The Church of the Holy Cross on Aghtamar on Lake Van: our Pilgrimage continues

“Van in this world, paradise in the next.” 

Church of the Holy Cross

I found this Armenian proverb as I was browsing through Armenia Travels and Studies Volume 2, by H F B Lynch. We were approaching Lake Van, which Lynch describes as “here the luxuriance of the Bay of Naples, there the austere features of a Norwegian Fjord.” Writing in more troubled times than now, he muses that this Armenian proverb might be justified in happier situations, but the perversity of man was converting this heaven into a little hell. This country, he writes further, is “one of the fairest and most favored of the old world”, and “like a book which may borrow much from the work of other writers and yet produce an effect on the reader which is wholly new, so one opens the landscape of Lake Van with that particular emotion which only very beautiful and original objects can produce.”

lunch of fish - presumed pearl mullet from the lake?

There is a pleasant looking lakeside resort called Edremit just the other side of Van towards where we are to pick up the boat to take us to the island of Aghtamar (Aktamar). It has a promenade, in need of a little smartening up, a small marina is being built, there are many small cafes along the road, which is lined on the lake side with what look like many miniature bandstands, but are actually little picnic huts with conical roofs and open sides containing the standard wooden picnic benches and tables that are so common everywhere. And they all have splendid views. This is clearly an up and coming lakeside resort. I was surprised not to see more boating activity but I guess the place was now shut for the winter with cold and snow on its way. The snow poles still present along the roadside out of town reminded us that winters here can be very harsh.

Edremit existed as a settlement before Christianity came here. Its name comes from the Armenian name Artamet, meaning "Near the Fields" in Armenian. This is appropriate situated as it is on the shores of the lake with fields of grapes and apples beyond. The population here suffered two genocides, the first Armenian genocide of 1894–1896, and then again in 1915-1923 when Armenian, Assyrian, Greek and other Christian numbers were decimated and Turkish families took over.  Before 1915 Artamet had 10 Armenian churches and 1 Greek church. Thousands of their historical monuments were annihilated as well. We have to appreciate this.

There is a lovely Armenian legend surrounding the original name for the island of Aktamar. It involves the love story of an Armenian princess called Tamar, living on the island, for her lover, a commoner boy on the mainland. Each night he would swim over the 3 km separating the island from the mainland, guided by a light she held for him. One night her father, disapproving of course of such a liaison, extinguished the light. The boy became lost and drowned, and when they found his body the words Akh Tamar or Oh Tamar were frozen on his lips. After another excellent traditional Turkish lunch we were taken by boat to the island. It was a half hour journey – there is a shorter boat route from further around the coast near Gevas but the longer trip allowed us to savour the lake views and then watch to see who would be first to spot the little church, dedicated to the Holy Cross, snuggled into the side of the island as we approached the landing stage.

It is something of a miracle that this beautiful church, built of pink volcanic tuff on this grey limestone island has been preserved as well as it is, given its turbulent and violent history. The island itself was once a palatial residence of a king, one King Gagik 1 Artsruni of the Armenian Kingdom of Vaspurakan, who reigned from 908-943. He built a large palace for himself and founded a large settlement with gardens and orchards and places of recreation. During the period from 1116 to 1895 the church was the seat of an Armenian Catholicus, something akin to a church bishop. All that remains today from that period is the church, built during the years 915-921 by a monk Manuel. During the Armenian genocide of 1915 the monks were massacred and the monastic complex of which the church was central, fell into ruins.

The church and island was a military training ground for a period and many large bullet holes were made in the beautiful façade which were to challenge later attempts at restoration. In 1951 the church was going to be destroyed by the Turkish government but was mercifully saved by the writer and journalist Yaşar Kemal and became a tourist attraction. It underwent some controversial restoration in 2005/2006 and became a secular museum for a while before being restored to its status as an Armenian Christian church.

The cross that now sits atop the dome once again, as a symbol of the true religious purpose of the building, was itself the center of controversy. Apparently the Turkish government resisted such a cross and there was some concern over the weight which the church would be able to support, but in 2010 a cross was indeed erected, albeit half the weight of that originally proposed. In 2011 the earthquake in the region cracked the dome, possibly weakened by the newly erected cross.

Since 2010, once a year on the feast day of 19th September, the Turkish authorities allow a patronal festival service to be held but otherwise the church is very much just a tourist attraction.
Tomorrow there will be more about this wonderful but still threatened church...

Armenian Christianity in Eastern Turkey - a pilgrimage and a history

Church of the Holy Cross Aktamar 

By now my readers will be used to the idea that pretty much everything about the history of the areas we were visiting in this beautiful region of Eastern Turkey has been extremely complicated. It was little wonder that I sometimes found it hard to get my head around all the dates and names and battles and so on that our guide was telling us about in the coach as we traveled on between our many and varied stopping points.

Armenian church of St Gregory of Tigran Honents at Ani

But to gain the most out of this pilgrimage it really was important to understand some of the background history to the area and especially its churches and monasteries,
and as far as the history of the Armenian Church is concerned, I have identified the following which I see as the main facts relevant to this pilgrimage:

1. It was two of the disciples of Jesus Christ, Thaddeus and Bartholomew, who first brought Christianity to the ancient Kingdom of Armenia, in about the middle of the first century AD. They helped spread the religion in the Kingdom and it is said that they may have been martyred in Armenia.

