Full Moon over Noah's Ark

by Rick Antonson

  “Goran, looks like you’ve only got Rick and me with you to Ishak Pasha,” Ian said. “What time?”

  “Seven. Grab breakfast before then.” There was a hesitation in Goran’s voice. “I’m thinking I might like to see where Zafer says Noah’s boat landed.”

  Nico had the last word, looking in my direction. “All this. It’s odyssey stuff, isn’t it?”

  FOURTEEN

  THE LOST SHIP OF NOAH

  “Myths do not die suddenly. They pass through a long period of respectable retirement, decorating the background of the imagination.”

  —Kenneth Clark, Civilization

  “I shak—you would call him Isaac on the Anglo tongue—didn’t start building this, nor did he finish. His dad, Colak Pasha, needed administration complex for his area of the Ottoman Empire. That in 1685.” Zafer bantered on about the palace to those he’d corralled in the Isfahan Hotel’s lobby and persuaded to come along: Goran, of course, and me, but also Ian, and at the last moment Patricia and Nico, who had both become inquisitive.

  We were driving a few miles south and east of Doğubeyazit. “This palace was center of town, but you won’t see that town now,” Zafer continued. “Ishak got his name on the door, but he was only like midwife for project. His son Mehmet got job done.”

  “We are on spur of the Silk Road,” he said. “Through here, by Ararat. Marco Polo.”

  As the high sloping sides of cut stone came into view, Patricia said, “Lovely place to stay if you were traveling three hundred years ago.”

  The hillside around the palace was desolate, and as a result of having nothing to compare it to, the mausoleum, already quite big enough on its own, really affected you by its colossus size. Eight smooth barriers angled around an uneven rectangle, forming a continuous octagonal base. I’d seen beautiful photographs of the palace in advance of my trip and looked back to see they’d been taken from a vantage point a long hike from where we were, one I was confident we wouldn’t be taking.

  Walking toward the arched gate of Ishak Pasha Palace, I saw a table of trinkets, one of which was a woman’s powder makeup case that would fit in the palm of my hand. It bore an image of a full moon over Mount Ararat. It was the first such image I’d seen. As I purchased it, I could see the real Ararat in the distance, majestic and almost touchable in the clear air.

  The Ishak Pasha Palace, outside Doğubeyazıt, commands a view of the surrounding lands, as befits a former administration center that began construction in 1685 but only saw full function and completion in 1784. Today it is in semi-ruin.

  Not until I ventured inside did the openness of courtyards and narrowness of passageways leading to domed rooms make the place feel charmed in its semi-restored state. The mansion was light and airy, much of it open to the sky. The interior plaza was sided by ornate stonework that rose above arches. There were a hundred windows without coverings. The barricades looked to never have taken cannon or rifle fire. Ian said it felt “over-restored.”

  “Let’s go see Noah’s Ark,” Nico said to Zafer, jesting only a little.

  Ignoring Nico and seeking a sympathetic listener, Zafer looked at Goran, disappointed by the lightheartedness. “It is serious, Goran. I believe Noah’s Ark landed where I will take you. It can be nothing else.”

  In the vehicle, Zafer prepared us for what he felt to be a contentious destination. “We are going to the Durupinar site, which you will have heard about.”

  “Not me,” said Ian.

  “Me neither,” said Goran, looking at Patricia, who shook her head.

  I had. It was common lore in even peripheral research about the Ark—a landmark that begged for explanation, and had often been given an intentionally erroneous one. It was that interpretation that Zafer believed in.

  The others who came along were skeptical, even cynical—reluctant pilgrims. Like so much in these travels, old images were becoming real for me. Photos from books became land I walked on, and this visit would bring old magazine articles to life for me.

  A patient but perturbed Zafer continued. “What I show you, I am exploring. I have on order special drill from United States. I believe it will show below this ground is Noah’s Ark.”

