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The lost motherland
by Tatul Hakobyan
Part One
Kars: The Land of Nairi and Snow
Musa, a 74-year-old carpet seller, has gotten in the habit of drinking tea
in Ali Bey's grocery store as morning breaks over the provincial city of
Kars. Over several cups of tea, he melts sweet pieces of sugar under his
tongue.
"Armenians used to live in this town. For hundreds of years Armenians
and Turks were friends," Musa says. And then: "It was the Russians who
incited Armenian against Turk."
"Armenians left for Russia and Armenia," he goes on, Ali Bey nodding
accord, as Musa reaches for the next piece of sugar to melt.
At the start of 20th century, the poet Yeghishe Charents pictured Kars
in his poetic novel, Land of Nairi: "This ancient Nairian city was like
the other Nairian cities, old or new: small, not too crowded, ruinous
and dusty. In the modern vernacular such cities are called
'underdeveloped' provincial cities."
A hundred years later, at the start of 21st century, the Turkish writer
Orhan Pamuk visited Kars in his novel, Snow. In his telling, the local
people explain to Pamuk (who appears in the novel as Karim Alakushoghlu,
freshly retuned from years spent in Germany, now covering Kars as a
correspondent for Cumhuriyet investigating local elections and a spate
of suicides among the town's young women) why Kars is in such a sorry,
poor state. There are several reasons: the Iron Curtain, the decline of
commerce, endless Armenian-Turkish quarrels, the indifference of God and
the state, percolating "nationalism" - if at one time everyone lived as
a big family, today one person declares he is an Azeri, another that
he's a Kurd, the third that he's Turkmen.
On the cover of the Nobel Prize-winning Pamuk's novel of Kars is an
image of Arakelots, the 10th-century Armenian monastery, frosted with
snow. Pamuk conveys the city's past - its glory days of Armenian
activity - and its troubled present: "There was a time when Kars was a
vivid city, where prosperous Armenians lived by their thousand-year-old
churches, which are still steady in all their intact charm."
To get an idea of this "ancient Nairian city" - part of the first
Armenian republic some 87 years ago - you'd do well to read Charents or
Pamuk. But that's not sufficient. You have to visit Kars, and seek out
(unsuccessfully) the tavern of Barrell Nikolay, the coffeehouse of
Telephone Seto at Loris Melikyan street, which Charents described. You
have to find the gate of General Alsho on Alexandrian Street; the winery
of Egor Arzumanov; the row of small, one-story shops on the long, long
road up to the train station.
A monument to Kazim Karabekir stands at the station today. In October
1920 the forces of General Karabekir occupied the cities of Kars and
Gyumri (Alexandropol), and one year later the treaty of Kars was signed,
under which the Bolsheviks ceded to Turkey Kars, Sarighamish, Igdir -
and other fragments of the Armenian motherland.
In the course of 87 years the Turks have been able to destroy, demolish,
and otherwise consign to oblivion the traces of the city's Armenian
presence. But 87 years has not been enough to scrape away every trace of
the Armenian monuments of Vanand in the Airarat province. The tenacity
of that Armenian presence leads you to realize that is not enough to say
that Kars was once Armenian.
From 928 to 961 Kars was the capital of the Armenian Bagratuni dynasty,
and when the capital was moved to Ani, it became the separate kingdom of
Vanand. Over the centuries the province of Vanand passed into the hands
of Byzantines, Seljuks, Georgians, Mongols, and in 1534 it was joined to
the Ottoman Empire. After a back-and-forth period of possession between
1828 and 1877, Kars passed into the control of czarist Russia.
In 1894 the British traveler Lynch wrote that the Russian garrison - not
counting the actual population of Kars - consisted of around 4,000
people, 2,500 of whom were Armenians, 850 Turks, 300 Greeks, and 250
Russians. Another traveler, Reitlinger, visiting Kars in 1931 wrote that
the major part of the city was abandoned and left in ruins, with a
population only in the hundreds. By the 1970s, though, the population of
Kars reached 80,000; and today it clocks in at about 100,000.
I have been to Kars on several occasions, the last of which was on my
way to Aghtamar. This time, the end-of-March blasts of cold wind and
snowy rain emphasized the dreariness of the city more than ever. Along
its bumpy, narrow streets one sees horse-drawn carriages, foreign cars,
heaps of rubbish, modern 10-story housing facilities - and next to them,
earthworks, all lined up side by side. The smell of horses, the clothing
and appearance of the locals, and those earth houses that seem to pop up
everywhere in the province - all this serves to transport a visitor a
hundred years into the past. It's as if the 20th century - and
civilization itself - has taken a detour around this city, and all
Eastern Anatolia, for that matter: the region that, in reality, is
Western Armenia.
