, who said he had two principles in life: ``Love God and hate the Russians." But the Soviet Union is dead and the Russians are gone and the only thing across that border is a very weak state of Armenia.
I left suspecting that the real reason Ani is not encouraged as a tourist site is that it presents the Armenians as a great civilization very much anchored in present-day Turkey. But I also suspected any Turkish official I asked would deny it.