ARMENIA

TRAVELS AND STUDIES

VOL. II

Lake Van with Sipan from Artemid.

Frontispiece, Vol. II.

ARMENIA

Travels and Studies

BY
H. F. B. LYNCH

Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things.

Shelley, Alastor.

Who can foretell our future? Spare me the attempt. We are like a harvest reaped by bad husbandmen amidst encircling gloom and cloud.

John Katholikos
Armenian historian of the Xth century Ch. CLXXXVII.

IN TWO VOLUMES
WITH 197 ILLUSTRATIONS, REPRODUCED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS AND SKETCHES BY THE AUTHOR, NUMEROUS MAPS AND PLANS, A BIBLIOGRAPHY
And a Map of Armenia and Adjacent Countries
VOL. II
THE TURKISH PROVINCES

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
LONDON: 39 PATERNOSTER ROW
NEW YORK AND BOMBAY
1901

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I PAGE

[Descend into Turkish Territory] 1

CHAPTER II

[To Lake Van] 11

CHAPTER III

[Across Lake Van] 25

CHAPTER IV

[Van] 38

CHAPTER V

[From Van to Bitlis] 116

CHAPTER VI

[Bitlis] 145

CHAPTER VII

[From Bitlis to Mush—Mush] 160

CHAPTER VIII

[From Mush to Erzerum] 174

CHAPTER IX

[Erzerum] 198

CHAPTER X

[Return to the Border Ranges—Θάλαττα, θάλαττα!] 225

CHAPTER XI

[Revisit Armenia] 237

CHAPTER XII

[Across the Central Tableland to Khinis] 245

CHAPTER XIII

[From Khinis to Tutakh] 254

CHAPTER XIV

[Down the Murad to Melazkert] 264

CHAPTER XV

[From Melazkert to Akhlat] 276

CHAPTER XVI

[Akhlat] 280

CHAPTER XVII

[Our Sojourn in the Crater of Nimrud] 298

CHAPTER XVIII

[Round Nimrud by Lake Nazik] 314

CHAPTER XIX

[Ascent of Sipan] 326

CHAPTER XX

[Back to the Central Tableland] 340

CHAPTER XXI

[Our Sojourn on Bingöl] 359

CHAPTER XXII

[Home across the Border Ranges] 379

CHAPTER XXIII

[Geographical] 383

CHAPTER XXIV

[Statistical and Political] 408

APPENDIX I

[National Constitution of the Armenians in the Turkish Empire] 445

APPENDIX II

[Chemical Constitution of some Armenian Lakes] 468

[BIBLIOGRAPHY] 471

[INDEX] 497

LIST OF PLATES

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

LIST OF MAPS AND PLANS

CHAPTER I

DESCEND INTO TURKISH TERRITORY

October 24.—The track which we were following winds for some distance along the spine of the range. You cross and cross again from the one to the other watershed, overlooking now the open spaces of the southern landscape, now the narrow and encumbered cañon of the Araxes below the adjacent cliffs of the tableland. The rocky parapets and gloomy valleys appear to extend from basin to basin, at right angles to the axis of the chain. West of the crags about us, and isolated from them, rose a shapely mass with black but snow-streaked sides. Darkness was falling when we descended from this lofty position into one of the valleys of the southern slopes. In its recesses we came upon a little Kurdish settlement, which seemed to promise shelter during the night.

Kurtler—Kurds! No sooner have we crossed the frontier than we find ourselves in their midst. The mountains of Kurdistan are more than 100 miles distant; yet these parasites fasten upon the countryside. Still their presence is appropriate and is not unwelcome, so long as they are confined to alpine solitudes like those which surround the village of Chat. Tufts of grass, interspersed with an endless crop of stones, were the only pasture which we had seen for some time. Yet the shepherds were in possession of a considerable stock of hay, against the approach of a winter season which can scarcely lack rigour at an elevation of 6700 feet above the sea. Their habitations just protrude above the level of the ground; and, once within the doorway, you proceed through narrow passages into the very bowels of the earth. In the darkness you stumble upon the forms of cattle or wake a ragged child. We took up our quarters in one of the largest of the subterranean chambers, lit our candles, and spread our carpet on the bare soil. We were surprised to discover that the roof of the apartment was artificial—layers of mud and straw, held together by laths of wood, and supported by huge beams. The walls, too, were built up of rough stones, plastered together; it was evident that the room was only three-parts buried, and that it communicated directly with the outer air. In fact we could see an aperture, the rude counterpart of a window, above the opening to the winding passage through which we had come. On the side opposite this only entrance a square hole in the face of the wall nourished a smouldering fire. The smoke wreathed upwards to a vent in the roof, or was sucked inwards towards the tunnelled approach.

When morning broke we were glad to issue from the fetid atmosphere of this human burrow into the pure mountain air. A few gaunt figures were standing upon the higher stages of the eminence which had provided a suitable site for these underground operations, and which rose like a large ant-hill from the waste of stone. Women squatted before the doors of the straggling tenements, weaving the bright rugs for which their race is famed. We proceeded down the glen, along the banks of a little stream. It finds an easy exit from the heart of the mountains, threading the trough of one of the meridional valleys. After riding for an hour and a half, we opened out the southern landscape from some high ground above the village of Amat ([Fig. 108]).

Ala Dagh Murad (invisible) Passage of Murad Kilich Gedik

Fig. 108. Plain of Alashkert from the Slopes of Aghri Dagh.

The great plain of Alashkert was outspread before us, bounded on the further side by the snow-capped mountains of the Ala Dagh, which stretched across the horizon from the east. Just before us, this lofty range was seen to recede into the misty background, the outlines bending away towards south-west. But the barrier was resumed at no considerable interval by a chain of hills, less distant, although of humbler proportions, called Kilich Gedik, or the sharp sword. We could just descry the site of Karakilisa, backed by the recess of the Ala Dagh. We knew that the Murad must be flowing through that nebulous passage in the opposite bulwark of the plain. The surface of the ground below us was level as water; the expanse was greatest in the west. In that direction the spurs of the range upon which we stood plunged by a succession of promontories into the floor of the plain. We were reminded of the valley of the Araxes in the neighbourhood of Erivan. Both depressions have the appearance of inland seas at the foot of the mountains, the one on the northern, the other on the southern side. But that of Alashkert is much more elevated (5500 feet), and less sheltered; you miss the presence of those extensive stretches of orchard and verdure which soften the landscape through which the Araxes flows. The eye wanders out over dim, ochreous tracts, broken by patches of fallow, and seamed by white rivulets. Just below the Armenian settlement we reached the margin of the level ground, and cantered along, almost on a compass course. We saw several insignificant villages; but the district was wild, the soil for the most part unreclaimed. Flocks of duck and geese took wing at our approach; cranes, with their long necks, sailed across the sky. In the course of an hour and a half we reached the street of Karakilisa, a distance from Amat, measured direct, of 9 miles.

A motley crowd collected round us as we enquired for the government quarters; a hundred curious faces were upturned towards us, and our ears were greeted with the cry of Ferengi! Ferengi! passed like a shuttlecock from mouth to mouth. The little town was full of stir; new shops and houses were in course of erection; it was evident that trade and traffic were on the increase. We had almost crossed it from end to end, when we were ushered into a modest building, of which the hall or outer chamber was thronged with people, for the most part peasants; while an old servitor or usher, with white beard and a flowing robe, was marshalling the rows of slippers by the threshold of an inner door. At our approach he drew aside the quilted curtain which screened this sanctuary, and turned the handle and bade us pass within. The low divan, which on three sides followed the walls of the apartment, was already occupied by a full complement of seated figures; they appeared to be engaged in deliberation when we broke in upon their séance. A little man with vivacious eyes was directing the conversation; he sat on the only chair behind a table covered with faded baize. Although we could scarcely doubt that our arrival had been announced beforehand, we seemed to take these notables by surprise. The little man rose from his chair; the assembly huddled together in order to give us place on the divan. Compliments were exchanged; coffee and cigarettes were provided; the discussion was adjourned by tacit consent. One by one, after satisfying without displaying their curiosity, the councillors stole from the room.

Fig. 109. Group of Kurd Hamidiyeh Cavalry.

Meanwhile the figure at the table—it was the Kaimakam, or district governor—had examined our numerous and weighty credentials, and had directed a billet to be provided and prepared. Our effects, which arrived later, were not subjected to examination; no excisemen or policemen dogged our steps. Such officials are almost unknown in this happy country! so we reflected with a sense of immense relief. The way they worry the people in the neighbouring empire passes the capacity of the uninitiated to realise. The Greek poet was certainly wrong when he gave expression to the sentiment that anarchy is the greatest of human ills. Here we were, enlightened observers, exchanging order for disorder with rapturous delight! We were free to wander as we willed, to enjoy a British liberty without so much as the restraint of roads and walls. Coming from Russia, the contrast was indeed startling; independence is far preferable to feeling reasonably certain that you will not be knocked on the head by a Kurd.

The Kaimakam escorted us to the adjacent barracks, in which a whitewashed room had been made ready to receive us. It belonged to the quarters of the superior officer—with the rank of Miralai—a Turk of great stature and broad shoulders, to whom we were introduced. He wore a dark blue military tunic of European pattern and material; but he had forgotten to fasten the lower buttons of this imposing garment, as well as the upper ones of the trousers beneath. His mouth and ears and nostrils were of unusual proportions; the expression of the face was kind, and denoted a childlike, buoyant nature—de bonne bête humaine, as one might say. In him we found an agreeable and a sensible companion. He bustled about the place, was accustomed to shave each Friday; he settled every difficulty with eh, wallah! accompanied by a hearty laugh. From time to time the troops were visited by the Liva, or commandant, an aged figure with a beard of snow. He had been at Plevna, and had made the campaign of Bulgaria; but nothing remained of him now but a worn-out body, made doubly infirm by an inveterate habit of getting drunk.

The peculiar care and constant plague of these high officials were the newly-enrolled regiments which, under the name of Hamidiyeh, flatter the vanity but sap the throne of the reigning Sultan. Am I guilty of indiscretion when I say that the prevailing opinion of them in official circles is one of contempt, not unmixed with alarm? Your high-placed Turk will quote at their expense his favourite proverb, the fish begins to stink from the head. The young men are the sons of their fathers, who are Kurds and brigands; the example of the fathers is transmitted to the sons. Something might be done, if the process were arrested—if the recruits were removed from their homes. When I objected that the Tsar’s Cossacks presented in some respects a hopeful analogy, I would be met by the reply that the Russian autocrat employed strong measures, the like of which the Turkish Government was too mild to enforce.

Fig. 110. Group of Karapapakh Hamidiyeh Cavalry.

Perhaps my reader is already aware that the Hamidiyeh are irregular cavalry, who owe their origin to the endeavour of the Sultan Abdul Hamid to emulate the example which gave to Russia her Cossack troops. They are recruited for the most part among the Kurdish tribes; the name of yeomanry expresses the nature of their military service, but cannot be applied to the class to which they belong. The force is still undergoing the initial process of organisation. At the time of our journey it afforded the principal topic of conversation. Yuzbashis, or sergeants, of the regular army were being poured into the country, and distributed among the villages, to instil into the shepherds the rudiments of drill. Depots of arms were being established in convenient centres; and it was the intention of the authorities to keep the weapons under lock and key, except when they should be required for the annual trainings in spring. Hundreds and thousands of suits of uniform were arriving in the principal towns, loaded on bullock carts. Each regiment had been allowed to exercise its own fancy upon the choice of a distinctive garb. The result was an incongruous mixture of the braids and gold lace of Europe with the Georgian finery of a serried row of silvered cartridge cases, banded across the breast of a skirted coat. How proud they seemed, and how insensible of their ridiculous appearance in our eyes—the long-beaked Kurds, the swarthy Karapapakhs, masquerading down the street of Karakilisa in these strange creations of the tailors of Pera or Stambul! They did not require pressing to consent to be photographed—a group of Kurds ([Fig. 109]), a group of Karapapakhs ([Fig. 110]). Some of the principal officers of either regiment are represented in my illustrations; and I would beg my reader to observe the seated Kurd in the Georgian dress—it is Eyub Pasha with his son and nephew. Behind him stands his principal henchman, who, although a Kurd, has seen service with regular troops.

In the caza, or administrative subdivision, of Karakilisa three regiments of Hamidiyeh have been enrolled. Two are recruited from Kurds of the Zilanli tribe; the third from Karapapakhs. This people—who take their name from their caps of black lambskin—are found on either side of the Russo-Turkish frontier, and are no doubt related to the Tartars of Azerbaijan. The Kaimakam informed me—but I question whether his statement, even if true, can apply to more than a small number—that the fathers of those among them who inhabit this district were followers of the famous Shamyl. According to his account they were at that time settled in Daghestan, whence they removed to their present seats. He added that their villages were 8 in number in this caza; that their regiment had a strength of 800 men; and that they had branded no less than 650 horses with the military mark. Their chief, Ali Bey, is a man of hideous features, whom we recognised as the same individual who had been seated in the place of honour, when we broke in upon the deliberations of the Kaimakam. I now learnt the purport of their lively discussion; it had been a question of fixing a price for grain. Months ago Ali Bey had made a contract with the Kaimakam to supply the cereal for Government purposes at a stated price. The time had just arrived for delivering it into the granaries; but the price had risen, almost to famine rates. In the drawer of the green baize table was securely buried the precious document, behind a lock of which alone the Kaimakam possessed the key. How great was the dismay of the wretched official to find that it had been abstracted, and to recognise that the robbery might cost him his place! His despoiler felt quite safe behind his Hamidiyeh uniform and his paper figures of 800 men-at-arms.