The Ottoman civilization of the 20th century ripped through Western
Armenia with all its cruelty, leaving in the heart of modern Armenians a
disconsolate pain. The magnitude of that grief and bitterness is
indescribable, and whether you call it the extermination of a whole
nation, or genocide in an historical homeland, you're merely resorting
to diplomatic language.
* The world spins, and Nairi endures
Back at Ali Bey's grocery story, a taxi driver, Jelal, tells me, "The
majority of ordinary people in the city want to see the Armenian-Turkish
border open. But the border will not be opened while there are Russian
soldiers left in Armenia. With the Russians gone, Turks and Armenians will
become friends."
The carpet seller Musa knows that Armenia itself lies not far away. "We
want the borders to be opened. Armenians will come to Kars to trade."
Let's for a moment move a little further off, to the Armenian city of
Gyumri, where 37-year-old Armine agrees with Musa - to an extent. She
agrees that opening the Armenian-Turkish border would be beneficial for
commerce. Nevertheless, she is against the border opening. "It is
possible that the day will come when Armenians and Turks will live side
by side," she says. "But the inner hatred will remain. I am against
opening the border, and I think that my contemporaries share my opinion"
- though she cites no polling data.
Misha, a 65-year-old Gyumri native, has a more open approach to the
issue: "The people of the entire world want peace. Opening the
Armenian-Turkish border would be beneficial for us as well. But why does
Turkey then build the Kars-Akhalkalaki railway, when we already have a
Kars-Gyumri line?"
Ashot Mamajanyan, 57, whose father is from Kars and mother from Mush,
says: "Our people are exhausted; Armenia is in an all-round blockade.
Let the border open at least from the side of Turkey, so they can bring
goods from there, maybe at a little bit higher or lower prices, but so
that people can make a living. People cannot live like this anymore."
* Arakelots Church
The most distinctly Armenian feature still standing in the homeland of
Ashot Mamajanyan's father, Kars, is the Arakelots church, built more than
a thousand years ago, in the reign of King Abas Bagratuni. In Land of
Nairi, Charents wrote of it: "Arakelots is the greatest and dearest
wonder, adornment, and amazement of this ancient city.... What the soul is
to the body, what the eyes are to the brain, what the heart is for a man's
physique - that is what Arakelots is for this Nairian city. What Notre
Dame is for Parisians, Arakelots is for dwellers of this city."
Charents goes on: "Northward from the fortress, nestled in the
descending slope of a hill, like a gray stony bird perches the church of
Arakelots. The church looks like a bird when you view it from above,
from the fortress; but viewed from head on it resembles a priest. An old
stony priest, who seems to have found a seat on the slope of the hill,
who has remained sitting there for ages, and who will remain sitting
while the world spins round; and in this endlessly spinning world, the
land of Nairi remains."
Charents also wrote: "Above, at the top of the dome, is a cross: a
plain, iron cross of Nairi." But today the cross is gone, and the dome
of Arakelots is topped with a Turkish crescent instead. Inside the dome
are reliefs of the 12 apostles - that's how the church got its name,
Arakelots, which means "of the Apostles." Several times the church has
been turned into a mosque, and its last religious service was in 1919.
After that the church was used for secular purposes only: it has been an
oil-storage pit, a museum. But today it is "Kumbeth jami," which means a
domical mosque.
The fortress of Kars, which dominates the city and the church of
Arakelots, was considered one of the major fortresses in the province of
Vanand. Today the fortress is introduced to visitors as a building of
the Seljuk period. Below the fortress flows the river Kars, which
divides the city into its old and new parts, while the old bridge brings
them together. This is "Vardan's bridge," mentioned by Charents.
In the Soviet era, the fissures of the Cold War passed along the
Armenian-Turkish border (which at that time was the Soviet-Turkish
border). But even during those years the Kars-Gyumri railway was
functioning.
On April 3, 1993, Turkey issued a government decree closing its border
with Armenia. To be more precise, it closed its two frontier posts:
Akyaka-Akhuryan (where the Kars-Gyumri railway passes) and
Alijan-Margara, next to Igdir and Yerevan. Ankara justified its decision
to close the borders by saying that Armenian forces occupied the
Kelbajar region of its sister state, Azerbaijan.
Already 14 years have passed, with Turkey keeping Armenia in a blockade.
The majority of Kars' population has migrated to Western Turkey, because
Kars and the entire region have not grown economically. One of the
reasons for that may be the closed border.
And so goes the dreary, lonely city, once a seat of princes, now a
depopulated ruin, its past glories and future prospects fading
simultaneously, due to the neglect and perhaps contempt of its present
rulers. But the past thousand years have witnessed many rulers, and the
words of Yeghishe Charents still echo faintly: "The world spins round;
and in this endlessly spinning world, the land of Nairi remains."
The first of a series.
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