Beyond Ararat: A Journey Through Eastern Turkey

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All travellers are dependent upon the goodwill of the people of the countries they pass through. Although Eastern Turkey presented dangers in plenty, the kindnesses I received far outweighed the hostility. I therefore owe a debt of gratitude to a great number of people who cannot be named in this book.

I would like to thank Jock Murray for the introduction to kind friends of his in Istanbul, who have now become valued friends of mine also.
Travellers are lucky if they have a partner who does not resent their being away for long periods. I would particularly like to thank my husband for his patience and forbearance and for keeping everything going in my absence.

I would also like to thank all those who have enjoyed my books and written to say so. Their encouragement has helped tremendously when the going was hard.

This book is dedicated to
Xenophon and the Ten Thousand
who also had a tricky time
in the mountains of Eastern Turkey

1

An Idea Takes Shape

‘And God Remembered Noah …’. These words lodged in my mind long after I had outgrown the charm of stiff little pairs of wooden animals going neatly two by two into a fat-bellied overcrowded ark. Such wonderfully portentous words, ‘And God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters subsided…’. And the Ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month on the mountains of Ararat ...’.

The spark that fired the idea of making a long journey towards the mountain where Noah’s Ark was supposed to have come to rest, however, came about as a result of chancing upon a particular passage in a book by a nineteenth-century explorer named James Bryce, who had actually climbed Ararat:

Below and around, included in this single view, seemed to lie the whole cradle of the human race, from Mesopotamia in the south to the great wall of the Caucasus that covered the northern horizon, the boundary for so many ages of the civilized world. If it was indeed here that man first set foot on the unpeopled earth, one could imagine how the great dispersal went as the races spread themselves along the course of the great rivers down to the Black and Caspian Seas, and over the Assyrian Plain to the shores of the Southern …