But the Kaimakam was not the man to go to sleep beneath an injury; he possessed both energy and brains. He and the Miralai would each evening repair to our quarters, and discuss the events of the day over coffee and pipes. On one occasion, in company with the Miralai, we had awaited to a late hour the arrival of the Kaimakam. When at last he made his appearance, his clothes were covered with dust and he was wearing his long top-boots. His eyes were bright with excitement as he narrated in vivid language the story of his day’s work. Kurds from Lake Balük had made a foray into his district, and had plundered the village of Mangasar, inhabited in equal numbers by Armenians and Mussulmans. He had proceeded in person to the scene of their depredations, and at the head of his motley followers had forced them to retire after a sanguinary fight. What was the origin of this man whose animated face and supple character contrasted strangely with the wooden figures of officers and notables who attended his divan? He told me he was an Albanian; he was, of course, a Mohammedan; but his whole appearance stamped him a Greek. Compared with Kurds like Eyub Pasha, with their resemblance to big birds, he stood on the opposite pole of human development. Although in point of years the youngest of the group, he led them all by the nose. A situation had scarcely been stated when he had already discovered the solution; he shared the feelings as well as the thoughts of the individual to whom he was lending his ear. I have no doubt that he was far the superior of Ali Bey in the successful practice of every kind of deceit. He professed himself my friend; I am sure he took a pleasure in abusing the confidence which I was obliged to affect. We had almost exhausted our stock of money when we arrived in Karakilisa; between us and the town of Van, where we might hope to replenish it, lay the wildest districts of Asiatic Turkey. Semi-civilised communications are entirely wanting in those regions; it was even impossible to hire a caravan. It was necessary to purchase horses; three days were consumed in finding the animals; having selected four, at an average price of £6 apiece, we were without funds to defray our expenses in the town. The Kaimakam might no doubt have advanced the few pounds in perfect safety; but he had cast longing eyes upon my gun. Alleging that he had already spent the last instalment of his allowance, he insisted that the usurers, who would supply him with the money, required that I should leave the weapon in his charge. It was arranged that, the moment the debt had been recovered, he would despatch the valuable pledge to Erzerum. No sooner had we reached Van than I contrived to send him the amount by way of Bayazid. Weeks later, upon my arrival in the capital of his provincial government, the gun had not yet come to hand. The Vali, or Governor-General, was recently dead; no successor had been appointed; the fact that I was an Englishman was scarcely worth recalling to the petty authorities, daily witnesses of the feebleness of the British Government, and full of contempt for the British Power. When my property was at last restored to me through the good offices of Mr. Graves, the whole winter and part of the spring had gone by. The Kaimakam had wreaked his revenge; the weapon came in broken pieces, and the barrels bore the marks of heavy blows.

Fig. 111. Caravan on the Black Sea—Tabriz Trade Route.

I was unable to ascertain with any accuracy the number of the inhabitants, whether of the district or of the town. The Kaimakam, although extremely communicative on other subjects, professed to have been forbidden to make them known. According to the most recent official statistics, the caza contains no less than 58 villages, and possesses a population of 5377 Mohammedans and 1902 Armenians. For the town in particular I have not had access to any information; but I should judge that the residents might be put down at 1500 to 2000, of whom the Armenians would be nearly two-thirds. With the exception of the shops, the houses are in general little better than the usual village tenements, half buried beneath the ground. But Karakilisa is increasing in importance day by day, being situated on the great avenue of communication between Persia and the Black Sea. Strings of camels, with their finery of coloured tassels, were continually passing at a stone’s throw from our door ([Fig. 111]). They were bearing the multitudinous wares of Europe for distribution among the Eastern bazars. They proceed by way of Trebizond, Erzerum, and Bayazid to the city of Tabriz. The place has also the advantage of being both a military and an administrative centre; there is always something going on. The fashionable amusement of the day were the Hamidiyeh. A luxurious coffee-house had just been built for their delectation; their name was on every tongue.

It was whispered in fear and terror by the poor Armenians. I visited their bishop, and found him in a state of blank despair. He was afraid to receive me, and sent me excuses—which, however, I refused to accept. After some parley with intermediaries he made his appearance—a stout figure, a thick-lipped, common face. He refused to listen to the simple questions which I addressed to him, and burst out into abuse. Europe, and especially England, had played the part of swindlers towards his miserable race. Their hopes had been incited by delusive professions, which had only served to alarm the Sultan and let loose the Kurds. Nor could they look to Russia, the arch-offender, fanning the agitation for ends of her own. The poor man continued in this strain until he was nearly beside himself; I was obliged to leave him to his rage. His diocese embraces the districts between Zeidikan and Bayazid, and extends southwards to the borders of the vilayet, or Government, of Van. His church at Karakilisa is little better than four stone walls. An ignorant priest imparts instruction in a wretched little building which can scarcely be dignified by the name of school.

Fig. 112. The Kuseh Dagh from the Plain of Alashkert.

One afternoon we made an excursion to the point where the Murad changes direction, and flows through the gap towards the south. Between the barracks in which we were lodged, on the extreme outskirts of Karakilisa, and the river, flowing placidly over the plain, there extends a considerable tract of marshy ground and low covert, the home of plover and innumerable water-birds. We crossed a stream which, coming from Aghri Dagh, passes just beneath the barracks to join the Murad a little further west (Kör Su), and made across the marsh in the direction of a little Armenian village which stands on the left bank of the principal body of water, almost due south of the town. Just below this settlement, called Küp Keran, we forded the Murad, which was winding at the foot of a gentle eminence of the southern border through a pebbly and many-channelled bed. Either shore was quite a museum of living wildfowl; in especial we admired a beautiful species of golden duck of which the wings were flaked with white bands. Avoiding the swamp on the opposite margin, we followed this bank for some distance: and a little later crossed back to the northern side. About a mile and a half below Küp Keran the river describes a beautiful curve, and enters the spacious passage of the hills. It is pushed southwards by rising ground at the base of the Kilich Gedik barrier; but the higher outlines of that range, as well as those of the snowy Ala Dagh in the east, are several miles removed from its shores. It flows towards grassy hills, among which you lose the silver thread which the eye has followed as far as a village, named Dombat. The breadth of the Murad at the bend, where its errant waters had issued from the marsh, did not appear to us to exceed thirty yards. The intense stillness of the scene was in harmony with the quiet sunset which shed radiance over mountain, river, and plain. From the lofty bulwark of the northern chain, beyond the lake-like surface of the steppe, rose the form of a single summit, overtowering its neighbours—the shapely dome of the Kuseh Dagh ([Fig. 112]). The fantastic profile of the system was drawn across the horizon in hues of opal to the far east. In that direction we could clearly see the magnificent bastions of Ararat, mounting the sky behind these heights. The snowfields were flushed with a delicate madder; we noticed that from this side they appear to gather to a single peak, the eminence upon which we had stood. We remarked the convex modelling of the lower slopes of the system along the opposite margin of the plain. A shorter way was shown us for the return to Karakilisa ([Fig. 113]), which leaves the river and crosses the head of the marsh.

Fig. 113. Karakilisa from South-West.

CHAPTER II

TO LAKE VAN

The principal artery of traffic in Turkish Armenia crosses the land from west to east. It follows the direction of a series of depressions: the plains of Erzerum, of Pasin and of Alashkert. It consists of a carriageable track, or rough road of unequal quality. The bulk of the transit trade between Europe and northern Persia is conveyed on the backs of camels along this route. The wall of protective duties which has been reared by the Russian Government compels this commerce to flow through a Turkish port and to adhere to Turkish soil. It has been stimulated by the efforts of a series of British consuls, resident at Erzerum. Robberies have been punished with great severity; and, at the present day, the traffic is seldom, if ever, interrupted, although it passes through the Kurd-inhabited districts about Bayazid, and the lawless border of the Persian and Turkish empires.

South of this beaten avenue are situated regions which, in spite of the researches of individual travellers, are still but imperfectly known. The lake of Van remains a centre of agriculture and primitive industry; yet it lies beyond a zone of feebly governed country which, year by year, is becoming more difficult to cross. The pest of Kurds has settled firmly upon these richly favoured territories, destroying agriculture and banishing trade. What caravans there are travel in large bodies, and every man is armed to the teeth. Between Erzerum and the town of Van they choose between two routes according to the season of the year. In summer they cross the mountains behind the northern capital, and proceed by the plain of Khinis, crossing the Murad at Melazkert. During winter they make the round by way of Pasin and Alashkert, deviating on the confines of the latter district, and passing the river at Tutakh. The approach through the town of Mush is used only once a year, when the pilgrims journey from Erzerum to the cloister of Surb Karapet. On that occasion the caravan, according to my informants, continues its course as far as Van. By the two first routes it is usual to follow the eastern shore of the lake, which is reached near the little town of Akantz.[1]

We set out from Karakilisa on October the 29th, mounted on our newly-purchased horses, and accompanied by a zaptieh or gendarme. Our objective was this same Akantz; the principal intermediate stations were Tutakh and Patnotz. I had thought it possible to accomplish the ride in the course of two days; our friends laughed at the idea. I decided therefore to start in the afternoon, with the hope of arriving on the evening of the third day. At a quarter-past three o’clock we were making our way along the marsh to the point where the Murad leaves the plain. After reaching the bend, we proceeded down the passage which receives the river, towards Dombat and the grassy hills which I have already mentioned. On our left hand, at an interval of about 500 yards from the left bank, rose the first gentle slopes of the Ala Dagh system; this high land was answered on the right bank, at about a similar distance, by the outworks of the Kilich Gedik. The Murad pursues its course between these two blocks of mountain, and, a little lower down, forces its way through the narrowing gap. Near Dombat both banks are of considerable elevation, and the ridges appear to cross the direction of the stream. Before arriving opposite the village we crossed the Sharian Su, a tributary which collects the drainage of the western portion of the plain, and which appeared to us to have a volume scarcely less than that of the principal branch.

After passing Dombat—which was said to be inhabited by Kizilbashes—we sank to a valley in which is situated the Kurdish village of Zado, and ascended the ridge on its opposite side. From the summit we commanded a prospect towards Karakilisa, and were impressed by the serpentine course of the river, flowing towards us in a pebbly bed which it threaded by several channels. We were placed at a height of some 250 feet above its waters. On a hillside further south we could now discern our evening station, the little village of Avdi. It was signalised by a green patch, due to vegetable gardens; its surroundings were bleak and bare. Arriving at half-past five, we selected the best of the fifteen tenements as quarters for the night. We were surprised to find a sergeant of the regular army established in this miserable place. He had come to recruit Kurds for the Hamidiyeh, and bitterly cursed his fate.

Next morning we were anxious to reach Tutakh before mid-day in order to pass the night at Patnotz. At a quarter to eight we were in the saddle; it had rained during the night, and heavy clouds hung over the hills. As we rose up the slope, we caught glimpses of the mountains which bound the plain of Alashkert upon the north. The plain itself had long been lost; we were at some distance from the river; we looked across high hills, which engulfed the invisible waters, to the summits of the Ala Dagh. The doubtful track commenced to wind between grassy slopes, strewn with boulders—a belt of country well adapted to guerilla warfare, and reputed the favourite haunt of Kurdish robbers. Horsemen would no doubt be completely at their mercy in the blind recesses of these irregular valleys. At a quarter to nine we approached the Murad, still high above it; the hills rose from either bank. In another half hour we obtained our first view of the cone of Sipan, a gleaming object in the south. Some two miles further the landscape opened, and assumed the character of a vast steppe of broken and uneven ground. Distant ranges encircled the expanse with dim outlines; Sipan alone was clearly defined against the sky. From the Kurdish village of Köshk we obtained a fine view over this country, with its waving surface featured by shadows from the clouds. We had got behind the barrier of the Kilich Gedik; and the whole segment of the circle from north-west to south-west was filled by comparatively level land. We observed a prominent shape in the mountains of the furthest distance, which we identified with the Khamur Dagh. Beyond the Mussulman village of Okhan, the river, which had left us, took a sharp bend, and joined our course. We made our way along it at a rapid trot and reached Tutakh a little after eleven o’clock.

