We were in a room organized like a lived-in work studio. Every wall or open space had a purpose. He invited us to take a couch covered in neat bedding, tucked in. The floors were part wood and part buffed cement, all smooth and swept.
As I sat on the couch, my elbow hit the television set. Vage turned on a static connection, twisting the rabbit ears. Over the next hour that we were there, the pictures were never once clear, nor was I ever sure what we were watching.
“Pirvay, oo nas bodit nemnovo vodki,” he announced to us and I heard, “You and him are about to bond with vodka and coffee.” The fridge door opened and bottles rattled. Vage reappeared with shot glasses. He set them on the wooden arm of the couch.
He carried a propane tank from the other room. Precariously balanced on top of it was a hotplate serviced by a gas hose taped to the tank’s nozzle, which he turned open. It hissed. Vage flicked a match off a strip of sandpaper and lit it.
“Just in time,” I breathed. He set the coffee pot to boil atop the makeshift stove, and then poured the fridge-cooled vodka from a bottle labeled Imperial.
This called for a Russian word: “Na strovya!”
“Na strovya,” I returned. “To health.”
Across from us, and under his bed, were hundreds of books, in bundles of three or five, each group tied with burlap string and stacked. There was no room left under the bed; all of it was jammed with stored books, nearly fifty cubic feet of them.
Vage explained his lifestyle with an endearing barrage of misplaced consonants and random vowels, or so it sounded to me. “Knigi vazhni dlya menya. Oni moya zhizni.” The explanation was relayed back as, “Books are important to me.”
There was no lost rhythm in Vage’s speaking. He spoke through Brent’s voice as the comments were redirected to me: “My life is photography, but my knowledge is books.”
Vage brought a chair in from the other room and sat on it, tending the propane stove as one might add kindling to a wood fire. My two companions looked at home in the surroundings, a reminder to me that Brent can live on the thin edge of nothing—and that appeared to be just about what Vage possessed. It was my underestimation.
Along the wall was a well-made bookshelf, at least six feet wide and spanning from floor to ceiling, behind locked glass doors. Vage stood and brought down four binders. They were photo albums. He placed them on the floor beside the propane tank and opened the first one.
Vage flipped through page after page of his photo collection, showing commercial work and many extraordinarily attractive women, as Brent narrated. “He was a professional photographer. He photographed many beautiful women. His wife left him.” After a pause came Vage’s candor. “I was young. I was handsome.”
We all smiled. There were dozens of such pages. Then a spread fell open with a newspaper clipping showing half a dozen photographs of a dapper man, dark haired, with a nicely formed nose and a mischievous smile beneath unquestioning eyes.
“That’s him,” said Brent.
“How old are you?” I asked Vage. There was a smiling debate between the two of them that I could not understand. If there was a bet on the table, I’d have put cash behind what I whispered to Brent: “Going on seventy?”
“He’s fifty-seven,” came the answer.
Brent returned from the outhouse to find Vage and me sipping more vodka. I held out my mug, and Vage poured.
“Did you use the bathtub?” I asked.
“No, but I left the water running for you.”
We laughed and Vage, not knowing why, joined us. They each took a cigarette and lit it off the ones they were already smoking.
“Could we see the photograph of Mount Ararat?” I asked.
Photo Vage, as he’d become to us out of a reference for the professional work we’d just seen, returned all but one of the binders to the shelving. The instant cameraman had revealed himself as a talented advertising executive, a sophisticated photographer, a self-trained academic, a voracious reader, and, even with all I now knew about him, still very much a mystery.
He sat down on his chair. There was one binder he’d propped behind the propane tank that he’d not replaced in the main shelf and had been ambivalent about revealing its contents. Now he opened it.
Every photograph was of art magazine caliber, and they featured a woman. Vage looked at me and said of his wife, “She was beautiful, yes? Now she lives in Russia. Moscow, I think. We are not together. Not for many years.”