  Our road was rolling, the hillside craggy as though a cover of dirt had been pulled back from the rocks, leaving them mostly bare, but for the occasional shrub or patch of mountain grass. With Mount Ararat eighteen miles off on our horizon, Zafer turned from the pavement, where a sign in Turkish promised us “Noah’s Ship,” the white lettering stating Nuhun Gemisi. He pulled up at a deserted orientation center and looked over a long valley toward rocky outcrops in the distance. It was the valley that would reach up and grab our throats with its unorthodox appearance.

  Around the building and away from the road, we were stunned by the archeological oddity that swept to massive proportions in the acreage below. We were gazing on what looked very much like a giant houseboat embedded in the earth: an ark.

  As we were silent, Zafer attempted to explain, himself agog at the sight. “Noah’s Ark story has its own reasoning. Not all is for us to know. It is beyond understanding.”

  Even though I’d seen online photographs of this while researching Ark matters, it was hard to ignore the visual impact of the grassed-over evidence of a ship-shaped formation that looked high enough off the surrounding ground to have “landed” there, now settled in bloated relief.

  “You see?” Zafer asked.

  “I … Yes … I … do,” Goran said, paying homage to the concept.

  “I’m glad I came,” Ian said. “I don’t know what to think. An astonishing coincidence, I’d guess. It looks like the hulk of a really big boat.”

  “Nico?” asked Zafer, prodding.

  “The mound looks like something you’d see on National Geographic. Or Fox News.”

  Patricia stared at the bulging ground the longest. “It’s … um … hard to dispute it’s shaped like a … ocean vessel … a boat. It looks like paintings that portray Noah’s Ark.”

  “It is a rock formation, through and through. It looks like a landed barge that has sunk slowly onto the earth over the ages. But it’s not,” I said.

  Zafer took umbrage at my comment; in his mind it would be Noah’s folly not to land here. “That is not true, Rick. You are wrong. Sorry. This actually is Noah’s Ark. Been proven. I will prove further.”

  To help us think through the logic, Zafer found the site custodian, asleep in the rear of the building. Bringing the man around to us, he said, “Inside.” We obeyed.

  Inside the visitor center, displays and poster boards were pinned with claims of facts and excavation work. The storyboards foreshadowed further digging into the artifact, planned to prove that this was not a freak of nature but instead a man-built object that explained the outcropping’s shape. But I’d done my research: even from a distance it had the tell-marks of rock folds, the synclines where the formations dip inward as though aiming to display an S, and rising in places, the anticlines that morph to a capital A design. These formations take many millennia to come about and don’t happen to former wooden structures. Overlooking geological truths has been a hallmark of this site’s popularity.

  The Durupinar site is captivating. Although this boat-shaped geological formation has been debunked as the site of the ark’s landing, it is a visually compelling structure resembling the hull of a ship, perhaps one bloated by centuries and the earth’s upheaving, conveniently approximating the Noah’s Ark measurements, including a length of 450 to 500 feet (137 to 150 m). It is 18 miles (29 km) south of Mount Ararat. Photo © John Dawson.

  The site before us was one of the best known sites that claimed to be the landing place of Noah’s Ark. First reports go back to 1948, when a Kurdish shepherd, Reşit Sarihan, came across a formation of rock that “looked like Noah’s Ark.” Sarihan thought a series of earthquakes had rattled the boat loose from the mud in which it was concealed. The earth’s rumblings dropped the starboard, he reasoned, leaving the sides of the �
��boat” exposed. Adding further excitement, a split in the middle of the formation spurred rumors that the boat’s timbered ribs were visible. Building on the appearance of a shipwreck, the relic’s proximity to Mount Ararat gave it special meaning. As awareness of the site grew, those who visited proposed that the form had been hidden within the earth until erosion and centuries of rain allowed it to slide down from a higher site until it came to rest here.