The little township does not possess more than about a hundred houses; yet it is the seat of a Kaimakam whose administrative area includes Patnotz, and meets the boundary of the vilayet of Van. It stands on rising ground, at some little distance from the bank of the river, facing the lofty hills which rise on the opposite shore, and push the Murad towards the west. It is about equidistant from Karakilisa and from Patnotz, a ride of some twenty-three miles from the first, and of twenty-eight miles from the second. The inhabitants are for the greater part Karapapakhs, imported into the district after the last Russo-Turkish war. They can now boast of some 400 houses in the caza, or a population of about 3000 souls. Agriculturists by profession, and by temperament robbers, they appear to be in an extremely prosperous state. Their aged chief conversed with me, and imparted several particulars which I had not known before. He told me that they had emigrated from the province of Chaldir, being dissatisfied with the Russian Government, who had not treated them well in the matter of lands. The Sultan had received them back, settled them in these fertile regions, and allotted to them as much ground as they required. I questioned him with some care about the original seats of his tribe; he was emphatic that they had always lived in Chaldir.[2] Taylor tells us that they became possessed of the villages and lands in that province, and in the neighbouring province of Kars, which had been abandoned by the Armenians who followed the army of Marshal Paskevich upon his evacuation of Turkish territory in 1829. According to the chief, their original possessions in Transcaucasia extended from Daghestan to Chaldir. The tribe supplies a regiment of Hamidiyeh for this caza; the head men were resplendent in their new uniforms, of which they seemed very proud. Both here and at Karakilisa I was impressed by the diversity of type which is found among them. Mingled with physiognomies of purely Tartar or Persian character were faces which, with their lighter hair and fairer complexion, might have belonged to a group of Circassians. With the exception of the shops, single-storeyed stone buildings, the houses in Tutakh are the usual loose agglomerations of earth and rough stone. The great majority of the population in the caza are Kurds; a scattering of Armenians are entirely at the mercy of their rapacious Mussulman neighbours.

Our baggage animals, which had started from Avdi with us, arrived at one o’clock. They were in charge of a second zaptieh, to whom I had given instructions to find his way to Akantz as best he could. A little before two we were again in the saddle, making for the adjacent ford across the Murad. The river is fairly broad just opposite the town, having a width at this season of about 100 yards. It had spread beyond its average dimensions in this region, and the water did not reach higher than the horses’ knees. We admired the clear, blue current, sweeping past us—a stream neither sluggish nor impetuous, as befits the beginning of a great river. From the opposite bank we proceeded at right angles to its direction, up the side of the line of high hills. At eighteen minutes after two we had wound our way to the summit; we stood on the surface of rolling downs. A little later, when I thought we had reached the highest point of these uplands, I took the reading of my aneroid. We had reached a level of 5800 feet, or of 560 feet above Tutakh. The exhilarating air, the easy ground, the magnificent prospects rendered our ride most enjoyable. Behind us was the outline of the Kilich Gedik, running from east to west. We could just see the crest of the Kuseh Dagh beyond it, the summit of the dome. Towards the south rose the irregular mass of the Khamur, and the beautiful landmark of Sipan. That graceful mountain stood disclosed to three-quarters of its height. Such are the rewards which Armenia bestows upon the traveller, and which Man is powerless to destroy.

That insignificant creature lives in squalor amid scenes of desolation which are due to himself alone. The soil is rich and loamy; but it is little cultivated, and lies idle beneath a covering of rough grass. The climate is more propitious than that of the corresponding highlands in the more northerly, or Russian portion of the land. The rainfall is probably less; but this disadvantage may be balanced by the earlier maturing of the crops. We rode for an hour without seeing a village, with the heights of the Ala Dagh following our course away on the left. The first settlement which we passed was Milan, inhabited by Kurds, which we were careful to avoid. Those of their number whom we met were armed with numerous knives, and had rifles slung across their shoulders. A little further I called a halt on the requisition of the zaptieh; he was very anxious that the plan of the journey should be changed. It was half-past three o’clock; we could not reach Patnotz before nightfall; if I persisted it was almost certain we should be attacked. In crossing from the territory of the Sipkanli tribe to that of the Haideranli, we should be obliged to run the gauntlet of the armed parties which scoured the frontier between these two hostile tribes. He pointed to a dot on the grassy plain about us which he identified with the village of Köshk. He said that it was the residence of the chief of the Sipkanli, who from his official relations with the Turkish Government would be obliged to shelter us. His counsel was no doubt sound if one could only trust his estimate of our distance from Patnotz. For some time we had been passing between two opposite hill ranges, one on our left front, the other on our right. On our point of course, in the middle distance, these outlines approached one another, leaving between them a wide gap. The ridge on the left, a spur of Ala Dagh, was said to bear the name of Gelarash Dagh; that on the right was called Kartevin Dagh. It would be no short ride to the passage between the two; and this gave access, according to the zaptieh, to the plain in which, upon its further confines, was situated Patnotz. Satisfied by his explanations, I deferred to his judgment, and directed our steps a few points off our true course, towards the village which he had indicated. A shower of soft rain was falling as we entered Köshk at four o’clock.

Fig. 114. Yusuf Bey of Köshk.

I have already introduced my reader to a Kurdish village; the description of one may be applied to all. But Köshk is distinguished by a single house in the proper sense, a two-storeyed building of stone. It is the abode of Yusuf Bey, chieftain of the Sipkanli, whose portrait I was allowed to take ([Fig. 114]). His followers gathered round us, a throng of Kurdish warriors, prepared at any moment for a fight. Besides knives, each man carried a rifle; a band of cartridges was fastened across the breast. I examined several weapons; all bore the Russian marks and letters. They told me that they were procured from the Russian soldiers, probably Cossacks, in the frontier districts of Kagyzman and Erivan. When a little later I questioned the chief about this traffic, he expressed surprise that the soldiers should be able to obtain firearms for the purpose of selling them. After some palaver we were ushered into his presence; he happened to be engaged in prayer. A broad divan followed the bare walls of a spacious apartment, and rugs were spread upon the divan. Several tall, lank figures stood on these bright carpets, with stockings on their feet. They faced the window and the light; at the head of one of the two lines was placed an individual whom we easily recognised as the mollah from his humbler stature, stouter person and ampler robes. Their backs were turned towards us as we entered; we advanced a little, but not a muscle of the faces moved. Then the silence was broken by a deep, gurgling sound, which developed into the expression of a series of labials, half a chant, half a spoken prayer. At certain passages the figures bowed to the ground, or dropped to a seated posture, and were still. To us it seemed an ideal rendering of the solemn relation between man and the universe.

Fig. 115. Kurd of Köshk in Gala Dress.

The litany completed, our hosts at once turned towards us, with a sudden change of countenance which took us by surprise. Yusuf Bey extended to us his massive but almost fleshless hand; his cavernous cheeks were lit by a smile. He and his brother are men of more than ordinary proportions, and both are true types of the Kurd. He told me that they were in daily expectation of attack from Hoseyn Pasha of Patnotz. This miscreant, although under the ban of justice, had been given the title of Pasha by the Turkish Government, partly in order to recruit their new irregulars among his tribe, and partly as a recompense for his bribes. He had quite recently burnt some villages of the Sipkanli, and had reduced the clan to poverty. Judging from the finery which was displayed by the inhabitants of Köshk ([Fig. 115]), I could only accept the latter part of this statement in a very relative sense. The seats of the Sipkanli extend to the territory of Bayazid; they supply three regiments to the Hamidiyeh. After partaking of supper, we composed ourselves to sleep in the same apartment into which we had been introduced. The night was disturbed by the weird cries which were exchanged at frequent intervals between the patrols in the outskirts and the guard in the village.

Among the forty tenements which constituted this particular settlement we were astonished to find that six were inhabited by Armenians. Imagine the condition of these poor people, in the very jaws of their enemy, who just allows them to exist and no more! The Turkish authorities, a long way distant, would be quite powerless to assist them, even if they had the desire. A poor stableman told us beneath his breath that their lot was desperate, and that some of his countrymen had contrived to escape to Russia.

The rawness of the climate in the plain of Alashkert had disappeared when we reached Köshk.[3] The weather became mild, and the sun shone freely from a sky almost devoid of cloud. When next morning we were again in the saddle at twenty minutes after seven, the mown pastures looked green and fresh after the rain of the preceding evening, and it was a delight to breathe the crisp air. We could still see the distant dome of the Kuseh Dagh; the ridge on our left hid the lower slopes of Sipan. We rode towards the still remote promontory of that grassy ridge, and the gap between the outlines in the hills. At a little after eight we had reached the passage; it appeared to have a width of about a mile. It leads from the undulating plains about Köshk to the level plain of Patnotz. The ground falls away by a succession of inequalities to a spacious area of flat alluvial land. Beyond that lake-like surface rises the fabric of a single mountain, the broad base, the vaulted slopes, the massive crown. Sipan was at last exposed from foot to summit, recalling by many a characteristic the majestic Ararat.[4] There was the same length of sweep, the same symmetry of structure, the same rounded central form. And if we missed the gardens and the immense expanse of the campagna of Erivan, this open plain seemed to repeat the surroundings of Ararat on a scale exactly suited to Sipan.

Near the opening we passed the tiny village of Burnu Bulakh, inhabited by Kurds. We doubled the long promontory; it was evident it had been pushing us away from our true course. Once rounded, we pursued a south-easterly direction, keeping to the base of the hills to which it belongs. In these solitudes a human figure is an unfamiliar object; great was our surprise to perceive several men running towards us from a recess in the range. Stranger still was the discovery that they did not bear arms; we collected together, and awaited their approach. When they had reached speaking distance, they unfolded their story, and begged for protection at our hands. They were Turks from the province of Kars who had deserted their lands and homes, taking with them all their portable wealth. They said that the Russian Government treated them very badly, favouring the Molokans, and annoying the members of their religion and race. They had resolved to seek new seats beneath the sceptre of the Sultan, and had crossed the frontier in pursuit of this end. Their journey had until yesterday been uneventful; but last evening, as they were approaching the territory of the Haideranli, they had been savagely attacked. The Kurds had despoiled them of all their possessions, and had been induced with difficulty to leave them the clothes in which they stood. Poor fellows! honest, sturdy peasants, returning to their old allegiance and to the stronghold of Islam, only to find the one insulted by robbers and the other a gaping ruin. All we could do was to take them to the prince of the bandits, in the hope that he would be more prudent than his wild bands. Inasmuch as they were without horses it was impossible that they should accompany us to the town of Akantz.

Fig. 116. Sipan from the Plain of Patnotz.

Not less eloquent an illustration of the decay of the Ottoman Empire was the landscape through which we passed. Mile after mile, the eye ranged across the floor of the alluvial plain to the lower slopes of the great volcano which, with the hills circling towards them, compose a basin-like area of vast extent. The fertile soil lies idle, as though the waters had lately receded; in the distance some goats and cattle browsed the burnt and scanty grass. Nature alone has made the most of exceptional opportunities; and Sipan, with this plain on one flank and the lake of Van upon the other, is worthy to rank among the most beautiful objects in the natural world ([Fig. 116]). There, can be little difference between the level of the expanse on either side; plain and sea have an elevation of about 5500 feet. The summit of the slowly-rising fabric which divides them attains an altitude of 13,700 feet. The history of the mountain may be studied to advantage from this, the northern side. There can be little doubt that it possessed a central crater, of which the walls have fallen in upon the north. The southern rim still stands, presenting an almost horizontal outline of sharp rock, harbouring drifts of snow.[5] The processes of denudation have been busy with the slopes of this ancient cone, and have broken the surface into knife-like ridges. We stood for half-an-hour in full face of the pile. After crossing two little rivulets which wandered out from the hills behind us, we arrived at half-past ten in Patnotz.

We found it nothing better than a wretched Kurdish village, with some one hundred huts and numerous stacks of dried manure. It is situated at the foot of the hill range which we had been skirting, and which had gradually been circling round towards Sipan. It overlooks the plain and the opposite volcano. About thirty of the tenements are occupied by Armenian families, and there is a row of shops which rise proudly from the ground. On the further outskirts a large stone building was in process of being erected; the Armenian masons were busy with the work. It was to serve as a school and for other purposes, and was due to the policy in favour with the Sultan, of educating the Kurds. I understood that the funds were provided by the Turkish Government. We rode up to a group of people assembled before this palace, and enquired for the chief. Among them was an individual of heavy build and forbidding features, attired in a long coat of military pattern, and displaying the brass ensign of the Hamidiyeh on the sheepskin cap which he wore. It was Hoseyn Pasha, lord of the Haideranli, and ruler of the territory of Patnotz. The irregular mouth and nose, and the dull, sparkless eyes correspond with the reputation which he bears. But discontent as well as malice was written upon his countenance; and the situation explained the humour of the man. His followers would no doubt argue that he was assisting at his own destruction; this school was the visible evidence of the Ottoman yoke. I have no doubt that he would console them with the assurance of its futility; and I am certain that he would be right. Meanwhile he had appropriated the completed apartments as a residence for himself. I waited for him to invite us to be his guests in his new quarters; but he beckoned to an attendant to find us a room in one of the huts. So I dismounted, and myself led the way into the schoolhouse, obliging him either to affront or follow me. He chose the latter course. Continuing the same tactics, I bade him take a seat by my side on his own divan. In his company was a fine specimen of the Kurdish nation, whose mien contrasted with that of his chief; and a genial Turk who had travelled, and was at once a man of the world and a parasite of the lowest type. This gentleman was delighted to have an opportunity of conversing about the affairs of the outside world; it was to him that I addressed the conversation until the sullen temper of the chief relaxed. When I was able to put some questions in return for those which I had answered, the tongue of Hoseyn Pasha had commenced to flow. He told me he was the titular chief of the Hasananli Kurds, a tribe of which the Haideranli, Adamanli, and Sipkanli were offshoots or species. This widely-spread genus extended to the Persian frontier. I asked him why his people did not cultivate the plain, and augment their wealth and numbers. He replied that in the absence of communications and markets they were not encouraged to take such a course. We lunched off some wretched cheese, inlaid with herbs in Kurdish fashion; and, after commending our companions to his sense of responsibility, took leave at a quarter-past eleven o’clock.

