Van IV …and beyond

After our family trip to Mardin and Gaziantep we arrived in Antalya at our old apartment complex which had been our family home for four years. All our old friends were still there and so we did the most natural thing and got together for a rakı sofrası outside in the grass (rakı is a Turkish fennel-liqueur served with appetizers, dips, heaps of fruit, and cheese). It was amazing to sit there with all the men and see how, even though all our kids had grown so much that I didn’t even recognize some of them, the adults were utterly unchanged. The food and drink was exactly as I had left it. Even the topic of conversation was exactly where we had left off two years before.

One of our friends was excited to bring out a container of çiğ köfte, a food normally made out of ground bulgur, nuts, and tomato paste but traditionally made of raw ground beef. This one was special because it was the traditional type made with ground beef that the government has banned from selling. Now culture dictated that I had to try it as it was brought for me specifically, but as I ate it I knew full well that this was not a great idea. Raw beef when the weather is 44 degrees at night is a terrible idea even though Turks will promise that kneading the beef and spices by hand will kill any bacteria.

It didnt.

And so it was with a terribly painful e-coli infection that I set out for my fourth trip to one of my favorite places on earth: Van.

On my previous three trips to Van I worked my way down a list of the most significant sites of the ancient Armenian Kingdom of Vaspurakan, but with opportunities to travel so few now I decided to shift my priorities a little bit for our fourth trip. Instead of just focusing on Vaspurakan which would now have us chasing down some of the hardest to find and most thoroughly erased sites, we planned to venture a little farther afield and visit some of the more significant sites in nearby areas.

Waiting for my bags at Van airport shortly after landing I was struck by how different the people looked from when I had visited in the past. Where usually the baggage carousel was exclusively surrounded by people immediately recognizable as Kurds from the southeast, this time there were all sorts of people: people from western cities dressed for hiking, Turkish businessmen, and even a handful of other foreigners. That said it still wasn’t difficult to spot Fred standing head and shoulders above the crowd.

The difference this time was because, while I usually visited Van in the early spring, this time I was here late in the summer and tourists were coming to hike and explore. While spring with its snow-capped mountains, green slopes, and flowering almond trees is definitely the most photogenic, I had a good reason to be visiting Van in the summer.

This time I had to get into the lake.

Ever since that first trip to Van in early 2021 I’ve been researching the lesser-known sites of this region. As I mentioned above, I’ve seen all but some of the least known places. There are two exceptions: two well known (though rarely visited) sites that have been just out of reach for years. These two sites are the island monasteries of Gduts and Surp Gevorg.

And so it was with an inflatable dingy taking up most of my luggage allowance, that I was back in Van and ready to finally visit these elusive sites.

Disaster struck quickly.

Our first stop was Gduts Monastery, a beautiful Armenian monastery built in a classic style with stripes of alternating black and white on Çarpanak island, a low green island barely separated by a sunken sandbar road that is sometimes passible without even swimming. This was supposed to be the easier of the two to reach so we decided to start here.

As we drove along the coast, the calm expanse of the lake on our left and the dry yellow plains rising gently to our right, we saw more and more signs saying that going on the beach and entering the water was “dangerous and illegal”. We continued on hoping this wouldn’t be the case at the beach where we hoped to make the crossing from.

It was.

Not far from the beach we were aiming for, the road was blocked by a makeshift police station set up to keep people away. I went out hoping to find out the situation and possibly even sweet talk my way into getting on the island (rules are VERY flexible if you can become friends with the people in charge).

Apparently 20 people had drowned trying to swim to the island last year so the government simply shut down all beach access in the area (swimming lessons aren’t much of a thing here and as the government closes down access to water whenever someone drowns there aren’t even many places left to learn). While the chat with the officer was friendly and he suggested other ways, none of them were going to work. He told me I could go from another point and reach the island but I did not have faith in my rubber dingy to take me across 10 kilometers of open water and back again.

Yet again I tried and failed to reach Gduts.

But! There was still plenty of summer sun and another monastery to attempt to reach. So we headed north to try and make the crossing to the church of Surp Gevorg on Lim Island, though now I wasn’t nearly so confident that we’d make it.

At first it didn’t seem like we were off to a good start here either. Getting out of the car on the beach we were immediately told we couldn’t be there. This beach, the closest point to the island, was only for women and their families so we’d have to leave. Not able to find a road to any nearby beaches we cut across some recently harvested fields and proceeded to get the car stuck in the soft gravel near the beach.