He turned a page showing pictures of a young girl growing through childhood and into her teens. He looked into my eyes and said, “My daughter. Only child. Lives far away.” With that, the binder was closed. He rose and placed it on his bed.
Vage walked back to a shelf of CDs and chose one.
I was told, “We must go to another town. A friend has a photography store. That friend will give us a copy of the photograph on this CD.”
* * *
I’d driven with Vage to Marmarashen, northbound on the main highway to Yerevan, in his smoke-filled Lada. We stopped ten minutes off that highway on a street of narrow stores. Vage, clutching the CD, asked us to wait while he went to a photography shop, six feet wide at best.
Our morning trip had lasted into late afternoon, and dinner hour was nearing. We walked back and forth on a sidewalk, never out of sight of the storefront Vage had entered. At last he came out, alone. He handed me a CD. The deal was done. He grinned, happy to have taken this trip with us. We were about to part when Brent said, “Dad, we still haven’t seen the photograph! You’ve no idea if it works for you.”
Vage took us to a room of photo-printing supplies and a large computer screen on the desk. His friend took the disc Vage had given me and inserted it in the slot, bringing up the image.
I was swept with gratitude.
A clear, brilliantly composed photograph appeared on the screen. The panoramic shot captured a magnificent view of both Mount Ararat and Lesser Ararat. And above that splendor hovered an almost full moon.
“Thank you, Vage. Thank you for everything! Spacibo.”
Evening crept up on us. Dusk fell as we drove back to Yerevan. The trip would be over in the morning with our flights out of Armenia.
We let a side road take us up a hillside. Once there, we stood with an unobstructed view of Mount Ararat. Masis was away and high, though from our perch we had the illusion of being eye-even with its peak as we looked across the Ararat Valley. At long last, this is the way it happened for me: a completely round sphere hung in a motionless moment, free of cloud. There was a full moon over Mount Ararat.
“That mountain symbolizes more death than any other landmark on earth,” Brent said.
“And hope … if you consider the ark stories.”
He grinned at me. “Can you really imagine those foothills under flood?”
I thought, but didn’t say, that maybe Black Sea waves had lapped toward this world seven thousand years ago, spawning a legacy of fact and fable. Instead I said, “Anyone who lived through that would have quite the story to tell.”
Brent closed our conversation. “And every survivor would remember it differently.”
19 In April of 2015, Pope Francis spoke at mass about “the first genocide of the 20th Century” having been inflicted upon the “Armenian people.” A strong rebuke came from Turkish President Erdoğan against using the term. Prime Minister Davutoglu said Turkey does “share the pain” with Armenians, stating that many Turkish deaths also occurred during those conflicts. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” Pope Francis said.
Photo Vage’s photograph of a full moon over Mount Ararat, with Lesser Ararat to the east. © Photo Vage, Armenia
I am assured at any rate
Man’s practically inexterminate.
Someday I must go into that.
There’s always been an Ararat
Where someone someone else begat
To start the world all over at.
—
Robert Frost
A-Wishing Well
AFTERWORD: BEGIN AGAIN
As my own journeys to Ararat in 2010 and Armenia in 2013 retreat into “a montage of moments,” I remember that I was shown the best of welcomes in some of the most troubled places. Those I met were at the forefront of cultural democracy and will need “reconstruction tourism” to help with the creation of economic well-being, when the time is right. They will not let our geo-curiosity rest at home; they wish us to come and visit with them.
Travels near Ararat and beyond will always be amid temporary détentes. What was, isn’t; what is, won’t be. There is no lasting resolution for the future, unless peoples forget their pasts. That’s not going to happen, least of all in this region of the world.