I am sorry that I am not able to present a better description of the features of the country between Patnotz and the lake of Van. I hope that some future traveller will be able to ascend the sides of the hills along the trough of which we rode for many miles. I should advise him to devote at least three days to the journey between Karakilisa and Akantz. The first night would be spent at Tutakh, the second at Patnotz. Hoseyn Pasha was astonished to hear of our intention to push on to our destination by a single stage. But the zaptieh knew of no village in which we might safely sojourn, before reaching the territory of Akantz. The authority of the Turkish Government is little better than a name among the valleys of the Ala Dagh. I was assured that I had formed a wrong conception of the distance, which, measured direct on the map of Kiepert, amounts to no more than twenty-one miles. Arrived at Akantz, I computed that we had covered, from station to station, no less than thirty-six miles. An incident which occurred just after our departure contributed to hasten our steps. A Kurd, mounted on a swift Arab, cantered ahead of us and was soon lost to sight. The zaptieh was certain it was an emissary of the chief, whose treachery he feared. The word would be given to the bands in the district that helpless travellers were passing their way. I think it more probable that he was bearer of orders not to attack us on any account.

From Patnotz we proceeded in an easterly direction towards the ridge which bounds the plain upon the east. It connects with the hills which we had so long been skirting, and which hollow inwards beyond the village. A few minutes before twelve we were on the summit of the low pass, and were leaving behind us the landscape of the plain. We entered a broad valley, which, with a grassy hill range on either side, stretched away towards south-east. The range on our right concealed from view the lower slopes of Sipan, and was distant about a mile. Its elevation above the valley was at first not greater than from 100 to 500 feet; but, as we proceeded, it rose to a more considerable altitude, and, at the same time, came closer up to the track. On our left hand the barrier was more remote and loftier, some five miles off, and some 1000 feet above our heads. The heights were streaked with snow; according to our informants, they belong to the system of the Ala Dagh. We rode for several hours between these two ridges, the ground rising as we advanced. Here and there a little brook threaded the waste soil, flowing towards the west. At one o’clock we came up with a long line of bullock carts, travelling from Erzerum to Van. We counted no less than seventy of these primitive vehicles, crawling over the ground with creaking wheels. Several horsemen accompanied the caravan, their persons bristling with arms of every kind. The leader was a Turk of quality and some importance. He told me that the journey occupied eight days, and that the Murad was crossed at Tutakh. Each of the drivers was said to be in possession of weapons, although they did not happen to be wearing them as we passed.

Three-quarters of an hour later we crossed a nice stream which, according to the zaptieh, flows into the lake. The transparent current pursued for some distance a roughly parallel direction to the south-easterly course upon which we rode. It left us to diverge southwards towards the barrier on our right; but we could not discover at what point it pierced the hills. A few horses were grazing upon its margin, and we wondered to whom they might belong. The track continued to approach the immediate foot of those hills, and they continued to increase in height. But it became evident that the average elevation of the ground had risen, for we were on a level with the higher slopes of the opposite range. At three o’clock we reached the end of the long valley, which narrows towards its head. The hills roll away; you stand on a lofty platform which commands a distant prospect of the lake of Van.

Dismounting on the rough soil, we stood for half-an-hour in contemplation of the scene. All our horses showed signs of fatigue; that of the dragoman was quite exhausted, and his plump rider required to be lifted from the saddle. We had covered, according to estimate, some 18 miles from Patnotz and over 33 from Köshk. The instruments were uncased, and the elevation taken, which I compute in round numbers at 1000 feet above the level of the lake. Below us lay spacious tracts of undulating country—friable soil, modelled into hummock shapes. We could follow the long profile of the hills on our left hand, dying away towards the still remote shore. The waters were scarcely visible beyond the detail of the middle distance—a glimpse of blue in the lap of the expanse. They represent the gulf-like extremity of the inland sea, of which the broad face is hidden from these slopes. But the scale and tendency of the land forms prepared us for such a presence, which they were aptly designed to usher in. We stood on the edge of a great half-circle; the view ranged to some sharp summits, belonging to a ridge on the opposite side of the lake, which must have been some 40 miles away. Our zaptieh knew it under the name of Besh Parmak, or the mountain of the five fingers. The arc of the curve was composed by the heights in that direction, arresting the softness of the vaulted hills and shelving ground. We were shown a long bank which had the appearance of a mound, and was distinguished from similar shapes by its size. It lay in the distant trough of the landscape, and was said to overlook the town of Akantz.

I placed the dragoman on my own horse, and was obliged to perpetrate the cruelty of riding his jaded animal. We had the benefit of the incline; but the nature of the ground was against us, necessitating long winds. Deep gullies obstructed our course; or we were turned aside by rising land. If I have estimated correctly, we were separated from our destination by a space of fifteen miles. We took to the saddle at half-past three; we did not arrive until past seven; and we must have covered some eighteen miles. At half-past four we crossed the first running water, and we were at the first village at a little before five. Karakilisa (Black Church) is well named, for it possesses a little church of black stone, with group of gables and conical dome. It is inhabited by Armenians, and has an air of prosperity; we were refreshed by the rare sight of a group of trees. The next settlement, Hipsinek, was also Armenian; we had emerged from the wild Kurdish zone. As we neared the lower levels, the deep silence of the evening was broken by a loud, rumbling sound. It was a river, descending from the mountains, and flowing in a stony bed. They call it the Buyuk Chai or Erishat; we crossed it, and arrived, soon after, at a village which bears the last of these names. It was half-past six o’clock; the light was uncertain; we were near water and on marshy ground. A villager was hailed; he showed us the way with a lantern to the solid land beyond. We proceeded at a walking pace along the foot of a dark cliff to the houses of Akantz.

[1] The following are my estimates of the mileage distances along our route from Karakilisa to Akantz:—

Distances.
Karakilisa-Tutakh23miles
Tutakh-Köshk11
miles
,,
Köshk-Patnotz17
miles
,,
Patnotz-Akantz36
miles
,,
Total87miles.

[2] At the time of Taylor’s journey (1868) there were some 13,500 Karapapakhs in the mutesarriflik of Chaldir, which comprised the towns of Olti, Ardahan and Ardanuch. The mutesarriflik of Kars counted 12,900 of this people, and that of Bayazid 2500 (Archives of British Consulate at Erzerum). [↑]

[3] Temperature at 9 P.M. 53° F., and at 6.30 A.M. 41°. None of my readings at Karakilisa reached as high as the first of these, though some were taken in the middle of the day. [↑]

[4] The comparison was also suggested to Koch, as he approached Sipan from the side of Melazkert (Reise im pontischen Gebirge, p. 428). [↑]

[5] Upon my ascent of Sipan during my second journey it was ascertained that the highest ridge of rock, as seen in this illustration, is not actually the southern rim of the crater. It is merely the side of the flat-topped mass of lava, upon which is situated the eastern summit. The western summit is just visible in this illustration. [↑]

CHAPTER III

ACROSS LAKE VAN

The Kaimakam of Akantz was in the company of his notables when we entered his reception room. Along the walls of the bare apartment stretched the usual cushioned seat; a row of figures, serried upon it, lined two sides. It was with difficulty that place was made for us beside him; and several minutes were occupied by the exchange of salutes, each man bowing and raising the hand to the chin and forehead. Coffee and warmth revived the drooping person of the dragoman; such was his command both of the Turkish and the German languages that it cost him little effort to perform his task. While supper and a lodging were being prepared for us, I was able to discuss plans with the Kaimakam. He promised that he would endeavour to procure a trading vessel to take us to Van on the following day. He engaged to despatch our horses thither, as soon as they should recover, by way of the southern shore of the lake. Unlike his colleague of Karakilisa, he proved faithful to his word; but I regret to say that we never saw the dragoman’s horse again. That night and the following day I attended him myself; but he appears to have died a few days after we left.[1] It was arranged that on the morrow we should visit the ruins of Arjish. I enquired of our host whether he knew of the remains of a city on the table surface of the cliff above Akantz. He confirmed the information which is given by Vital Cuinet, and said that the place was known to the learned under the name of Kala-i-Zerin. The people call it Zernishan.[2]

Fig. 117. Akantz.

According to the Kaimakam there are no less than 500 houses in Akantz; but I am inclined to consider this figure excessive. A number among them are well built, with good walls and glass-paned windows; and it was a change to erect our camp beds in a clean and airy room. The population is partly Mussulman and partly Armenian. I should say that the former have the preponderance, although not in the proportion which was assigned to them by the same authority of four-fifths of the whole.[3] The Armenians possess two churches and a school, administered by a priest. Several regiments of Hamidiyeh have their headquarters in the town. They are recruited among the Haideranli and Adamanli Kurds. Their enrolment has been attended by the usual result—a general relaxation of the law. Robberies are committed under the eyes of the Kaimakam, and stealing is scarcely considered an offence. While our effects were being conveyed to the lake in a little cart, a clever thief made away with the yoke of the oxen.

The morning of the next day was devoted to preparations, and the whole afternoon was occupied by our excursion to Arjish. The site bears a few points west of a line due south from Akantz, at a distance of several miles. But the track across the plain is obstructed by channels of water which compel you to deviate. Leaving the town by the south side, we paused to admire the cluster of houses, embowered in trees, and backed by the high cliff ([Fig. 117]). A continuation of the same ridge rises behind the gardens and orchards, which are about a mile away, upon the east. Between us and the lake lay a broad zone of alluvial land, of sandy surface broken by green oases. We rode through two considerable villages, Hargin and Igmal. They are almost buried beneath the foliage of tall poplars and forest trees which are supported by a network of irrigation. The last of these two settlements can scarcely be less distant than an hour’s walk from the shore. Beyond them the ground is patched with cultivation, which in turn gives place to a desert, cut by dikes. The ruins adjoin the lake, and accentuate the loneliness of the bleak waste from which they rise ([Fig. 118] from the north, and [Fig. 119] from the south).

Little is left above ground of the once important borough of mediæval repute. The crumbling walls of a castle, a ruined chapel, a minaret are the principal monuments still erect. The method of building is that of a more cultured age. A recent fire had converted the brushwood into black patches. We looked across the silvery waters to the opposite shore of the lake, from which a range of hills rise. Behind this barrier towers a rocky ridge of serrated outline, which, commencing at a point about east of the ruins, extends westwards and groups together with the magnificent chain on the southern margin of the sea. The arm beside which we stood stretched away by a succession of promontories, to spread towards those distant and snowy peaks in the south.

Fig. 118. Ruins of Arjish from the North.

Arjish played an important part in the history of the Middle Ages; and there can be no doubt that these ruins are those of the mediæval city.[4] On the other hand it is quite possible that the name Arsissa, under which Lake Van was known to Ptolemy, may be connected with a much more ancient Arjish, which may well have stood on the high land overlooking the modern town of Akantz. I regretted at the time of my visit, and I have since had reason to deplore more keenly, our inability to protract our stay in the neighbourhood, and to examine the site of the so-called Zernak, or Zerin, or Zernishan, of which I have already spoken. Its situation seems to correspond with that of the plateau of Karatash or Ilantash, where Schulz informs us that he discovered traces of the sites of numerous buildings, and at the foot of which, on the north-east, facing the plain, he copied inscriptions in the cuneiform character, which, according to the translation of Professor Sayce, record the planting of vineyards in this region by the Vannic king Sarduris III., who lived in the eighth century before Christ (c. 735 B.C.).[5] The inscriptions are found upon a series of three tablets, hewn in the rock, some eight feet above the ground. One of the tablets is without any characters.[6] Close by is the cave where a nest of serpents or large lizards are reputed to have lodged since immemorial times, and have been seen by modern travellers.[7] The place is described as being situated about two miles east of Akantz near the road to Haidar Bey.[8] Messrs. Belck and Lehmann, who have visited Akantz since I was there, were brought some objects in bronze, of which one represented a serpent, and another contained cuneiform characters. They were found by the natives among the ruins of this Zernak.[9] It will be interesting to learn the result of the excavations which they appear to contemplate. In the village of Hargin, through which we passed, they have found a large stele, with a cuneiform inscription of Argistis II. (714-c. 690 B.C.). A second monument, containing records of the same monarch, has been discovered by them in the same district.[10] The name Arjish agrees so nearly with that of this Vannic king that one is tempted to suppose that it is derived from it. And we may be rewarded by the bringing to light of a city of Argistis, buried upon the summit of that salubrious plateau of which the cliff backs the houses of Akantz.

Fig. 119. Ruins of Arjish from the South.

The mediæval city of Arjish was sacked by the Georgians in A.H. 605, or A.D. 1208–9. The Arab historian, Ibn-Alathir, who chronicles this event, states that its outcome was the desertion of the place by the inhabitants, so that it remained in the ruinous condition to which it had been reduced.[11] But there seems to exist evidence to show that, like Ani, Arjish struggled on through the centuries during which barbarism was increasing its hold upon the land.[12] It was known to Marco Polo (thirteenth century) as one of the three greatest cities of Armenia; and at the commencement of the sixteenth century it formed one of the seven fortresses which encircled the lake of Van.[13] In the summer of 1838 it was still peopled; but in the winter of that year the waters of the lake rose, until in 1841 they had attained an increase of some 10 to 12 feet. The foundations of the houses gave way and the supply of fresh water failed.[14] Arjish was evacuated by its reduced population, and is at the present day not tenanted by a single soul. Marshes extend on either side of the ruins; that on the east appeared to me to be the more extensive.

