The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians. Philip Marsden

Armenian businesses and restaurants; in the United States there is an Armenian credit card called Ararat, as is an Armenian nursing home in California. The national football team is called Ararat, and the mountain’s dual-peaked profile had hung in every Armenian home I’d seen so far. I knew it as a symbol of exile, staring as it now does into Armenia from across the Turkish border. But Father Levon’s idea was much more than that. I began to see the mountain as something more enigmatic: an article of faith, the survival of an animistic past.

      Osip Mandelstam, after several months in Armenia, also became aware of Ararat’s peculiar presence:

      I have cultivated in myself a sixth sense, an ‘Ararat’ sense: the sense of attraction to a mountain.

      Now, no matter where fate carry me, this sense already has a speculative existence and will remain with me.

      I had seen Ararat too – from Dogubeyazit in Turkey. But it had left no particular mark on me. Perhaps I had to wait to see it from Armenia.

      I left Father Levon in the Piazza San Marco and took a boat across the lagoon to the island of San Lazzaro. The afternoon was crisp and beautifully clear. Only two other passengers were on the boat; one of them was an Armenian monk. For more than two hundred and fifty years, San Lazzaro has been an Armenian monastery. It is now one of the great storehouses of Armenian culture, with its collection of thousands of manuscripts – pages and pages of Mesrop’s script.

      The monk from the boat passed me on to another monk who guided me around the monastery, Climbing the stairs to the museum, he asked me for news of the Armenian monastery in Jerusalem. I went in to some detail about the new patriarch and the bishops and the old retainers of the Holy Places, but I could see he had lost interest; they were members of the Brotherhood of Saint James, he was a Mekhitarist, a wholly different sect.

      San Lazzaro’s museum, on the other hand, was a testament to the cohesion of the diaspora. Each exhibit, brought to the island by devoted pilgrims, was another dot on the Armenian map. It was like the collection of some well-travelled Victorian philanthropist. Under a Tiepolo ceiling, Persian ceramics stood with Iznik dishes and Kutahya ewers; there was an ivory Taj Mahal, some ivory filigree orbs (seven inside one another, like a Russian doll), a silver Ethiopian hand cross, St Petersburg miniatures, stamps, banknotes, a Crusader sword, a Canova cast of Napoleon’s son, a Burmese boustrophedon manuscript explaining in Pali the initiation rites of a Buddhist priest, and a mummy. In 1925 Egypt’s foreign minister, an Armenian, had brought the mummy, along with a Bubastis cat. The mummy was the monk’s favourite exhibit.

      He led me away from the main gallery to a room lined with the buckram spines of English classics. There, hanging over the door, was a portrait of Lord Byron. All through the winter of 1816, several times a week, Byron crossed the lagoon to visit the monks of San Lazzaro. He developed a fascination with Armenia, discovering among other things that it was the supposed site of Earthly Paradise.

      ‘Their country,’ he wrote, ‘must ever be one of the most interesting on the globe.’

      In this room Byron took on the Armenian language. His letters tell of his endeavours: ‘In the mornings I go over in my gondola to hobble Armenian with the friars … my mind wanted something craggy to break upon … this was the most difficult thing I could discover … a Waterloo of an alphabet …’ In Venice itself, his pursuits were easier:‘… the lady has, luckily for me, been less obdurate than the language …’ After some months his visits to San Lazzaro dried up.

      

      The next day, before leaving Venice, I called ahead to Cyprus. I told Garo Keheyan, an Armenian I’d met in Jerusalem, that I planned to be in Nicosia in a few days.

      Crossing the Rialto that evening I saw the Grand Canal just beginning to ice over. In Trieste there was a night train to Yugoslavia. It snowed heavily in the night and at Belgrade a guard stumbled along the track to thaw the points with a flaming torch. The train ploughed on, south through Serbia, through dead valleys and silent forests, beneath swollen clouds. The day slid past in a series of frozen images: a man with a gun on an icy pond, the breath of a horse at a level-crossing, a yellow pig leaping in the snow.

      The following afternoon at Piraeus was warmer. A ship from Odessa was in port and the Ukrainians lined the docks’ perimeter fence. By their feet lay piles of china plates, plastic dolls, knives, forks, and tins of caviar. I bought a bottle of Armenian brandy from a stern Russian woman and carried on past the ones with smiles and powder-blue eyes and no goods at their feet, prepared to go to any lengths for hard currency.

      The ship to Cyprus was practically empty. Half a dozen people gathered in its burgundy lounge as if for a bad joke: a Jew, a priest, a London cabbie, and a Greek cabaret artiste. The Orthodox priest settled down to watch a TV game show while the cabbie vilified Saddam Hussein for the ‘artiste’. I took the brandy and sat with the Jew, an antiques dealer with shoulder-length hair and dark, smiling eyes. He was on his way to marry a girl he’d never met. A friend in Lithuania had sent him her picture and now they were to meet at a certain hotel in Cyprus, go through the civil ceremony, and start anew in Haifa.

      ‘Call me a fool,’ he said. ‘But I feel good about it.’

      I drank to his bride and he asked me what I was doing in Cyprus.

      ‘I’m on my way to Armenia.’

      ‘Armenia? What are you going to find there?’

      ‘I have no idea.’

      ‘So we are both on a mystery tour!’

      It was well after dark when the ship hauled in her warps and eased away from the dock. The antiques dealer suddenly thought of something: ‘I remember there were some Armenians in Cairo. Extraordinary people. They had an expression – perhaps you’ve heard it. They used to say that the Armenians were “caught between the hammer and the anvil”.’

      ‘And they say that if the hammer falls often enough you end up with a diamond.’

      

      After a day and a half we berthed in Limassol and I took a bus up to Nicosia. There I went to find Garo Keheyan whom, I hoped, would be able to advise me. I was trying to get back to the Armenian communities of Syria. There were two options: to go straight there, by boat to Latakia, or to go via Beirut. A lot of Armenians lived in Beirut; it had at one time been the most important city of the diaspora. But while the Gulf war continued, I was not keen on going in. Nor did I have a Lebanese visa. But then I had no Syrian visa either; in fact I had no visas for any of the countries I wanted to visit before Armenia – nor for Armenia itself.

      In part this was due to the confusion of the Gulf war and the mess of the Soviet Union. But I saw it also as a test. The Armenians have travelled these regions more consistently, more zealously than any other people. They have always lived by travelling – as merchants, adventurers or pilgrims – with all the cunning and enterprise that it requires. That the Armenians remained so mobile, and yet survived as a distinct people, was a miracle that I still had not understood. When borders were sealed by warring empires – Mameluke and Seljuk, Seljuk and Abbasid, Ottoman and Safavid, Safavid and Mogul – the Armenians’ network of exiled communities spanned them all. Often they were the only link between rival courts and carried messages in their own script like a code. Because of the eternal instability of Armenia itself, the rigours of a peripatetic life were part of being Armenian; frontiers and wars just an everyday obstacle. My own journey would have to be an experiment in this.

      Garo shrugged when I asked him if I should go, and in truth I’d already decided. He knew the Lebanese consul and telephoned her to vouch for me. All I needed, she said, was a letter from the British High Commission to free them of any responsibility. I secured the visa and arranged – through Garo’s own travel agency – a passage to Beirut. I had two days before the boat left; the Armenian network was already proving its worth.

      

      Garo was not just a travel agent. He was also Cyprus’s Brazilian consul, director of a bank, a property developer, a would-be publisher and a power-broker of the Armenian republic’s burgeoning foreign affairs. But his real enthusiasm was reserved for esoteric