To this day, Greater Kurdistan remains a sorrow, not a nation. It is said, “The Kurds have no friends but the mountains.” The Kurds have spent three hundred years running against history’s headwinds. The “Kurdish Question” becomes harder to ignore when the Peshmerga fight alongside coalition forces to hamper and destroy ISIS (Daesh). Will the coming decade see a nation of Kurdistan, in some form, rise from the turmoil in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey? If so, will it be accomplished by dismembering portions of one or more of these countries? Would creation of such a new nation attempt to include Mount Ararat? How would that sit with Armenians, even those of Kurdish heritage?
This human-headed winged bull was bulldozed by militant extremists during an intentional assault on the historic remains at the North West Palace of Ashurnasirpal (King, reigning 883—859 BCE), at Nimrud, March 5, 2015. UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova condemned “in the strongest possible manner the destruction of the archaeological site of Nimrud in Iraq … nothing is safe from the cultural cleansing underway in the country.”
Turmoil in this region may lessen, but it will not cease. In Henry Kissinger’s book World Order, his summation is this: “In our own time, the Middle East seems destined to experiment with all of its historical experiences simultaneously—empire, holy war, foreign domination, a sectarian war of all against all—before it arrives (if it ever does) at a settled concept of international order.”
Ararat and the Ark will remain entwined as namesakes; science is an explainer but not an excuser—legends have remarkable tenacity. As this book went to press in 2016, there had been no independent scientific validation, for example, of the “discoveries” from the highly publicized 2010 Chinese–Turkish expedition to Mount Ararat that made news headlines around the world. One example ran in the Daily Mail, Australia:
“WE’VE FOUND NOAH’S ARK!” …
CLAIM EVANGELICAL EXPLORERS ON MISSION TO SNOW-CAPPED ARARAT
(BUT BRITISH SCIENTISTS SAY, “SHOW US YOUR EVIDENCE”)
Similar announcements had been made by the Hong Kong–Turkey group in 2007, 2008, and 2009, purporting to have proof of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat. What differed in the 2010 media blitz was the release of video footage showing expedition members in a cave above the twelve-thousand-foot level on Ararat and within a wooded-walled room, claiming to be inside the missing Ark.
The lead organization on these search achievements is Noah’s Ark Ministries International (NAMI), based in Hong Kong, along with its Turkish mountaineering partner Armet Ertugrul (Paraşut). That turns out to be the same Paraşut I’d tried to contact on my trip to Ararat, with the intention of climbing to his reputed ice cave.
NAMI’s publicity included a screening of Noah’s Ark Discovery on National Geographic Television, one of television’s top-ten archaeological programs viewed that year. In response to cynicism about their declarations, a 2010 Christian Science Monitor article by Stephen Kurczy stated: “There is no plausible explanation for what they found other than it is the fabled biblical boat.”
However, given the lack of reputable third-party corroboration of any of the evidence they—or anyone else making similar claims—have presented, all claims are found wanting. NAMI, and its enabling Turkish partner Paraşut, risk earning a place on the roster of tricksters like Ronald Wyatt, who once rode a roar of self-promotion around the discredited Durupinar site not far from Mount Ararat.
There are those, however, who provide context through ongoing scholarship, and who harken back to Leonard Woolley’s words: “Beneath much that is artificial or incredible there lurks something of fact.” As oceanographer Robert Ballard told an interviewer, “It’s foolish to think you will ever find a ship. But can you find people who were living? Can you find their villages that are underwater now? And the answer is yes.”
I maybe most agree with Irving Finkel, who once observed, “I don’t think the ark existed—but a lot of people do. It doesn’t really matter. The Biblical version is a thing of itself and it has a vitality forever.”
My odyssey’s encounters have left lifelong friendships. I’ve spent evenings with Taha and Gulie and Andam in their home. Their family in Iraq is safe, despite the dangers. Others, like my Iranian train dance partners, have remained email pen-pals. Those I climbed Mount Ararat with are always up for correspondence and periodic exchanges about leaving on another grand quest together. Whether that adventure actually happens is not important. I will send a copy of this book to Photo Vage, so he can see his lovely photograph of a full moon over Mount Ararat adorning the back cover of this book.