Fig. 120. Our Boat on Lake Van.

We had been warned not to linger too long upon the site; the district is inhabited by some Kurds of ill repute. One of them had been sighted making off to apprise his friends of our presence. Yet darkness had fallen before we were clear of the intricate dikes, among which it would have been easy for an armed man or two to cut off our retreat. The villages lay before us—a mass of gloom in the dimly lighted scene. We were glad to pass within the fringe of their orchards; and a little later we were again in safety at Akantz. Meanwhile the necessary preparations had been completed, and we were informed that a vessel would be ready to receive us after we had partaken of a meal. We set out at nine o’clock; yet not a single light flickered among the houses of the silent town. The boats station at a point about south-east of the settlement, along the margin of the sandy shore. It was after ten o’clock by the time we reached the lake and our craft, from which the long stage was dropped upon the sand to let us in ([Fig. 120]). The vessel was not decked, and we could spread our carpets within the hollow of her lofty sides. Scarcely a breath of air was stirring; but the breeze was expected, and it was decided to await its approach. We composed ourselves to sleep beneath the stars.

At midnight we set sail. When I awoke at half-past seven, the sky was blue in the zenith above my eyes. Set within that field of brightness, the pale crescent of the moon marked the boundary of a sheet of cirrus cloud. The gauzy tissues deepened as they neared the horizon, and gathered into long banks of heavy vapour, suspended about the summits of the chain of inky mountains which borders the lake upon the south. In that distant and gloomy range I at once recognised the features of the mountains of Kurdistan. It was the same chain that I had followed for weeks upon the waters of the Tigris, threading the vast plains between Diarbekr and the Persian Gulf. Day by day those steep parapets, sharp peaks, and gleaming snows had accompanied the peaceful voyage of my little raft.

How well I now recalled the longing I had then experienced to explore the famous lake on their further side! What a thrill of pleasure I now felt to be floating upon its waters, expanding towards those mountains with the proportions of a sea! The reflection of the blue vault above us paled and whitened as the flood approached that long black line. Bank upon bank, the clouds were serried upon the peaks, shot by the lights from the snows. Here and there the fretted outline of a pearly bed of vapour was drawn across the background of dull opal in the region of the middle slopes; or wreathing forms, like smoke, clinging to the sides of some loftier eminence, broke the horizontal layers.

The scene behind us contrasted the softness of a southern landscape with the stern grandeur of the coast above our prow. The northern shores of the lake were bathed in light; and the hummock convexities of the Ala Dagh, streaked with snow towards the summits, rose against a sky of transparent turquoise, and sank to a surface of more solid substance, but not less pure and not less blue. From these heights, across the long sheet of azure water to dazzling snow in the heaven above our heads, the fabric of Sipan mounted slowly to the flat rim of the central crater, and, sweeping past us, declined, with equal majesty of outline, to low ground in the west. The great volcano composes one whole side of the lake, and faces full south. I observed that the snow-line was perceptibly higher than on the occasion when we had approached the mountain from the north. The western limits of the lake were vague, and, in places, invisible; the mass of Nimrud, dim and cloud-streaked, had the appearance of a long island, rising on the horizon between the sunny slopes of Sipan and the nebulous barrier of the Kurdish chain.

It is this contrast—no chance effect of light and atmosphere—between the more northerly and the more southerly coasts of the vast basin that gives to the lake of Van its own peculiar character and a beauty quite its own. On the one hand, length of sweep in the form, and brilliancy of tone in the colouring—as seen in the curves of the bays, in the profiles of the mountains, in the texture of the soil; on the other, startling steepness, black rocks and deep shadows—one long serration, made more vivid by the snows. Here a scene which recalls the luxuriance of the bay of Naples; there the features, the austere features, of a Norwegian fiord.

A fresh north-easterly breeze filled our huge lateen sail; in the hollow of the white fold were painted large in a russet brown the emblems of a crescent and a star. The ship was heading for a low promontory which showed up yellow against the shades of the distance, and ended in a little island rock. That cape conceals the site of the city of Van, as you approach it from the east. The answering horn of a wide bay rose from the waters in our wake; we were skirting the eastern shore of the sea, with its gentle hills and delicate hues. On the slopes we could just discern a single small village, the only sign of the presence of man.

On we glide, and are soon almost abreast of the promontory, opening the expanse on the further side. The line of the shore curves inwards, and describes a wide half-circle, meeting the base of the stupendous barrier in the south. The whole long range is exposed to view, from foot to cloud-swept summit, from the waters in the west to beyond the waters in the east. The eye is arrested by a strange vision in the middle distance—a bold, black rock, starting from a bed of white mist on the surface of the sea. We learn from the sailors that it is the castled rock of Van. When the mist clears, and the object appears in its true proportions, it becomes a speck against the parapet of the great chain.

We approach the little island; I decide to land upon it; the water shallows, and assumes a hue of pure cobalt. Then the bed of soft white rock shines through the crystal element, and the vessel takes the ground. One steps ashore with the feelings of a Greek mariner, come from afar to a strange land. Gulls circle round us or rest tamely on the rocks; surely we have sailed across the bosom of the high seas.

Fig. 121. Scene on the Island of Ktutz.

Ktutz is the name of this enchanting spot, a name insulting to a Western tongue ([Fig. 121]).[15] We walked across a narrow stretch of grass, strewn with boulders, in the direction of a crag of the same white limestone, weathered yellow,[16] by which the cliff on the opposite shore of the islet falls away before reaching the point. Against that crumbling surface rose the conical dome of an ancient church, surmounting a picturesque group of gables, and, below these, a cluster of mud walls. Several almond-trees, of great age, spread their stippled foliage along the foot and up the side of the cliff. We observed for the first time one of the primitive structures which the people use for drawing water from their wells.[17]

The figure of a priest advanced to meet us; he greeted us kindly, and offered to escort us to the monastery. The finished masonry of the dome, the careful juxtaposition of black with yellow stone in the roof, evinced the culture of a happier age. The church consists of an outer nave and an inner sanctuary, from which the former is separated by a solid wall. As at Khosha Vank, near Ani, this outer building or pronaos is of larger dimensions than the shrine to which it leads.[18] It has probably been added at a later epoch. The nave is accompanied by two broad aisles. The doorway through which you enter the inner chapel is richly carved in the Arab style ([Fig. 122]). You look from without the open door across deep shadows to the lofty daïs of sculptured stone which supports the high altar in the apse.

Fig. 122. Doorway of the Church at Ktutz.

The inner chapel must date back to a remote period, in spite of the ogival arches of the two little doorways in the apses of the narrow side aisles. These betray the direct influence of Arab architecture, and are a solecism among the pointed arches of which the rest of the edifice is built up. It is disposed in the form of a Greek cross; the dome rises from massive piers. The apse on the north contains a chamber in which you are shown the grave of John the Baptist, and a girdle which is said to have belonged to the Saint. Frescos after the taste of the Persians cover the smaller spaces—garlands and wreaths of bright leaves. The archways are painted in quiet blues and reds; pictures of saints are suspended from the walls. Elaborate altar-pieces adjoin the entrance, one on either side of the door. The floor is carpeted with rugs, and an air of comfort pervades the dimly-lit shrine. This twilight serves to soften the gorgeous decorations which the wear of time has assisted to subdue. Neither they nor the interior which they adorn are of striking merit; yet you leave under the impression of a composite charm. We, as Englishmen, were much interested by an old standard clock which, to our surprise, bore on its face the name of Isaac Rogers, London. It ticked away in the heavy quiet, an object so familiar that our guide forgot to point it out.[19]

He was a pleasant individual, quite young, extremely ignorant and without ambition to learn. He was called the monk Peter, or Petros vardapet. Eight monks were on the foundation of the cloister; of these only four were in residence on the island. We found them each in his cell, sharing the group of little buildings which cluster at the foot of the church. All appeared to be without work or occupation of any kind. They seemed to have passed their lives upon the cushions of their couches, looking across the tremulous shade of the almond trees to the Italian sea and the soaring fabric of Sipan.

It was half-past twelve when we put off; the wind had dropped, and scarcely enabled us to forge ahead. For several hours we lay becalmed on the bosom of the lake, here at its widest, in full face of the murky chain on the horizon, which was reflected in hues of burnished steel. Banks of mist shrouded the landscape, especially in the west, where the mass of Nimrud seemed encircled by the sea. A pest of little midges covered our clothes and blackened our papers; then a shower fell, and yet another, and they disappeared. About four o’clock a nice breeze freshened, coming from the shore of low hills upon our left. It brought with it rain; but a little later the sun triumphed, and burst the canopy of clouds in the south and west. A double rainbow of great brilliancy rose from that near shore, revealing the site of a little village. Our head was pointed to the rock of Van, which, at this distance, shows like an island, even without the assistance of mirage. The long barrier of the Kurdish range declines in that direction, and gives way to a less steep and less gloomy ridge; but that outline again rises on the further side of the city, to culminate in a lofty parapet of saw-shaped edge. Varag—such is the name of this mass—commands the bay in which Van lies from behind a spacious interval of garden and field. In the landscape it strikes the last note of the tumultuous theme which is suggested by the mountains in the south—a final trumpet blast by which the procession marches onwards to the Persian plains.

In the opposite quarter, across the lake, and against the declining slope of Sipan the gardens of Adeljivas might just be seen in shades of grey. Those of Artemid were more distinct—a stretch of softness and verdure along the summit of a low cliff of yellow substance near the foot of the black range. A fragment of rock thrown seawards from those mountains was identified as the isle of Akhtamar. But the site of Van engrossed us, surpassing our expectations, high as these were. The rock, which had appeared at a distance to be an island, projected almost into the waters from a background of plain and without visible connection on any side. Battlements crowned its horizontal outline; while at its foot and along the shore luscious foliage, touched by autumn, covered all the inequalities of the ground. From rock and garden, and from the vague detail of the middle distance the eye was led upwards to the stony slopes of Varag; a bed of cloud lay captive upon them; but the jagged parapet stood out from a clear sky. Here and there, stray fragments of vapour, flushed by the evening, floated outwards from the dense canopy over the mountains in the south. The veiled snowfields of the range were revealed in fitful glimpses of yellow, unnatural light.... We moored our vessel by the side of a cluster of similar craft at the so-called harbour, and took the direction in which the town was said to lie. It is surrounded by a walled enclosure, and nestles at the foot of the rock. Darkness had fallen as we passed down its silent streets, made more gloomy by the shadows from the cliff. The bark of dogs, the sad refrain of an Eastern song were the only sounds which broke the stillness of the night. Then we entered a broad chaussée which stretches inland to the suburb of gardens which usurps the importance of the fortified town. There are situated the Consulates of the European Powers, and the residences of the principal citizens. Poplars of great height rose from the irrigated ground on either side of the road. Side lanes led away from this broad avenue into the park of trees. After a walk which seemed interminable, and which occupied no less than three hours, we arrived at the British Consulate at half-past nine o’clock.

[1] Mignan tells us that he purchased a gelding at Sulimanieh which carried him from Baghdad to Tiflis across Kurdistan in 16 days, a distance of at least 800 miles (Winter Journey, etc., London, 1839). I have heard of similar feats in the East, but have not been anxious to place the veracity of my informants to the test. [↑]

[2] La Turquie d’Asie, Paris, 1892, vol. ii. p. 710, “Tout près d’Akantz, à 2 kilomètres vers l’est, se trouve une montagne qui renferme une carrière de pierre calcaire, de 3 kilomètres d’étendue, large d’environ 300 mètres. Le sommet de cette montagne se termine par un vaste plateau couvert des ruines d’une ville antique nommée Zernak qui fut très florissante. Les rues de la dite ville sont larges et coupées à angle droit; on retire de ses édifices de belles pierres siliceuses régulièrement taillées dont on se sert pour les nouvelles constructions.” [↑]

[3] Cuinet (op. cit.) goes quite astray in his statistics both of the caza and town. He estimates the Mussulman inhabitants of the whole caza at only 5129. Akantz and the villages between it and the lake would alone contain as many or more. [↑]

[4] I do not think that Vivien de Saint Martin is justified in supposing that the town which was destroyed by the Georgians in A.D. 1209 was situated in a different locality from that occupied by these ruins (Nouveau Dictionnaire de Géographie Universelle, Paris, 1879–95, sub voce Ardjiz). [↑]

[5] Schulz, in Journal Asiatique, Paris, 1840, series 3, vol. ix. p. 322. Sayce, The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Van, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1882, vol. xiv. pp. 649 seq., and 1888, vol. xx. pp. 3 and 19. [↑]

[6] According to Dr. Belck (Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, etc., 1895, Heft VI. p. 599) the third tablet can never have possessed an inscription. [↑]

[7] See especially Müller-Simonis, Du Caucase au Golfe Persique, Paris, 1892, p. 393. [↑]

[8] Müller-Simonis, op. cit. pp. 292 and 555. [↑]

[9] Verhandlungen der B. G. für Anthropologie, 1898, Heft VI. p. 591. These travellers add yet another name to the supposed ruins, viz. that of Sirnakar. [↑]

[10] Verhandlungen der B. G. für Anthropologie, 1898, Heft VI. p. 573. [↑]