After some considerable time spent getting the car unstuck we once again turned our attention to the low island across from us. Worryingly, it was much further than I had remembered from our last visit three years ago and, to make matters worse our boat was far smaller and more flimsy than I had hoped and nowhere near large enough for two adults (my mistake was not trying it before dragging it halfway across the world).

Fred, who doesn’t like the water at the best of times and had no faith in my pathetic little boat opted to stay behind. After just a few seconds of watching me attempt to paddle the unwieldly thing he was even more convinced he had made the right decision.

The boat came with a pair of plastic oars which were unusable. I tried using just one of them like a canoe and the boat spun rather than moving forward. The only way I managed to get the boat to move in the direction I wanted was by holding both oars together at once and using them like a kayak paddle and the only position I could find that worked to paddle in was a sort of awkward kneeling-squat.

As uncomfortable as it was the water was warm, the breeze gentle, and there was no current to fight. Even then it still took me over an hour to cross the 2.5 kms of water. My hands cramped from holding two paddles together and my legs were absolutely aching from the squat position. As I drew near the island I was greeted by two things: a swarm of small flies and a horrendous stench.

The flies swarmed all over me as I made an undignified landing by stumbling and slipping on wobbly legs in the slick soda-water of the lake. On the gravel beach I found the source of the smell: thousands of dead seagulls baking in the sun.

The seagulls weren’t just there on the beach but all over the island. The yellowed grass was deep, dry and thickly covered in bird droppings that tumbled onto my bare feet as I made my way up the slope to the monastery. Pigeons burst out from wells in the ground and crudely built shepherds huts, some built recently as the island has been used as pasture by villagers from the mainland. In the church, thick clouds of flies rose up as I came in and disturbed them where they hid in the cool corners of the building. They made such a noise that the first time it happened I thought I had disturbed a bee’s nest and quickly ran outside. As I had expected there were large pits left behind by treasure hunters, though these, like everything else here, were covered in a thick layer of guano indicating that no one had dug here in a while.

As every corner stank and was filled with flies, dead birds, and guano I didn’t linger long. The church, which historic photos show to have been built in a classical Armenian style (a narrow cruciform with a lofty drum topped by a high cone) was completely missing as was the beautiful belfry. The church here at Gduts was once one of the most beautiful in the area with a beautifully fluted drum and cone rather than a smooth sided octagon. All that remains now is the large square zhamatun (narthex or fore room). There were many other lesser buildings that made up the complex, though only piles of rubble and the imprints of plaster are left to hint at what was once there.

The trip back to the mainland was much like the trip to the island, only now my legs were sore and the swarm of flies I had found on the island decided to tag along for a ride back to the mainland. Wanting to give my legs a break I tried paddling lying down like I was on surfboard. It was far more comfortable but when I raised my head after a short time of paddling I found I had turned around and was heading back to the island.

After another hour of paddling I made it back to the beach. There had been nothing pleasant about my visit; the site had become disgusting, and the history that the island pointed to was a sad one. Despite this I was glad to have finally visited this site that is so important to the cultural landscape of Armenian Vaspurakan and wish I could have spent more time there.

After our island adventure, Fred and I checked into a hotel in Bitlis where I did my best to wash the crusted salt, soda, bird guano dust, and the thought of dead birds off myself. My E-coli infection had become quite painful by this point so I missed out on exploring Bitlis that night but managed to spend an hour walking through this odd medieval city the next morning. With its ancient black stone buildings set in a narrow lush gorge it was almost as if someone had transported a bit of Diyarbakır city into the green valleys of Trabzon.

But we weren’t there to see Bitlis as Bitlis deserves a day or two at least all for itself. Instead, we had come to see a handful of very special stones hidden in a village not too far away. The village of Por is home to a pair of Armenian churches, and more importantly, a collection of some of the largest Khachkar monument stones in Turkey.

Por, one of a handful of villages with that name in Bitlis province alone and now officially known as Değirmenaltı, is a large village of ancient stone houses packed in close to one another making it very difficult to navigate. It was also much larger than expected so we wended our way through its narrow twisting streets and unexpectedly found ourselves on the other side without having found any trace of any of the things we were looking for.

Stopping to ask directions from a local at work in his garden we ended up stopping for breakfast, sitting on an old rug and picking vegetables from the garden while he sent his kids down to the house to fry eggs and peppers for us. We chatted with our host, with his thick guttural accent of the southeast, for an hour or so enjoying his stories and hospitality. Eventually we did take his directions and followed a rough road up the valley and found ourselves in a bright sunny pasture with a sad heap of rubble in the midst of it.