  But it wasn’t until ten years after the shepherd’s discovery that the world took popular notice. A routine mapping exercise of a Turkish Air Force flight over Mount Ararat in 1959 ended up profiling this geographical oddity. Turkish army captain and air photo specialist İlhan Durupinar, analyzing aerial photographs taken at ten thousand feet over the Akyayla range near the Tendürek mountains, discovered an unusual oval, boat-shaped mound of earth. His interpretation of a particular uplift of land attracted the interest of his military superiors; Durupinar speculated that it was the hull of a ship. In support of his assumption, the ridges in the pictures were identified as gunwales. Turkish officials brooded over the image, but Durupinar went so far as to propose that the photographs revealed the petrified wood remains of Noah’s Ark (despite petrification being a process of fossilization ostensibly at odds with Biblical timelines).

  The military dispatched engineers for a two-day reconnaissance under the aegis of the Archeological Research Foundation. Among their preliminary findings were measurements indicating a length of 500 feet, a height of 45 feet, and a midsection width of 150 feet. If one allowed for thousands of years of ground swelling and seismic upheaval, these enlarged figures were thought to compare favorably with the accepted conversion of Noah’s cubits as recorded in the Book of Genesis within both the Torah and the Bible.

  To those engineers on the ground, though, the preliminary findings were insufficient and inconclusive. In a departure from archeological protocols, the assembled brain trust decided to dynamite part of the formation to determine if there were fossilized timbers or if the demolition’s debris held pasted tar or indications of metal braces used in boat construction—anything that would be grounds for further exploration. When they sifted through the demolition’s rubble there was nothing of the sort, just lava, stone, and soil.

  Not even a polite hunch remained that the formation had ever been a boat, but Captain Durupinar’s legacy was that the site became his namesake. And despite the lack of any concrete evidence, the site gained notoriety as the “Phantom Ark.”

  Word spread widely in the United States with the September 5, 1960, issue of Life magazine, which ran aerial photographs under the banner: “NOAH’S ARK? Boat-like form is seen near Ararat.” Life’s reputation for integrity lent an aura of fact-finding sincerity to the speculation.

  For two decades, enthusiasm for the Durupinar site as the home of the Ark bubbled below the surface, with the occasional news report. Although fraud-mongers and tricksters had been involved with Noah’s Ark sightings for over a century, American Ronald Wyatt’s “I found Noah’s Ark” caper courted plausibility of this site by distorting facts better than anyone before him. The impetuous Wyatt resuscitated international awareness in the Durupinar site.

  A novice in every respect, the self-described “researcher” Wyatt first visited the formation in 1977, a site to which he’d return nearly two dozen times in twenty years. He recounted his preliminary investigations in a widely distributed, creatively phrased pamphlet, Noah’s Ark Found, which attracted funding for further exploration. Wyatt returned two years later amid claims that earthquakes (as first suggested by Reşit Sarihan in 1948) had indeed exposed timbers of petrified wood, aligned to resemble those of a massive boat.

  Wyatt’s storyline had the aura of truth. In the summer of 1984, he brought American space hero James Irwin to the site, one of many celebrities and scientists, including archeologists, geophysicists, and brigades of religious embellishers. The “dig” site was mapped with elaborate tools, such as “penetrating radar,” and with equipment said to be capable of generating data about fossils or isotopes for dating whatever was found, as well as determining what remains of construction might be retrieved from beneath the surface.

  Asserting that he had unearthed proof of the Ark’s existence, Wyatt showered the outside world with so-called evidence from his findings, reporting data from elementary metal-detection devices that he claimed revealed a grid of fastenings required at specific structure points in the Ark’s erection. He assured that man-made braces and peg-secured joints would be found. To the surprise of accompanying professionals, he even removed samples purported to be artifacts and smuggled them out of the country, without the permission of the Turkish authorities.

  Wyatt’s bewildering publicity tactics became more intricate as he scrambled to sustain funding, expand support, and court public interest. As a Biblical literalist, Wyatt’s popularity relied on the idea that Noah’s story was not a metaphorical tale, let alone improbable folklore.