[11] See the extract from Ibn-Alathir in Fragments de géographes et d’historiens Arabes et Persans inédits, by Defrémery, in Journal Asiatique, Paris, 1849, series 4, vol. xiii. p. 518. [↑]

[12] Saint Martin, Mémoires sur l’Arménie, vol. i. p. 136. We know that Ani was a fairly populous town long after the date when it was formerly supposed to have been deserted. [↑]

[13] Marco Polo, Yule’s translation, London, 1874, vol. i. p. 47; and “Merchant in Persia” in Italian Travels in Persia, Hakluyt Society, London, 1873, p. 160. The other six castles were Tadvan, Vostan, Van, Berkri, Adeljivas and Akhlat. [↑]

[14] Loftus, who visited Arjish in 1852, has collected the facts relative to the inundation (Quarterly Journal of Geological Society, London, 1855, vol. xi. p. 319). [↑]

[15] It may help to advance the study of the changes of level in the waters of Lake Van if I record that at the time of our visit (November 2) the island of Ktutz was almost a peninsula. The monks told us that in a few weeks’ time the long neck of sand which almost joined it to the land would be exposed from end to end. In spring the waters cover it. [↑]

[16] This rock, a specimen of which I brought home, may be described as a compact limestone, largely consisting of foraminifera and fragments of mollusca and other invertebrate organisms. [↑]

[17] The long pole shown in the picture projecting against the sky serves as a lever for lifting the bucket. [↑]

[18] The measurements of the interior are as follows:—Pronaos, length 36 feet 2 inches by 34 feet 4 inches. Church proper, length to head of apse, 40 feet 7 inches (25 feet 10 inches to the daïs supporting the altar, and 14 feet 9 inches from the daïs to the wall of the apse); breadth, 24 feet 8 inches. [↑]

[19] The reader of early travels in the East will be familiar with the figure of the European watch and clock maker, to whom he is introduced in some distant city of Asia. [↑]

CHAPTER IV

VAN

Of the various sites which one might select upon the shores of the lake of Van, none would present as great advantages for a populous and self-contained settlement as that of the city from which it derives its name. The great range along the southern coast leaves little respite of even land between the waves and the parapet of rock. The opposite margin of the bosom of waters is filled with the fabrics of those huge volcanoes, Nimrud and Sipan. Sipan, indeed, upon nearer acquaintance, is robbed of some of his apparent extension; and the low outlines on the west and east of the dome-shaped mass upon the horizon will be recognised to belong to a belt of limestone with intrusive igneous rocks which the traveller follows all the way from Akhlat to Adeljivas, and upon which the volcano has built itself up. But those hills, which from the neighbourhood of Van seem to constitute the train of Sipan, are at once rugged and approach closely to the shore. Arjish alone is backed by a zone of fairly even and fertile country; while, as regards the coast between Van and the mouth of the Bendimahi Chai, I do not know that it has ever harboured a considerable city. On the other hand, the alluvial plain which is confined by Mount Varag upon the east, and which may be said to extend from a headland near the village of Kalajik on the north to the high ground just north of Artemid upon the south, affords a considerable area of rich soil, capable under irrigation of producing the choicest fruits of the earth.

Of the beauty of the site it would not be possible to speak too highly; but I tremble to provoke in my English reader a nausea of descriptive writing. The Armenians have a proverb which is often quoted: Van in this world and paradise in the next. The comparison might be justified under happier human circumstances, the perversity of man having converted this heaven into a little hell. Its aptness may be recognised during the course of a walk in the neighbourhood, or from the standpoint of the rock which supports the citadel. In the north across the waters is outspread an Italian landscape—a Vesuvius or an Etna, with their sinuous surroundings, on an Asiatic scale. Nearer at hand and fully exposed, the long barrier of the Kurdish mountains recalls the wildest scenery of the Norwegian coast. From the city herself as from the extremities of the wide basin, the short, sharp ridge of Varag is seen with pleasure to the eye, lifted some 4500 feet above the waters, and, at evening, reflecting the sunset in the most varied hues. The lake is not sufficiently large to separate these various objects by distances which preclude under ordinary conditions the simultaneous enjoyment of the beauty of all from a single shore. And it is large enough to spread at their feet with all the qualities of the ocean—the depth and vastness and changing surface of the high seas.

I.—The Lake of Van

It is about six times as large as the lake of Geneva, having an area of some 1300 square miles. Its western shore is erroneously laid down in existing maps; and this necessitated a particular survey of that region during my second journey, the result of which has been to invest the lake with a shape of greater symmetry—a central body with two arms, one on the north-east, the other on the south-west. The remainder of the outline I have borrowed from the best available sources, adapting them to the position of Van, of which the latitude and longitude are approximately known, and correcting them as well as possible by sketches, and readings to the principal points from the summit of Sipan. If my reader will turn to the map which accompanies this work he will, I think, be able to transfer, with the aid of a few illustrations, the features which are there conventionally delineated into a picture visible by the mind’s eye.

How strange it seems that at the end of the nineteenth century one should be engaged in exploring and mapping this fine country, one of the fairest and most favoured of the Old World! How should we be able to explain, still less to justify, the circumstance to some visitor from another planet? It lies about in the centre of the land area of our hemisphere; the climate is bracing, water is abundant, the sun is warm. Yet it is so little known to the more civilised peoples that their travellers journey thither with the aid of a compass through districts which are now deserts, but which are well capable of supporting the races that are highest in the human scale. The case would appear to have been much the same during the period of the expansion of Greek culture and of the later and beneficent sway of Rome. The knowledge displayed of these regions by representative writers like Strabo, Pliny and Ptolemy is, to say the best of it, vague and fabulous. Yet Strabo, the contemporary of Augustus, was a native of Asia Minor; the countrymen of Pliny had carried the Roman eagles to the Araxes; and Ptolemy wrote during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian whose statue, commemorating his journey through the interior, looked out upon the waves above Trebizond. The first of these authorities plainly confuses the position of Lake Urmi with that of Lake Van; but he is well acquainted with the essential characteristics of both sheets of water, different and strongly marked as these are. The former is described as largest in area, and second in size to the sea of Azof; its name is interpreted to signify the deep blue (κυανῆ ἑρμηνευθεῖσα). The water is salt; and there are salt works in the neighbourhood.[1] The peculiar properties which actually distinguish the latter exactly tally with the language of Strabo, who, speaking next of the lake Arsene or Thopitis, says that it is charged with nitre, which word would seem with him to signify carbonate of soda,[2] and that it washes clothes as though they had been scoured. He adds that the water is undrinkable and supports only one kind of fish. And he proceeds to relate a circumstance which is repeated and embroidered by Pliny, and which is so curious that I cannot refrain from extracting the whole passage from the work of the last-named writer.[3]

“Meet also and convenient it is to say somewhat of the river Tigris. It begins in the land of Armenia the greater, issuing out of a great source; and evident to be seen in the very plaine (fonte conspicuo in planitie). The place beareth the name of Elongosine (or Elegosine, Elosine, Elegos). The river it selfe so long as it runs slow and softly is named Diglito; but when it begins once to carry a more forcible streame it is called Tigris, for the swiftnesse thereof; which in the Median language betokens a shaft (sagitta). It runs into the lake Arethusa; which beareth up aflote all that is cast into it, suffering nothing to sinke; and the vapors that arise out of it carry the sent of nitre. In this lake there is but one kind of fish, and that entreth not into the chanell of Tigris as it passeth through, nor more than any fishes swim out of Tigris into the water of the lake. In his course and colour both he is unlike, and as he goes may be discerned from the other: and being once past the lake, and incountreth the great mountain Taurus, he loseth himself in a certain cave or hole in the ground, and so runs under the hill, untill on the other side thereof he breaketh forth again, and appeares in his likenesse, in a place called Zoroanda. That it is the same river it is evident by this, that he carrieth through with him, and showeth in Zoroanda, whatsoever was cast into him before he hid himselfe in the cave aforesaid. After this second spring and rising of his he enters into another lake, and runneth through it likewise, named Thospites; and once again takes his way under the earth through certain blind gutters, and 25 miles beyond he putteth forth his head about Nymphæum. Claudius Cæsar reporteth, that in the country Arrhene, the river Tigris runs so neere the river Arsania, that when they both swell, and their waters are out, they joyne both their streams together, yet so, as the water is not mingled: for Arsanias being the lighter of the twain, swimmeth and floteth over the other for the space wel-neere of 4 miles: but soon after they part asunder, and Arsania turneth his course toward the river Euphrates, into which he entreth.”

We need not discuss in this place the phenomenon last mentioned, except to remark that the story may well have been suggested by the propinquity of the sources of the Diarbekr branch of the Tigris to the stream of the Murad, the ancient Arsanias. The country of Arrhene is probably the same as that better known as Arzanene, which is comprised within the present vilayet of Diarbekr. Our present interest in the passage lies in the statements relative to the Tigris, that it flows through two lakes called Arethusa and Thospites. Strabo, in speaking of the same phenomenon, attributes it to one lake only, namely that of Arsene or Thopitis. The river, according to him, rises in the Niphates mountains, by which name he seems to be referring to the Nepat of Armenian writers, the modern Ala Dagh. After flowing through Lake Thopitis it disappears in a chasm at the corner of the lake. It comes to light again in the province of Chalonitis; and, although later on he attributes that province to the Zagros, I cannot help thinking that the sense which his informants wished to convey was that it came to light in the mountains of the peripheral region. The mention of two lakes by Pliny need not perplex us over-much; for his Arethusa no doubt denotes the Arjish arm of Lake Van, and his Thospites the principal body of water with the city of Van, the Dhuspas of the cuneiform inscriptions, upon its eastern shore. Ptolemy, on the other hand, entangles the subject still further by separating the lakes of Areesa—no doubt the Arethusa of Pliny—and Thospitis by four degrees of longitude. This geographer does not give us any indications as to the properties of the lake waters; but he tells us that the Tigris is partly a river of Armenia and that its sources constitute Lake Thospitis. The position which he assigns to the town of Artemita—which is probably the modern Artemid—is further evidence that in speaking of Lake Areesa or Arsissa he was in fact referring to Lake Van. One cannot help concluding that his Thospitis with the town of Thospia was actually the self-same sheet of water. The discrepancy in longitude finds a parallel in the degrees assigned by this writer to Lakes Sevan and Urmi. They are really upon the same degree. Yet Ptolemy, under the names of Lychnitis and Martianes, assigns to them the difference of over four degrees.

I think it is plain that the names Thopitis, Thospites, Arsene, Arethusa, and Areesa or Arsissa, are all applied to the great basin with the two immemorial cities, Dhuspas—the modern Van—and Arjish. Moreover, I should be surprised to learn that any lake exhibiting the same properties had been discovered in the belt of mountains south of Lake Van in which the present sources of the Tigris are found. Put together, the scraps of information retailed by the classical geographers go to show that in their days there existed a widely spread belief that the Tigris drew its waters from the tableland of Armenia, flowed through a lake strongly impregnated with soda, and disappeared in a chasm at its further and narrow extremity (μυχός) to come to light again on the further side of the barrier of Taurus or, in other words, of the parapet of mountains which are aligned upon the south coast of Lake Van. The mention of two lakes by Pliny and Ptolemy may point to a former isolation of the Arjish arm. I have taken the trouble to set forth these accounts—though not with all the care that I should desire—because they have an important bearing upon the subject to which I now proceed—a brief notice of some of the peculiarities which distinguish Lake Van.

