Ararat: In Search of the Mythical Mountain by Frank Westerman

Author:Frank Westerman [Westerman, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Religion & Science, Travel, Essays & Travelogues, Middle East, Turkey, nature, Ecosystems & Habitats, mountains, General, science, Earth Sciences, Geography
ISBN: 9781407019512
Google: oGID9ASYCFQC
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2008-12-02T23:58:52.512236+00:00

Tablet XI

THE PORTRAIT OF Ağri Daği was in every tourist guide to Turkey. And it seemed all the photographers had stood at the same spot, for every Turkish depiction of Ararat looked identical. Set beside the standard Armenian snapshot taken from the north, it looked as though Ararat had only a front and a back. Side views were nowhere to be found; it was either heads or tails.

In late July, when no reply had yet come to my request for a visa, I took the bull by the horns: I flew to Istanbul on a dirt-cheap weekend ticket. I wanted to find out how the Turks saw Ararat – what significance or symbolism did they attach to their highest peak?

After checking into my hotel I walked down Istiklal Caddesi (Independence Street), past clothing shops and bakeries that could as easily have been in Vienna or Brussels. Amid Turkish girls in vest tops I stood before the window of Robinson Crusoe, a bookshop with a wide assortment of English titles. I was looking for a children’s book from the series Goodnight Stories from the Quran, which I found inside in the rotating rack opposite the till. These were picture books with titles like Allah’s Best Friend and The First Man. On the cover of The Tale of a Fish I recognised a spouting whale that was clearly recovering from having vomited up the prophet Jonah. I took The Ark of Nŭh – the volume I was looking for – down from the rack and began leafing through it. Here too: the animals, two by two. Elephants, giraffes, monkeys, snakes, hippos. But just as Jonah was missing from the drawing of the whale, so too was there no Noah on the deck of the Ark. He and his sons were nowhere to be seen; to judge from the pictures, the Ark had not been built by human hand.

The Ark of Nŭh reminded me of one of Vera’s pop-up books, which consisted of two hard covers that conjured up a replica of the Ark when opened. In the envelope that went with it there were foldable animal pairs and eight human figures: Noah and his three sons, plus their wives. Islamic tradition did not allow the depiction of humans. Otherwise everything seemed the same.

I bought The Ark of NÅ­h for Vera, and for myself as well, curious as I was to see whether she would miss Noah.

If you viewed Ararat as a mountain with only two faces, then Noah went with the north face, NÅ­h with the south.

But did that make any difference? The Ark of the Old Testament (and the Torah) must have been just as solid as that from the Quran. The Islamic story of the Flood was simply a bit shorter and a bit more fragmentary than the Genesis account. Allah, too, had instructed righteous Nŭh to build a ship for his family and the animals: ‘And thou shalt come into the Ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife,

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