We had come to the upper church of Por, the monastery of Surp Hovahannes, or St John. Our first view of it was nothing more than a heap of rubble, though as we got closer we saw it was the zhamatun (a narthex or outer room to the main body of the church proper) that had collapsed into a heap of rubble while the church itself was still standing. Based on the architecture and remnants of plaster the zhamatun had been added much later, and as with many other Armenian churches in the region, was built in a lower quality. While it is true the zhamatun wasn’t built to the same standard as the rest of the church, it was only in the last ten years that it had finally collapsed after a century of neglect and treasure hunters tearing out stones and weakening the structure.

We met a shepherd who now owns the land the church sits on, he said he’s put up fences and doors to keep looters out but they just tear down the door and begin digging.

Coming back down the valley into the village of Por, we once again tried finding Por’s main attraction: a set of massive khachkars or monumental Cross-Stones. Following what we thought was a street we drove onto a porch where a group of women were sitting and had to do a slow and awkward 5-point turn while they all silently watched us make our retreat. Based on the number of children that were running around the village there must have been men somewhere but we never saw them. I asked a teen sitting playing games on his phone if he knew where the church was and without taking his eyes off the screen for a second he said he didn’t know. This of course was absurd though it made a strong case for the universality of teenage angst. The teen proving unhelpful I asked a pair of five-year-olds standing in a doorway. As I started asking I saw a group of women sitting in the shade preparing food and had to quickly choose between looking absurd for asking five-year-olds for directions or breaking the gender segregation as a stranger by speaking to women in their house. I chose the latter as it seemed more likely they could actually help me. Thankfully there was a teenage son who popped out and got in the car with us to take us to the church which was only 100 yards away.

What remains of the church of Surp Anania is rather typical of the region though somewhat larger than many others, consisting of a large barrel vault supported by ribs and ending in a semi-circular apse on the east end. Beyond that, it was difficult to see anything else as the space was packed with fodder collected over the summer to prepare for winter.

But it wasn’t the church we had come to see but rather the khachkars that stood just outside. The Khachkar is one of the Armenian culture’s most important and enduring symbols, one that can be found just about anywhere the Armenian diaspora has put down roots. We got to visit a workshop in Yerevan in 2023 where they carried on this tradition by carving new khachkar and sending them all over the world.

Both in regard to the size of the stones, the number of stones, and the intricacy of the carving, the khachkar at Por are without a doubt one of the most interesting and important collections that has survived to date in Turkey. While the stones at Por are a part of a wider artistic tradition, they are also unique. In the case of the three largest khachkars the symbols and patterns are all carved at the same depth with no negative space and only the border around the cross carved deeper to make it stand out. The flatness of the stones’ surface and minute detail of the patterns reminded me more of tightly woven grass mats rather than stone.

The setting of these magnificent stones had obviously changed in recent years. Newer multistorey houses had been built up around the church and even right up against the largest stones making it impossible to stand back to photograph them. The family didn’t seem to have an issue with us standing on their porch to see the faces of the carved stones.

The massive khachkar of Por reminded me of something I had seen from a distance on a previous visit. In 2022 Fred and followed the advice of a shepherd we had met on the shores of Lake Van and found the Monastery of Surp Tadeos on the upper slopes of Mt Nemrut. When we visited in 2022 it was spring and we got caught in the snow, yet again driving a sedan directly up a mountainside. Not wanting to get stuck we quickly went up to the church, explored, and left. But as we were driving I noticed through the snow a tall black object standing some distance from us. With the weather not cooperating we decided not to stop.

Thinking back, it struck me that it must have been another monumental khachkar overlooking the western shores of the lake.

Later we made our way back up the slopes of the massive volcano and found the spot where the church stood. The stone was easy to spot from below and, going closer to investigate, it was in fact a large khachkar set into a socket cut into the bedrock. The harsh weather of the upper slopes had worn just about every trace of the carving on the face of the stone apart from a faint patch near the bottom of the stone which was probably protected from the driving winds by piled snow for much of the winter. Set on this lonely bare stretch of the mountainside the khachkar was a dramatic monument above the lake.

After Bitlis we drove west to Muş province to find the ruins of a monastery that I kept reading about while researching sites of Vaspurakan. The trip from Bitlis to Muş took us up a long broad valley with low hills to our north and short, sparsely-treed mountains to our south. When we first moved to Turkey in 2014 this was still a hotbed of insurgency and regularly in the news for all the wrong reasons. Now, a little over ten years later we weren’t even stopped at any of the checkpoints and military vehicles were nothing more than sedans or vans used to bring the officers out to checkpoints where they sat drinking tea as traffic flowed by uninterrupted. Our reception in nearby Bingöl in 2017 was less than friendly but now there was nothing but friendly curiosity; what could possibly bring two foreigners who speak Turkish to Muş?