Ani church of St Gregory of Tigran Honents

2. St Gregory the Illuminator (otherwise called St Gregory the Enlightener, and so called because he enlightened the nation with the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, was responsible for the Armenians embracing Christianity. He was brought up in Caesarea in Cappadochia as a Christian and was imprisoned and tortured for many years in a deep dungeon by the pagan Tiridates. The story goes that at that time King Tiridates III succumbed to a dreadful affliction brought on after the King had a group of Christian nuns murdered in a fit of spite because his amorous advances were rejected by one of them. So Gregory was brought up from his dungeon, where in spite of the awful treatments inflicted upon him he had survived, and sure enough did indeed cure the king, converting him to Christianity from Paganism at the same time. This was good news for Armenian Christianity as in gratitude the King declared the official religion of Armenia to be Christianity.
This made Armenia the first country to have a national Christian Church. 
Within just a few centuries, with royal support, Christianity had spread rapidly throughout the country and even permeated the Armenian culture.
The frescoes in the eastern part of the Church of St Gregory of Tigran Honents at Ani are devoted to the life of St Gregory the Illuminator.

3. There were three other very significant events in early Armenian church history:

a. In the mid fifth century the Persians wanted the Armenians to denounce their faith and follow Zoroastrianism. The Armenians fought for their right to remain Christian at the Battle of Avarayr where St Vartan and over 1000 noblemen were defeated, but after 30 years of persecution the new Persian Shah acknowledged the right from then on for the Armenians to pursue their Christian faith without hindrance.

b. Until much the same time there was no written Armenian language and Greek or Syriac was used in worship. In 404 AD the monk Mesrob, later to become St Mesrob, invented an Armenian alphabet enabling him to translate the Bible so that the written word was available for all.

c. The third event of significance is somewhat more complicated and theological and concerns the way that followers of Jesus understood his nature as both perfect God and perfect man; basically whether Christians emphasized the diversity or the unity of the incarnate God – “the Word become flesh.” Those who believed in the unity of the incarnate God were accused of denying the humanity of Christ while the diversity group were said to be effectively splitting Christ into two persons. The argument is a difficult theological one, and the matter was put up for discussion and decision by the fourth Ecumenical council held at Chalcedon near Constantinople in 451 AD. Far from bringing the two sides in the debate together, in fact the council were accused of leaning too far towards the diversity idea and this split the churches into those that accepted Chalcedon (The Eastern Orthodox Churches as well as the Roman Catholic Church) and the non Chalcedonian churches including the Armenian, Syrian and Coptic Oriental Orthodox churches.

For some time from 992 Ani was the main See or center of the Catholicus or leader of the Armenian Church, and had many of the finest examples of Armenian Church architecture, sadly mostly in ruins as we had seen. Ani was the capital of the medieval Armenian Kingdom (Bagratuni) from 961 – 1045 and by the beginning of the 11th century it had a population of well over 100,000 (some say even up to 200,000). It was renowned not only for its churches but also for its elaborately fortified walls and was known as “the city of forty gates” as well as the “city of a thousand and one churches.”

Church of the Holy Cross Island of Aktamar

It was important for us to understand as pilgrims the persecutions and oppressions suffered by the Armenian Church through the ages, 
right up to the devastating genocide in 1915 already mentioned and subsequent limitations on worship in Soviet Armenia.
It says a great deal for the strength of their faith that the church has survived as it has, and at the same time it was sobering to see so many beautiful Armenian churches in different states of ruin or abandonment. 

So where does the Armenian church stand today? I quote below from an article by Michael B Papazian on The Armenian Church from which some of the above information was also obtained:

“The mission of the Armenian Church today is the re-evangelization of Armenia following its emancipation from coercive atheism as well as the renewal of religious life in a Diaspora that is increasingly threatened by materialistic and secular influences (I so agree!) The mission today to integrate all aspects of Armenian life with the Gospel remains fundamentally the same as that of St. Gregory the Illuminator at the Armenian Church’s beginning.”

I also used another excellent source, from the Armenian Culture website, on the “History of the Armenian Church”  by James R. Russell, Columbia University. 1981 and it seems appropriate to close with passages taken from the final paragraphs of that article:

"Religious intolerance, violence, and the fanatical propagation of one's own ideas without regard for the convictions and dignity of others, are the denial of civilization. …
The Armenians became more than a culture with Vartan, separating themselves decisively from Iran -- they became a civilization. No king led them into battle, nor did any hope of victory or gain spur them; they fought with simple bravery and fine reluctance, only for the right to be themselves. Such a nation is so enlightened, cupped in the very hand of God, that it can never really be defeated. Armenia celebrates in Vartan the victory, not of arms, but of an idea. That idea is the freedom of the spirit, the basis of liberty, of creativity, of thought and of life.”

Other sites that may be of interest:
http://www.armenianchurch-ed.net/our-church/history-of-the-church/history/ in USA http://armenianchurchsydney.org.au/our-church/church-history/ in Australia