My eyes were thoroughly examined by a doctor upon my return, and whatever visual disruption occurred descending from the summit of Ararat was—like so much in that region, except for the mountain itself—temporary.
A TIMELINE
BCE = Before Common Era, CE = Common Era, secular terms replacing the Gregorian calendar’s BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini—In the Year of Our Lord).
The Origin (with its debatable dates)
13.82 billion years ago
In the beginning … The Big Bang. Singularity. Start of the universe.
4.54 billion years ago
Earth forms (according to radiometric age dating).
600,000 to 1 million years ago
Phanerozoic evolution of complex life: multicellular to human.
500,000 to 200,000 years ago
Evolution of Homo sapiens onward to today.
BCE
c. 15,000
Height of most recent glaciation.
c. 12,000–10,000
Earliest date for traditional “Creationist” view of earth’s formation, with humankind in attendance.
c. 6000
First settlements in area that became ancient Nineveh (today Mosul).
c. 5600
Epic high water. A great deluge. The Black Sea Flood (argued speculation). Mediterranean Sea waters rising through the Sea of Marmara burst through the Bosporus isthmus to flood freshwater lesser Black Sea and form saltwater Black Sea.
c. 5000–3500
Additional settlements take place in region that eventually becomes Mesopotamia.
Initial community of Erbil begins, one continuously inhabited to the present.
4004
Creation of the Earth, according to literal interpretation of Bible, worked up using the generational “begets,” by Rev. James Ussher (in 1650).
c. 3300–3100
Cuneiform script developed.
c. 3100
Mesopotamia emerges more formally as a region.
c. 2700–2500
Gilgamesh (King of Uruk) lived (according to Babylonian written records, he may have lived closer to 2100 BCE).
c. 2000–1800
Flood Tablet written down (earliest known); Epic of Gilgamesh, including Chapter XI, containing the flood story; hero is Utnapishtim.
c. 1900
The prophet Abraham (Ibrahim, Abram) leaves Mesopotamia for Canaan.
c. 1900–1700
Ark Tablet written down (earliest known); Babylonian flood story; hero is Atrahasis. Prior to Ark Tablet, revealed in 2014, the earliest written version of this story was from 1635 BCE.
c. 1000
Mesopotam
ia begins period of Assyrian then Persian dominance.
c. 860
“Kingdom of Urartu” and “Mountains of Urartu” referenced (Urartu became Urarat, then Ararat—and, in the Latin, Armenia); Anatolia, today in Turkey, was largely included; Urartu was also known as the Van Kingdom.
c. 650
Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (reigning 668–627 BCE) constructs new palace and builds library at Nineveh.
c. 612
Over 30,000 fragments of cuneiform tablets buried in library at Nineveh, under assault from Medes.
Assyria falls to the Babylonian Empire.
c. 600
Ancient Armenian Kingdom emerges.
c. 597
Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. The Babylonian Exile of Jewish people begins, perhaps facilitating their introduction to the Babylonian Flood Story and other narratives; Jewish exile lasts sixty years (two to three generations).
c. 590
Mount Ararat ceases to be under the Kingdom of Urartu.
c. 550
First Persian Empire (Achaemenid) founded by Cyrus the Great.
c. 539
Cyrus the Great overthrows Babylon. Cyrus Cylinder is written/created.
c. 537
Jews freed by Cyrus as part of his abolishment of slavery and granting religious freedom; Jews able to return and rebuild Jerusalem; the writing of Hebrew texts begins.
c. 538–332
Noah’s Ark story written down (earliest known): Book of Genesis of the Hebrew Torah (or the Pentateuch), eventually becoming part of the Christian Old Testament in the Bible; hero is Noah.
c. 275
Berossos (writer, astronomer, and priest; of the Chaldean people who controlled Babylonia from 625 to 539 BCE); references the flood narrative and ark in the remnant excerpts found from his History of Babylonia.
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