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During Ani's halcyon days, a
separate Armenian state,
Vaspurakan, flourished around
Lake Van, and its greatest king,
Gagig Artzruni, built a palace
and monastery for himself on
this island in 921. The only
part remaining today is the
Church of the Holy Cross. It is
a wonderful example of Armenian
church
architecture:
the outside walls are completely
covered with awesome reliefs
from the Old Testament such as
Jonah and the Whale, Abraham and
Isaac, and David and Goliath, as
well as mythical animals and
Armenian inscriptions.
Van
Van was founded on the lake
shore by the Urartian king
Sarduri I in the 9th century
BCE. The modern city, a few
kilometers away, was rebuilt
after World War I. At the Rock
of Van, the ruins of the ancient
Urartian citadel has many
inscriptions in Assyrian
cuneiform and Urartian
hieroglyphics that have filled
in many gaps in history, and the
world's best collection of
Urartian artifacts can be seen
in the museum in Van: Urartian
gold jewellery, bronze belts and
terracotta figures are
accompanied by Mesolithic rock
carvings (9,000-8,000 BCE) that
remind one of Van's prehistoric
roots.
Lake Van is the world's biggest
alkaline lake (3,713km2),
and is the largest lake of
Turkey. It is so deep (1,646m)
that locals believe a creature
like the Loch Ness monster in
Scotland lives in the depths;
they call it Van Dam!
Ani
Ani, which succeeded Kars as the
capital of Bagratid Armenia, was
once a very wealthy city with a
population of 100,000 and was
known as the city of 1001
churches. Today, having been
deserted for over 300 years, it
is a huge open-air museum of the
finest Armenian architecture.
The Lion Gate was added by the
Seljuk leader Alp Arslan, and
there are many churches and
mosques to explore. The Church
of the Redeemer (1036) was cut
in half by lightening in 1957.
The Church of Saint Gregory the
Illuminator (1215) is the best
preserved one, with animals in
relief on the outside and
beautiful frescos on the inside,
and some of the scenes depicted,
such as the life of Saint Anne,
the mother of the Virgin Mary,
originate from apocryphal texts
which were part of the Armenian
Bible. The largest of Ani's
buildings is the Cathedral of
the Apostles (1010), and it is
unusually positioned on a
north-south axis so that light
would flood the church only at
midday. Menucehir Mosque (1072),
said to be the earliest Seljuk
mosque in Anatolia, was possibly
a former Armenian palace. |
