Aktamar, Lake Van contd: the pilgrim's perspective

As we stepped ashore on the Island of Aktamar after our short boat trip across Lake Van from Edremit it soon became clear that for the first time on our pilgrimage we were to share the site with tourists.
Sadly the groups already ashore made it difficult for us to find any chance for peace, prayer and contemplation within the church. In any event the guard on duty told us that we could not say the Lord’s Prayer there as a group, so we had to find our own moments for private prayer.
Whilst I knelt silently and I hoped unobtrusively in a dark corner within the church the building was besieged by noisy groups who seemed to care little for the sacred space, whilst they listened to poor and inaccurate information from guides who seemed to have little accurate knowledge of the place. Indeed one group were more interested in getting back earlier to their hotel to allow shopping and swimming time before supper! 

This tenth century Church of the Holy Cross is truly beautiful and as so often on this pilgrimage we were blessed with fine weather to be able to view it in detail from outside as well as within. For it is justifiably famous for the very fine carved bas-reliefs on all four sides illustrating biblical stories from both Old and New Testaments. As I walked around the church, starting with the south side and dodging tourists and tombstones, I looked with awe at depictions of David and Goliath, the Madonna with Jesus, the Isaac sacrifice, the Jonah story, a rather playful vineyard scene: then on the East side St John the Evangelist, John the Baptist and Gregory the Illuminator, (whom we met at Ani): to the North, Shadrak, Meshak and Abednego and the fiery furnace, and Adam and Eve: and so round to the Western side with a rather wonderful relief of a church and Jesus Christ. Sadly the frescoes inside the church, Christian images of the gospel stories, have been badly damaged and it needed some patience and a very cricked neck to work out the meaning of much of the imagery. I was sorry I didn’t get a good image of Gregory the Illuminator, in bas relief alongside St John the Evangelist and John the Baptist on the East façade, but there is a very good website which provides extensive detail and drawings of all the various images at  and very much more besides. This is all very comprehensive, for those who wish to delve much deeper into the detail of these various sites. Reading that website and from our own observations it is apparent that much of historical and architectural importance is being allowed to collapse and decay, through vandalism, some officially sanctioned it would seem, even politically motivated. This is sad and disturbing…

a view of the graveyard at Aktamar

And be warned – there are also some YouTube videos where ill informed guides seem to have little idea of the difference between Old and New Testament stories, mixing them up in sad ways. I listened to one such guide who is heard to say about Shadrak, Meshak and Abednego that they were told to walk through hot ashes to show they believe in Jesus!! A strange interpretation indeed of the Old Testament story of the fiery furnace from the book of Daniel! A big Turkish flag flies on the island, which had been clearly visible from our boat as we approached. It seems that the Turks only want to preserve the island on their terms, as an interesting archaeological site, not as a sacred Christian building. There is apparently no guide book available for the inside of the church, but I found it hard to believe that someone somewhere isn’t even as I write this putting one together somewhere. There is certainly a demand for one, in both Turkish and English. Or is there? Given that there is plenty of information online, and that tourists nowadays take their tablets out with them to call up all the detail they seek, and to take all the photos they want, then perhaps the paper guidebook has nearly had its day?

Restoration? Rebuilding? of monks' accommodation

Outside the church some workmen are busily building replicas of the monks’ cells that would have been there… but they are only making them one story high and there is good evidence that these would have had two stories. Again the restoration work may be ill conceived and inappropriately destructive?
Are the Turks deliberately trying to hide the Armenian Christian heritage in Anatolia? The new name for the island given to it by the Turkish authorities of Akdamar, meaning White Vein, is claimed by some to be part of a deliberate cultural cleansing. What I experienced within the church made me uneasy for the future of such a beautiful sacred artefact.

looking back as we leave the island

Our time on this lovely island was all too short and after enjoying a hot cay in the weak and not too warm sunshine outside the island’s café it was with some sadness that we strolled down to catch our boat back to the mainland. On the way to the jetty I dipped my hands in the water of the lake. The concentration of minerals left the skin feeling silky smooth; as good as any hand cream! On the boat the wind dropped and the snowy mountain tops in the distance glistened in the setting sun of early evening. It wasn’t too far to go to our next hotel. I hoped our driver was feeling better. It had been a very long drive for him today. So we made our way further round the lake, through the new road tunnel towards Tatvan, past smart new villas with lake views, and were waved through an army checkpoint, before offloading at our last hotel stay of this trip.

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

Pilgrimage to Turkey: the Ancient Armenian City of Ani

exterior animal carvings on Church of St Gregory Ani 

I mentioned already that it was sometimes difficult to remember on this trip that we were pilgrims first, not tourists.
We were urged regularly by our long-suffering leaders that the first thing we should do at each place visited was to be quiet, reflective and prayerful. 
Photos could follow later. It has to be said that we didn’t always remember this advice. 

But once inside the church of St Gregory, commissioned by the wealthy Armenian merchant Tigran Honents, finished in 1215 AD and easily the best preserved monument at Ani, the pilgrim in us took over completely. The interior was simply fabulous, adorned with the most beautiful frescoes, which depict the life of Christ, the life of Saint Gregory the Illuminator and scenes from the life of St. Nino, who converted the Georgians to Christianity. In the narthex or outer lobby area and its chapel fragmentary frescoes survive that are more Byzantine in style. The church is tucked away down the side of the gorge and hidden from immediate view from the main path. It meant a bit of a clamber down a reasonable pathway that sadly some found too challenging; because the rewards were great. The exterior of the church is also quite simply stunning. Its setting nestled into the side of the cliff down into the deep gorge is special enough. But it is decorated on all its four sides with ornate stone carvings of animals, both real and imaginary which were quite marvellous. As I gazed in delight at these wonders, my attention was caught by the most haunting and beautiful sound coming from inside the church. I listened outside for a while, captivated.

The church of St Gregory, Ani 

Then I forgot my camera and hastened to the doorway. There within was a member of our group, a deacon from Iraq, singing something that brought me out in goose bumps.
The sound was captivating, and a deeply spiritual moment for me and I suspect for many others. It was only afterwards when he had finished that I learnt he was singing the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic. None of us really wanted to spoil this moment for quite some while as we all stood, united as pilgrims, to reflect on the past history of this place, full of reminders of the glories of Armenian Christianity in another age long ago.

 The ensuing and deeply spiritual silence in this beautiful church was finally brought to a gentle finale by the bishop leading us in saying the Kyries;
Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. And we all stumbled out from the gloom into the light with tears in the eyes of more than a few of us.

There is simply no shortage of information available about this site, in guide books, websites and web reviews from the many travellers who are drawn to this important place. Most stress that it takes 4 or 5 hours to do it justice, and advise carrying a picnic and a water bottle. For us it was cold, but at least sunny, and there is a perfectly adequate restaurant off site for lunch time refreshment.

During the morning we wondered all over the ruins, visiting not only the said church of St Gregory, but also exploring the massive cathedral (or church of the Holy Mother of God, started in 989 but not finished for another 12 or so years), the Church of the Holy Apostles, the mosque of Minuchir and the Citadel, the highest point, from where we had a panoramic view of the whole area. I was personally fascinated by the ruins of the houses, with fireplaces, niches for ornaments perhaps, and signs of an underfloor heating system.


More about all this tomorrow with lots more photos of Ani....

more of the outside of the church of St Gregory of Tigran Honents at Ani