Do landscapes cup the bitter essences of bygone human suffering?
Does mass atrocity change the delicate blue cast of shadows thrown, for example, by nodding steppe grasses? Or alter the flight of hawks?
And what balance of memory and forgetting can help traumatized cultures move towards healing?
These questions rose to mind as I walked roughly a thousand miles through eastern Turkey and the Caucasus, one of the most gorgeous—and war-haunted—corners of the planet. They are also questions I grapple with in the fifth installment of the “Out of Eden Walk” series of stories in the print edition of National Geographic, now available online. (Read the opening of the story below.)
Such concerns may seem abstract. But the unhealed legacy of the 1915 mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire—the predecessor state of Turkey—continues to taint the region politically and economically, hindering progress, locking ancient neighbors into narratives of denial and grievance, and impoverishing all involved. I dedicate this boot-level journey through one of the most intractable political disputes in the world to all my walking friends—Armenians, Turks, Kurds, and Azerbaijanis—who shared the heartbreak, and heartbreaking beauty, of their homelands with me.
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Excerpt of the National Geographic story, “Ghostlands”:
One million Armenians—some say more, some say less—were killed a century ago in the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey.
A stone cenotaph in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, commemorates this tragic event: the Medz Yeghern, or “great catastrophe,” of the Armenian people. Each spring—on April 24, when the pogroms started—many thousands of pilgrims climb an urban hill to this shrine. They file past an eternal flame, the symbol of undying memory, to lay a small mountain of cut flowers. Just 60 miles to the northwest, and a few hundred yards across the Turkish border, lie the ruins of an older and perhaps more fitting monument to the bitterness of the Armenian experience: Ani.
What is Ani? Ani was the medieval capital of a powerful, ethnically Armenian kingdom centered in eastern Anatolia—the sprawling Asiatic peninsula that today makes up most of Turkey—and straddling the northern branches of the Silk Road. It was a rich metropolis that hummed with 100,000 souls. Its bazaars overflowed with furs, with spices, with precious metals. A high wall of pale stone protected it. Renowned as the “city of 1,001 churches,” Ani rivaled the glory of Constantinople. It represented the flowering of Armenian culture. Today it crumbles atop a remote, sun-hammered plateau—a scattering of broken cathedrals and empty streets amid yellow grasses, a desolate and windblown ruin. I have walked to it. I am walking across the world. I am retracing, on foot, the pathways of the first ancestors who abandoned Africa to wander the world. I have seen no place on my journey more beautiful or sadder than Ani.
“They don’t even mention the Armenians,” marvels Murat Yazar, my Kurdish walking guide.
And it is true: On the Turkish government placards erected for tourists, the builders of Ani go unnamed. This is intentional. There are no Armenians left in Ani. Not even in official histories. So just as Tsitsernakaberd hill in Yerevan calls to remember, Ani is a monument to forgetting …
Read more in the current issue of National Geographic.
