Turkey, Armenia and the unresolved issue of Mount Arat

The mountain of Noah's Ark, a biblical symbol of ancient Armenia, remains an unresolved issue in the ongoing attempts to revive relations between Ankara and Yerevan. Turkey claims that Kurdish armies are organised on its slopes and does not want to grant any rights to others. And Pašinyan would like to remove the Armenian flags so as not to pursue ‘dreams of the past’.

Yerevan (AsiaNews) - Tension remains unresolved over Mount Ararat, the ancient  biblical symbol on the border between Turkey and Armenia which are currently trying to reopen their borders and re-establish relations, overcoming the disputes over the genocide of the early 20th century.

The Turks consider the mountain their exclusive property, having received the volcano as a ‘gift’ from the Soviets over a century ago.

Sacred Scripture relates in the book of Genesis that Noah built the Ark out of hard gopher wood, in a manner similar to contemporary ships, with three decks with bulkheads and interior rooms, tarring the body outside and inside.

The measurements of the salvage ship from the universal flood, 135 metres long, 25 metres wide and 15 metres high, are also reported, and students at the University of Leicester have calculated that about 70,000 animals could be crammed into such a cargo capacity.

According to tradition, on the ‘seventeenth day of the seventh month’, the ark landed ‘on the Ararat Mountains’, whose peaks rose above the waters, where a dove appeared.

Today, the Ararat is a large mountain complex stretching over an area of 130 kilometres between Iran and Armenia, while the main part with the two snow-capped peaks lies within the borders of Turkey, rising up to 5,165 metres above sea level, over 4,000 metres from the base of the entire system.

It is not simply a mountain, but an active volcano with two craters, which last erupted in the 19th century, when frozen waters melted inside, causing an explosion of heat. The story of Noah's Ark has always fascinated historians, who have been exploring the area especially since the last two centuries.

Until the beginning of the 19th century, the inhabitants of the area, Persians, Kurds and Armenians, believed that it was forbidden to climb the sacred peaks of the Ararat, but in 1828 the Peace of Turkmenčaj was signed between Russia and Turkey, as a result of which the German explorer Johann Parrot was able to reach the summit first.

In the course of a century, the Ark was sighted three times, by shepherds, the Turks and the English mountaineer James Brice, who claimed to have found woody remains at a height of 4,000 metres. In 1916, a Russian expedition reached the Ararat, claiming to have found the Ark in the saddle between the two peaks, following the photographs of the pilot Vladimir Roskovitsky, and the American Alexander Koor also came to the area.

The expedition's materials were lost during the revolutionary events in Russia, then in 1921 the Soviet Union conceded the entire Ararat to the Turks, and access was forbidden to all explorers, although during the Cold War American spy planes circled over its peaks, monitoring the Soviet borders.

The astronaut James Irving, a fervent Christian, devoted several years to the search for the Ark, and according to rumours found its remains in 1982, which remained inaccessible due to a ban by the authorities in Ankara, and several subsequent expeditions were unsuccessful.

Turkey justifies itself by claiming that on the slopes of Ararat, the Kurdish armies have even organised a Noah's Ark Museum and venerate the mountain as sacred, uniting both Christians and Muslims and considering the area as belonging to them, they call Noah Nukh, and consider themselves heirs to the biblical stories.

For this reason, too, the Turks do not want to grant any rights to others, not only to the Kurds, but not even to the Armenians, to whom they even dispute the symbol of the mountain, which was already extolled in the flag of the Soviet republic of Armenia, and is still used today as an image of Armenian glory, particularly in regional conflicts with Azerbaijan over the other mountainous region of Nagorno Karabakh.

Prime Minister Nikol Pašinyan himself has suggested eliminating it, in order to remain tied to the ‘real Armenia’ and not to pursue dreams tied to the country's historical and biblical past, but the mystery of the Ark continues to plough the waves of the mountainous borders of these regions in perpetual conflict, trying to find the dove of universal peace.