  As Wyatt’s contrived story failed scrutiny, participants with serious academic credentials fell by the wayside and declined further engagement in his project. The duplicitous Wyatt was an evangelist with no hesitation about promoting himself as a modern-day Indiana Jones (using a parody of the movie poster for his book and video covers, floppy explorer’s hat atop a face with a graying beard, neatly trimmed on a tanned face). He maintained his pledges of pending discovery. Accusations of farce and fraud abounded, including those stating Wyatt placed relics on-site to be found later. Undeterred, the sensationalist circulated photographs showing a grid of professional survey strips over the “ship’s” earthly casting. He maintained that their placement was based upon scientific soundings taken with sophisticated equipment. The strips outlined, unmistakably, an ark-like ship.

  None of this was true.

  The location has much visually—and only visually—to commend it to a succession of believers and proponents. But soundings and core samples have proven without a scientific doubt that this amazing piece of geography was just that—an amazing piece of geography. At the core of every claim made by the cherubic Wyatt was fabrication.

  Dr. David Merling of Andrews University says of one claim that “the lack of growth rings in what Wyatt thinks is wood is evidence that the Durupinar site was created by molten rock, not made of wood.” A 1997 Australian court case drew in a disenchanted Wyatt supporter and one-time collaborator, fellow American David Fasold, author of The Ark of Noah. The case pitted Dr. Ian Plimer, respected geologist and formal skeptic about Ark claims, as court foe with a group of “creationists.” Fasold, having repudiated his earlier endorsement of the Durupinar site’s prospects of being Noah’s Ark, testified that claims the Ark had been found were “absolute BS.”

  Still, despite all the real evidence to the contrary, Wyatt’s charade was so successful that many today still believe the Durupinar site to be Noah’s Ark, and regardless if visitors believe it to be the ark or not, the unique and natural rock formation is fascinating. Local officials, whether as preservationists or opportunists, set the Durupinar site aside for protection, and by June 1987 it was being called “Noah’s Ark National Park”—though the Turkish government did not officially adopt the name. Located two miles from the Iranian border, less than twenty miles from Mount Ararat and within ten miles of Doğubeyazit, the attraction extends the length of stay of visitors to the region and increases economic impact to the area.

  Zafer weathered the dismissive comments from our group. “It was from here that the animals again went to earth. And the sons of Noah who left this site four thousand years ago were fathers of Iran, and Iraq, and also Armenia. Of course, Turkey too.”

  Or, as the Bible puts it:

  The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth.

  According to the Hebrew records, Japheth had seven sons, whose descendants peopled Europe and Asia, while Ham’s
four sons populated Asia’s southwest and Africa, leaving the Middle East (western or southwestern Asia) to Shem’s descendants.

  Nico did not accept that. “So all five races, every ethnic group on earth, share a common descent from one family on the ark?”

  “It is so.” Zafer did not blush or hesitate.

  “Rick?” It was Nico seeking an intervention. My mind raced, as I preferred observing them and not participating. Should I ask, “So Noah’s small, two generation family repopulated the earth by having sex with one another?” Or, “So, after the flood, the kangaroos hopped without breeding-stops all the way from here to Australia in order to be a one-continent animal?” I didn’t. It was not a discussion with a resolution, and the two of them let it drop, for the moment.

  I inferred that Zafer’s adherence to literal interpretations reflected the religious landscape hereabouts where Noah stories (or those of Nûh, for those of Islamic faith) were perceived less as folklore and more as hand-me-down truths. He knew things, like that the old village Ahora’s name translated to “vine plantation,” reinforcing that Noah planted the first off-ark vines there. With such traditional information, many people had no need for indecision.

  Eventually Zafer double-edged us: “I said I will drill next year,” he said. “Many of us believe. We know. We will prove.”

  Zafer’s bravado did not, in my mind, stand up against the information I knew, like the competing story information found in the Flood Tablet, a small storyboard I hoped to see with my own eyes at the British Museum in a couple of weeks. Nor did it pass muster with science. Still, it didn’t matter one iota what I believed. He believed.

  In front of the Isfahan Hotel, Ahmet’s vehicle idled in preparation for the drive to Fish Lake and his grandfather’s village.

  “We have guests,” I said to him. “Nico and Patricia are coming to Fish Lake.” Just the three of us.