It may not be out of place to cast one’s look a little further so as to include the other great lakes. That of Urmi in the Persian frontier province of Azerbaijan has an area of 1823 square miles. Its extreme length from north to south is about 80 miles, and its breadth from east to west 24 miles. It resembles its neighbour on the west in constituting an isolated basin, many rivers flowing in but none out. On the other hand its insignificant depth invests it with the character of a lagoon; the average being probably not more than 20 feet and the maximum some 45 or 50 feet. Evaporation must be very rapid over such a sheet of water; and it is at once situated further south than the lake of Van and at a level which is lower by 1500 feet (Lake Urmi, 4100 feet; Lake Van, 5637 feet). Abnormal salinity is the special feature about the waters of Lake Urmi; and extensive beds of rock salt are found in their vicinity. It has been estimated that they are six times as salt as the ocean, though only three-fifths as heavily charged with saline matter as the waters of the Dead Sea. Viewed from a height they are coloured a deep azure, a characteristic usual with salt lakes. If they are allowed to dry upon the body of the bather it is as though he had been covered with flour, and neither fish nor molluscs can live within them. The shores of the lake, which are in general low, are impregnated with salt; and the margin, upon which are found fragments of fossil coral and shell, shines like a white ribbon by the side of the blue. Three boats of not more than 20 tons burden compose the entire fleet of this inland sea.[4]

Very different is the description which may be given of Lake Gökcheh (the blue) or Sevan—the Lychnitis of Ptolemy, the lake of Gegham or of Geghark in Armenian literature. It is situated at a level of 6340 feet, and is therefore the most elevated, if also the smallest, of the three great sheets of water upon the surface of the tableland. It lies at a distance of about 130 miles north of the northern shore of Lake Urmi, and close to the barrier of the mountains of the northern peripheral region. Its waters are sweet and support delicious salmon trout; they are said to attain a depth of 360 feet, or, according to another observer, of 425 feet.[5] Gökcheh is in fact essentially an Alpine lake, lying restfully in the lap of a circle of mountains of which those on the southern shore are of eruptive volcanic origin. It has an outlet on the west to the river Zanga, and a portion of its waters find their way through this channel to the Araxes. The balance of opinion inclines to the view that this connection is of artificial origin; and when the lake is low, especially in autumn, the stream will be almost dry.[6]

But both Urmi and Gökcheh sink into obscurity when compared to the lake of Van. Almost as large as the one and perhaps deeper than the other, it at once combines some of the characteristics of either basin and adds others essentially its own. Like Urmi its waters are heavily charged, though with soda rather than with salt. Its great elevation and its juxtaposition to the mountains of the peripheral region recall corresponding features in Gökcheh. But like a book which may borrow much from the work of other writers, and yet produce an effect on the reader which is wholly new, so one opens the landscape of Lake Van with that particular emotion which only very beautiful and original objects can produce. With the wondrous pieces of natural architecture about the margins of this inland sea my reader will become perfectly familiar as this work proceeds. My present object is to fly very low to the ground, and to notice such facts as appeal to the mind rather than to the eye. The extreme length of the lake would seem to measure 78 miles, and the breadth from north to south of the principal body about 32 miles. To all appearance it is very deep except at the north-east and south-west extremities; but no systematic soundings have been taken to my knowledge, though it would be extremely interesting to know whether indications can be traced of the Arjish arm having once composed a separate unit. The principal streams enter the easterly portion of the basin; they are the Erishat or Irshat near Akantz, the Bendimahi Chai, the Marmed and the Khoshab. Several little rivers are collected in the delta below the old Akhlat, and quite a nice stream cascades into the lake at the neighbouring village of Karmuch, which probably collects a portion of the drainage of the plain between Nimrud and Lake Nazik. No issue of the sea has yet been discovered. None of the copious springs which feed the Tigris on the southern side of the parapet of mountain, quite close to the flood washing its northern slopes, has yet been shown to possess any of the strongly marked qualities characteristic of the waters of Lake Van. One of the most remarkable of these springs is situated near the south-west corner of the lake, at Sach in the Güzel Dere or beauteous valley—a valley with a specially appropriate name.[7] It has been examined by Major Maunsell, who describes it as issuing from the base of a cliff and immediately constituting a stream 50 yards wide and 18 inches deep. It is quite possible that this source of the Tigris may have given colour to the belief of the ancients that the river flowed through the lake and found an exit at its further end by an underground channel. Another scarcely less interesting fountain in the neighbourhood is that of Norshen at the head of the plain of Mush. It rises in a circular pool with a diameter of 105 feet, from which it wells over into a stream which runs to the Euphrates. The natives hold that it is in connection with the lake in the crater of Nimrud, and relate how a shepherd, whose staff, weighted with a small parcel of coin, had sunk below the surface of that deep mere, had one day been astonished to see the lost object eddying in the current of the pool of Norshen. Careful scrutiny of the spring during my second journey established the conviction that it affords no outlet to Lake Van. Moreover, its position and the delicious flavour of its water point to its being derived from the limestones of the range on the south of the plain.

Analysis of the waters of Lake Van has furnished results which are described as remarkable by the eminent chemist to whom I submitted the sample which I brought home with me, and which I obtained by swimming out from the rocky shore at Erkizan, some distance east of the abandoned Ottoman fortress of Akhlat. The amount of suspended matter has been found to be very trifling; while the proportion of solids in solution, principally carbonates of potassium and sodium, chlorides and sulphates, is very large indeed. It is estimated that the alkalinity is equal to rather more than 3¼ ounces of ordinary soda crystal dissolved in a gallon of water. The presence of a little silica accompanies the alkali. The account given by Strabo of the cleansing properties of the lake is thus confirmed in a striking manner. Indeed, the bather issues from his swim as though his limbs had been rubbed with soap—but with a soap of extremely agreeable quality, leaving a velvety feeling upon the skin. The great buoyancy of the waves enhances the pleasure of such exercise, and they are at once pellucid and sparkling under the ruffle of the breeze. On the other hand they are most unpleasant to the taste. The colour of the sheet of water cannot be given in a single word; and indeed it varies with extraordinary range of scale. A cobalt of great brilliancy is perhaps the most normal hue; but a certain milky paleness is seldom quite absent, becoming invested at morning and evening with an infinite number of delicate tints.[8]

Only one kind of fish is found in Lake Van, resembling a large bleak. But, often as I have bathed, I have never seen one gliding through the water, or surprised a shoal while following the shore. It is possible that they adhere to the estuaries of the rivers, up which they make their way in large numbers to spawn during the season of spring freshets. It is then that they are caught in great quantities by means of barriers placed at the mouth of the streams with baskets resting against one side. The fish leap the barrier and fall into the baskets, after which they are dried and salted. Seagulls and cormorants haunt the lake, but are not very numerous; nor have I observed a pelican, although these birds are conspicuous on the adjacent lake of Nazik together with many varieties of smaller waterfowl. The main body of the sea never freezes over in winter, rigorous as that season is at this high altitude.

A feature which has occupied considerable attention, especially among German writers, is the fluctuation in level of these Armenian lakes. There can be no doubt that they are all three subject to more or less pronounced periodical changes; and various reasons have been assigned. Do these fluctuations arise from the opening or closing of subterraneous issues or from movements of the earth’s crust? Or may they be accounted for by ordinary climatic conditions, such as the fall of snow and rain and the consequent variation in the volume of the rivers and in the activity of springs? The economic state of the country and the extent of irrigated land within the watershed has been recognised as a factor, but a factor of insufficient importance to produce the recorded results during the period reviewed. In the case of Lake Van we are precluded from attributing these fluctuations to the agency of subterraneous issues. Not a single one of such has yet been discovered. Nor am I aware that any such outlets to Gökcheh or Urmi have been noted by any traveller. The evidence which may be collected in the case of all goes to show that the islands are as much affected as the adjacent shores. It may therefore seem unlikely that the changes arise from movements at the bottom of the lake; for these would lift or depress the islands to some extent.[9] If I venture to join in the discussion I would submit the suggestion that we should for convenience group the phenomena under two heads. Temporary variations should be distinguished from any differences of a more permanent nature the existence of which it may be possible to prove.[10]

It cannot be expected that we should be able to collect evidence of a satisfactory nature in respect of the changes which would fall within the first category. We have to rely upon the statements and even upon the inferences which may be derived from the writings of travellers. Even if we could rest contented with the accuracy and sufficiency of such testimony in the case of lakes which are so much affected by the melting of the winter snows, it would not establish, except in a very approximate manner, the beginnings and ends of the successive phases. Still, the subject is so interesting that it is worth while to collate the observations of which record may be found. In the subjoined table I have endeavoured to perform this task; and it has already been undertaken with great diligence by Dr. Sieger. It will be seen that a certain correspondence may occasionally be traced in the periodical fluctuations which have affected the three sheets of water.[11] Perhaps the most remarkable evidence in this sense is that which is furnished by the almost simultaneous observations for 1898. Messrs. Belck and Lehmann for Lake Gökcheh, Mr. Günther for Lake Urmi, and my companion, Mr. F. Oswald, and myself for Lake Van, all bear witness to a rise in quite recent years. Our own investigations were made during the month of July of that year, and were confined to the westerly inlets of the lake. A prominent feature about these inlets was the tendency of the streams to form shallow lagoons behind a narrow barrier of alluvial sand. On the margin or even in the bed of such lagoons one might often see a group of willows. Some had been immersed a foot or two by the rise in the waters; and, while their neighbours on dry land were green and thriving, these were quite dead. The most notable example was observed by Oswald within the little broken-down crater on the southern shore opposite Akhlat. It receives the lake within its enfolding arms. We have called it Sheikh Ora after a little village of that name which was discovered in its south-east corner. Oswald sailed across to examine this interesting spot while I was busily engaged at Akhlat. Between the village and the water he came across a small grove of willows upon which the lake had gained. Those above the water line were evidently flourishing; but those which stood in the lake had been killed and their bark withered, so that many of the stems were quite gaunt and bare. The average diameter of the trunks of the dead and the living was not appreciably different. It was therefore not a question of an advance of the lake dating back very many years. On the other hand there had been time for the chemical properties of the water to exercise their destructive effect.

TABULAR STATEMENT OF THE EVIDENCE OF TRAVELLERS IN RESPECT OF THE FLUCTUATIONS IN LEVEL OF THE THREE GREAT LAKES.

Year.Lake Van.Year.Lake Urmi.Year.LakeGökcheh.
1806Jaubert attests a gradual rise in the waters,threatening Arjish and the suburbs of Van (Voyage enArménie, etc., p. 139).1811Morier attests a relapse. The former island of Shahi hasbecome joined to the mainland by a swampy isthmus during the last twoor three years (Second Journey, p. 287, seq.).
1812 to 1829Progressive relapse of about 10 feet during this period attested by Monteith(J.R.G.S. 1833, vol. iii. p. 56).
1838Brant attests a relapse which, according to thenatives, has effected a gain of one mile in ten years to the plain onwhich Arjish stands (Journal R.G.S. 1840, x. p. 403).1834Relapse attested by Fraser since his last visitin 1822 (Travels in Kurdistan, pp. 47 seq., andNarrative of Khorassan, p. 321).
1830A low level, perhaps aminimum, is attested by Monteith. The canal to the Zanga is aninsignificant runnel, supplying the river with the smallest portion ofits waters (J.R.G.S. 1833, vol. iii. p. 43).
1838Loftus records a rise on native authority,commencing during the winter. In twelve months, viz., by the winter of1839, the lake is said to have risen nearly 6 feet. In the next two years, viz., by 1841,it is said to have risen altogether 10 to 12feet, necessitating the evacuation of Arjish by the inhabitants,the place becoming an island (Quarterly Journal Geol. Soc. 1855,p. 318).1838Autumn. Rise attested in general terms byRawlinson (J.R.G.S. 1840, vol. x. p. 8) and more precisely in1839, by Perkins on native testimony (Residence in Persia,Andover, 1843, p. 394). Rise has been gradual.
1856Lieut. Owerin of the topographicalstaff of the Caucasus, estimates that nearly ⅛th of the waters ofthe lake find an egress through the canal to the Zanga (Petermann’s Mitt. 1858, p. 471). Other evidence goes toshow that in the forties and fifties the lake was certainly higher thanin Monteith’s time.
1847Hommaire de Hell attests a relapse (Voyage enTurquie, etc., quoted by Sieger, Schwankungen, p.6).
1850Layard attests a rise “during the last fewyears.” Many villages on the margin are partly submerged. Iskele,the port of Van, is still in- habited; but the greater part of thevillage is under water (Nineveh and Babylon, p. 408). [Layardwas perhaps only witnessing the effects of the rise which commenced1838.]
1859 to 1879Relapse during this period isassigned to the lake by Brandt (Zoologischer Anzeiger,ii. 523 seq.), from whose observations we may infer aminimum about 1879. Islands had formed; these again had become apeninsula. The canal to the Zanga seems to have been scarcely operativeat all.
1852Loftus attests a considerable relapse duringrecent years, said by the natives to have commenced in 1850. Arjish isconnected by a passable isthmus to the mainland for eight months in theyear (op. cit. p. 318).1852A relapse is attested by Perkins to Loftus (QuarterlyJournal Geol. Soc. 1855, p. 307).
1856Rise may be deduced from N. von Seidlitz whoseems from a distance to have seen Shahi, an island in October(Petermann’s Mitt. 1858, pp. 228, 230).
1863Strecker records a continuous rise during the yearspreceding his writing, as evidenced by Turkish officials of hisacquaintance (Petermann’s Mitt. 1863, pp. 259seq.)1891Relapse has continued. Treesplanted thirty years ago on the margin of the water at the island ofSevan are now standing some 50feet away, and some 7to 10 feet above thelake level. (Belck in Globus, vol. lxv. p. 302).
1875A maximum at about this period may be inferredfrom the accounts given by Bishop Poghos of Lim to Dr. Belck(Globus, vol. lxiv. p. 157), and by the Rev. Mr. Cole of Bitlisto Dr. Butyka (Globus vol. lxv. p. 73). From this period thereappears to have been a gradual relapse until 1892, and possiblylater.
1898Rise dating backseveral years is attested by Belck and Lehmann. The trees alluded toabove are now standing in the water (Zeitschrift fürEthnologie, 1898 p. 414).
1898Günther chronicles arise during the last two years on native evidence(J.R.G.S. November 1899, p. 510).
1898Evidence of Oswald and myself infers arise during the last few years.

The same phenomenon of a rise in level was apparent on the margin of the large lake in the crater on Nimrud. There the brushwood, representing the growth of many years, was submerged; and much had already perished from want of sustenance. All the evidence points to the fact that such changes are of a temporary nature, and that a period of increase is followed by one of decline. The most probable explanation is that they are due to climatic conditions, which, it is well known, are variously operative over cycles of years. In the absence of any observatory in these countries this question is largely a matter of surmise or, at best, of inference. The existence of such periodical fluctuations may be regarded as having been established; it remains to consider the changes of a more permanent order.