What brought us to Muş was the Arakelots Monastery, or Monastery of the Apostles, now a large ruin tucked into the low sun-bleached mountains above the city of Muş.

From photos I had seen before, I knew we should be able to drive to the site but we made the rookie mistake of trusting Google and so, after nearly an hour of driving up steep dusty roads we found ourselves on the wrong side of the mountain. We switched to satellite images and tried again, this time following the roads we could see but were not included on the maps.

We finally found Arakelots, set on a wide table of land between two intersecting valleys. Despite the ruin, it was clear that this was once a massive monastery. Though in terrible condition, portions of three buildings remained: the main church, a freestanding Belfry, and an outer church to the east and a short distance outside of the main monastic complex. The outer walls of the complex and the lesser buildings have all been reduced to heaps of rubble, the rows of which indicating where the walls once stood and the low points in the heaps showing where there were once rooms.

Apart from a single carved stone sitting in the floor of the belfry there was not one ornamental stone left. Arakelots was once home to a library of beautiful manuscripts, a number of khachkar (some of which have been documented before they disappeared) and even a set of beautifully carved doors that were taken when the church was looted over a century ago. These doors eventually made their way to Armenia where Fred and I saw them on display in a museum in Yerevan in 2023.

While the buildings were still standing, their decline seemed rapid and recent. The sacristies of the main church had been excavated below the bottom of the foundations, undermining the integrity of the already badly damaged structures.

A day after visiting Arakelots we went out in search of another church ruin, this time on the northern edge of Vaspurakan near the town of Erciş in Van. This was the monastery of Metsopavank, the home of Tovma Metsopetsi, a 14th century monk who recorded the horrific destruction of the region by Tamerlane in his work The History of Tamerlane and His Successors. Reading through this book during Covid-era lockdowns was a huge part of how I came to be so captivated by this region and its tumultuous history.

From photos I had seen taken in the last ten or fifteen years, I didn’t expect much to remain of Metsopavank, a few walls and a small section of vaulting at best. As usual there was no accurate information about the location of the monastery so we made our way down the valley road, stopping to ask for directions whenever we saw locals, and on a few occasions got out of the car to explore any of the gorges that opened on the side of the road.

Finally, we found a gorge that seemed promising and began climbing up among the rocks looking for any trace. A small stream ran down the bottom of the gorge making a narrow strip of green in this otherwise dry rocky place. The stone shimmered in massive streaks with black and dark brown obsidian. The hidden gorge and stream seemed a good place for a monastery and the rock formations looked similar but we could find no trace whatsoever.

Just as we were thinking of moving on to see what other gorges were further down the road, I spotted a large clump of stone held together with mortar. Looking around this area more carefully I finally came across a pit with an old stone wall on one side of it. We found more traces of masonry and even the odd bit of brick but nothing else. The entire church had been destroyed with only a small portion of wall left protected under a heap of rubble. In the cliffs we spotted numerous crosses and even pale patches where mortar and plaster had been set against the cliff itself. Locals told us that there used to be more carvings in the cliffs but that many had been dynamited by treasure hunters chasing the myth of gold buried behind unworked rock.

There was something tragically poetic about this site, which was so closely tied to my first falling in love with Van, Vaspurakan, and its history being utterly destroyed.

Seeing so many sites in this state of active and intentional destruction is quite disheartening. This is my fourth trip to the area and the number of churches and monasteries that I have visited that are little more than ruins keeps growing. Sites like Metsopavank that have now been utterly erased are the worst. Even if a shift would come and these sites would be protected or maintained, there’s nothing left here to protect.

Yet, it was only in 1950’s that they were going to tear down Akdamar and then in 2005 it was restored. These cultural shifts continue, and so I still hope that someday this will include the protection and possibly even restoration of some of these monuments before they disappear forever.

It was even more recent that some of these places were closed to outsiders because of the conflict with insurgents and suspicion was everywhere. That too seems to be coming to an end. So while it is too late for many historic places that have been lost, things are changing for the better in this area, and hopefully the sites that have survived till today will still be here for years to come. After returning to Canada I was talking with another traveler who was in this area not long after me who heard from a village headman that there was hope of restoring the church in his village. While a village wanting to restore the church isn’t the same as actually carrying out the work, it certainly gives hope that this could one day be the case.