We must not forget that at a period relatively recent in geological time this lake of Van was but a part of an extensive inland sea, which appears gradually to have become divided up into a series of basins. There can be little doubt that down to quite a late geological epoch no such barrier had been constituted between this basin and that of the plain of Mush, which immediately adjoins it upon the west. The waters have left their mark upon the rocky boundaries of that plain; and to their action I do not think we should err in attributing the peculiar appearance of the basal slopes of the Kerkür Dagh, where they face the great depression of Mush. To the same period perhaps belong several terraces which may be traced upon the bush-grown face of the southern coast of Lake Van between Garzik and the Güzel Dere. The highest of these is perhaps the most conspicuous, and may be situated at an elevation of a hundred feet or more above the present level. Just as the waters of the plain of Mush were drained away through a narrow opening in the mountains which hem it in upon the west, so it is quite likely that a similar vent was offered by the gorge which cuts through the parapet of Taurus in the direction of Bitlis, and at the present day affords an easy passage to the caravans from the plains of Armenia into the defiles of Kurdistan. Loftus chronicles a tradition that the waters of Lake Van cover a plain that was once studded with villages and gardens. The streams of Arjish and the Bendimahi Chai—and presumably the Khoshab—are said to have met and formed one large river about midway between Arjish and Bitlis. His informants were under the belief that it had issued from the plain through a hole in the earth; and that when this passage had been closed up by a sudden convulsion the present lake formed.[12] This story is at least not lacking in verisimilitude, so far as the existence of a former river is concerned. This river would have probably flowed to the Tigris, of which it would have been the principal branch. The cause of its being dammed up was perhaps the outpouring of lavas from Nimrud, which have formed the plateau between Tadvan and the head of the plain of Mush—a plateau which rises to a height of 680 feet above the lake, and, extending across from Nimrud to the face of Taurus in the south, chokes the entrance to the Bitlis gorge. It is this barrier which actually maintains the lake of Van. No eruptions on this scale are recorded during the historical period; and, of course, it is not impossible that they were originally submarine.

These phenomena, which are partly attested by the ancient lake terraces and in part suggested by the general structure of the country, belong to an epoch which, if quite modern from the standpoint of the geologist, probably lies beyond the range of the archæologist as well as of the historian. Much the same conditions as at the present day appear to have prevailed during the historical period—a vast sheet of water, deep and translucent, dammed up by the volcanic barrier at its westerly extremity. I think there can be no doubt that the permanent tendency of this sheet of water has been to rise in level. Moreover, all the evidence is to the effect that this tendency has been operative in the case of the other two seas. Dr. Belck has recorded that in the year 1890 during the month of July he came across a little lake at the eastern end of Lake Gökcheh, separated from it by a tongue of land scarcely more than 55 yards broad, and connected with it by a stream descending from the mountains and piercing through the isthmus. On the margin of this shallow lagoon, near the outflow of the stream, he discovered an ancient Armenian graveyard of which the stones were under water. When he returned in August of the following year they were only just dry. His visit coincided with the latest stage of a period of decline; and it seems certain that since the time when the cemetery was constituted the norm about which the fluctuations oscillate had risen in a marked degree. The same traveller draws our attention to the interesting circumstance that the three last lines of the cuneiform inscription of Rusas the First (c. 730–714 B.C.), cut in the face of the rock overlooking that same northern lake, have been almost completely destroyed by the erosion of the waters, although placed just above their level in 1891. It seems incredible that the Vannic king should have engraved his memorial in a situation where it would be exposed to the periodical floods.[13] As regards Lake Urmi I need only recall the important discovery of Mr. Günther in 1898. In the islands of that sea he found many species of living animals which could not have crossed the stretch of salt water, amounting to a distance of some 10 miles, that at present separates their homes from the shore. In his opinion the zoology affords conclusive testimony of these islands having been joined to the mainland at no very distant date. Upon one of them he found the skeleton of a wild sheep.[14] The evidence which may be collected upon the shores of Lake Van all points in the same direction of a progressive upward tendency.

Strecker has thrown out the suggestion that this process may be accountable for the junction of the Arjish arm to the main body; and that we may therefore attach some credence to the statements of Pliny that in his time there were two lakes.[15] However this may be, we are not dependent upon such hypotheses, or upon the stories current of submerged causeways or bridges. The three old fortresses of Akhlat, Adeljivas and Arjish all bear testimony to a considerable rise in the level of the lake since the days when they were built. The walls of the first two on the side of the water have either fallen in or are being slowly undermined. Arjish has been permanently abandoned by its inhabitants. Immemorial villages, like that of Kizvag between Akhlat and Tadvan, are being menaced by the latest periodical increase, which seems to have commenced about 1895. Nature herself speaks eloquently in the same sense. An ancient walnut-tree which stands on the rocky bank of the lake in the gardens of Erkizan, a quarter of Akhlat, had already been deprived of a great portion of its foothold when we encamped beneath its boughs in 1898. In the Sheikh Ora crater a giant mulberry, which may have been some 500 years old, was standing with half its roots in the water and was already doomed. The most obvious explanation of this gradual rise in the norm of the lake level is furnished by a cause, which must be constantly operative, namely the increase of sediment deposited upon the bottom. But whether this factor by itself be sufficient to have produced such important changes is a question upon which I am not qualified to pronounce an opinion.[16]

II.—The Ancient Empire of Van

Deep in the curve of the bay, which with minor indentations extends from the promontory and island of Ktutz to Artemid, lies the isolated rock with the mediæval city at its southern foot and the long line of gardens stretching eastwards across the plain towards the slopes of Mount Varag. These various features are disclosed or suggested in my illustration ([Fig. 123]), which was taken from those distant slopes. But before I invite my reader to explore the ancient township, something must be said upon a topic which here fascinates the traveller’s interest equally with the characteristics of the strange lake beside which he sojourns. I have already on several occasions remarked upon the insignificance of the human element in these Armenian landscapes. At Van for the first time we become sensible of a different impression, derived, not indeed from the peoples who now inhabit the country, but from the monuments of a remote civilisation which abound in the neighbourhood, and of which the spirit is wafted towards us across the ages. Here the massive substructures of an aqueduct, there the Cyclopean masonry of the fragment of a wall tell the tale of man’s mastery over Nature, and insensibly conjure the vision of the plains crossed by great roads, the rivers spanned by bridges, the fertilising waters brought from afar. Our curiosity is enhanced by the inscriptions in the cuneiform character which are deeply incised in the hard stone of the various works. But it rises to the degree of fervour when we survey the rock of Van, clearly recognised as the very navel of this old polity. Its precipitous sides are quite a library of inscriptions, carved upon their face in spaces polished by human hands. Square-cut shadows disclose the entrances of chambers hewn into the calcareous mass at a considerable height above the level of the plain. And something in the spirit of the works and in the choice of situation at once distinguishes them from the rock dwellings, such as those at Vardzia near Akhalkalaki, with which we have become familiar during the course of our journey south. It is evident that in their original purpose they were only a feature of a large design which mocks the scale of the existing fortifications.

Fig. 123. Van from the Slopes of Mount Varag.

By what people were they inscribed, these regular lines of elegant characters; and who were the kings who sojourned upon this delightful platform, which seems to have been raised by a freak of Nature in the midst of the plain with its westerly extremity almost reaching into the lake? Armenians, Persians, Arabs, Seljuks, Tartars, Turkomans, Turks—all have come and passed or stayed, and none have been able to return an answer to the question invited by the writings on the citadel. They have had recourse to the resources of Oriental legend, or have been content with the explanation that these inscriptions are talismans, sealing treasures long since buried in the heart of the rock. The fame of the place is widely spread over all the surrounding country, forming as it does the kernel of a populous city on the confines of Armenia and Kurdistan. It has been described by the national historian of the Armenians in terms which in many respects portray the existing features in a singularly faithful manner. Moses of Khorene attributes the works to an Assyrian queen Semiramis, and relates on the authority of Mar Abas Katina and from Chaldæan sources the story of her fruitless passion for the reigning king of Armenia, Ara, and of the death of that monarch while resisting her endeavours to obtain his person by force. The queen is said to have accompanied her armies to the northern kingdom, and to have founded the city as a summer residence for her luxurious court. The tale is beset by incidents which reveal its fabulous nature; and the historian informs us that several such legends relating to Semiramis were current among his own countrymen.[17] At the same time he deplores the lack of culture among his ancestors, to which he ascribes the absence of native annals.[18]

It has been reserved for our own age to penetrate the mystery, which, indeed, is only now as I write being dispelled. Quite early in the nineteenth century, while the future excavators of the Assyrian cities were either unborn or were still in their nurseries, a young French student, Jean Antoine Saint Martin, the son of a tradesman in Paris, was fired by the account of the inscriptions at Van contained in the pages of Moses of Khorene.[19] Mainly through his efforts the French Government—always solicitous of the interests of culture—were induced to despatch a mission to Armenia in 1827, engaging the services of a young German professor, Friedrich Eduard Schulz. The first report of the explorer was published by Saint Martin in 1828.[20] By a piece of misfortune, happily rare in the annals of travel in these countries, Schulz was murdered by the Kurds in 1829. But his papers were recovered and brought to Paris, where they seem to have awaited in obscurity the awakening of interest in Oriental antiquities which was consequent upon the discoveries of Burnouf, of Lassen, and of Rawlinson. An instructive memoir, together with copies of forty-two inscriptions at Van and in the neighbourhood, appeared under his name in 1840 in the pages of the Journal Asiatique. Schulz’s copies have been found to be in the main remarkably accurate, although he had not the smallest knowledge of the language in which they were composed. Little by little the contents of the tablets in a similar character which are spread over Persia yielded up the secrets which they had so long maintained; and the excavations in Mesopotamia furnished Orientalists with the necessary material to enable them to understand the languages of the cuneiform inscriptions furnished in such profusion by the buried cities of the plains. But with the exception of the great tablet in three columns and as many tongues which is such a conspicuous object on the southern face of the rock of Van (Schulz, Nos. IX., X., and XI.), and an inscription on a stone in the remains of a wall at its base (Schulz, No. I.), none of the Vannic records agreed with the syllabaries already discovered, or could be translated into any known language. Schulz had indeed perceived that the first of these monuments contained the names and titles of Xerxes, son of Darius; and when Layard visited Van and took new copies in 1850, it had come to be recognised that this tablet of Xerxes resembled other Achæmenian inscriptions, and was very nearly word for word the same as those of this Persian monarch at Hamadan and Persepolis.[21] The characters upon the stone in the wall were exactly the same as those of Assyrian writings; and, although the inscription had not been satisfactorily deciphered when Layard’s book was published, that investigator was able to discern that the language also was Assyrian, while that of all the remainder, in spite of the similarity in character, was peculiar to Van, and baffled decipherment. In the meanwhile other equally perplexing inscriptions had been discovered in districts of the tableland remote from the city of Semiramis; and a partially successful endeavour had been made by the English Orientalist Hincks to read the mysterious texts.[22] But the problem remained unsolved for very many years, while the stock of inscriptions collected by travellers in various parts of Armenia was continually increasing. A great step forward was made by the discovery by M. Stanislas Guyard, announced in 1880,[23] that the phrase at the conclusion of many of the Vannic texts represented the imprecatory formula found in the same place in their Assyrian and Achæmenian counterparts; and this enabled Professor Sayce of Oxford to proceed rapidly with their decipherment, upon which he had been engaged for some years.[24] Mainly as the result of his labours we are now enabled to gather their meaning, and to add a new language and a new people to the museum of the ancient Oriental world. Since he has written, the number of known Vannic texts has been doubled by the German scholars and travellers, Professor Lehmann and Dr. Belck. They have also, in a series of most instructive articles, called up the vanished civilisation from the grave.[25]

We now know who built Van and by whom these tablets were engraved upon the face of the citadel. As the horizon opens with each advance in our acquisition of the vocabulary and with each addition to the catalogues of texts, we are introduced to no obscure dynasty which slept secure behind the mountains, but to a splendid monarchy which for at least two centuries rivalled the claims of Assyria to the dominion of the ancient world. The native designation of the imperial people was that of Khaldians or children of Khaldis, just as the Assyrians reflect the name of their god, Assur. The constitution of the State was that of a theocracy in which Khaldis occupied the supreme place. The company of the remaining deities were spoken of as his ministers, and the whole land appears to have borne his name.[26] It was the wrath of Khaldis that was invoked against whosoever should destroy the tablets; and with him were coupled in a kind of Trinity the god of the air and the sun-god. The seat of Khaldis was the city of Dhuspas, the modern Van; and all conquests were made by the king in his name. Dhuspas was the capital of the territory of Biaina, from which the king derived his title. We can readily trace through literature the corruption of the word Biaina into the existing form, Van; it figures in the shape of Buana in the writings of Ptolemy and in that of Iban as late as Cedrenus.[27] In the course of time it had come to be applied to the city; while the name of the city was transferred to the province in which it was placed, and became the Dosp or Tosp of Armenian writers.[28] The contemporaries and rivals of the Vannic monarchs, the rulers of Assyria, styled the northern kingdom Urardhu or Urarthu; and this is the same name that appears in the Bible in the familiar form of Ararat. They make no mention of the local appellation of Biaina; although it seems possible that the district called Bitanu or Bitani in the Assyrian inscriptions may be connected with the latter name.[29] On the other hand there can be little doubt that the Turuspa of the Assyrian annals is the Dhuspas of the monuments of Van.

The Khaldians take their place in this new chapter of history at least as early as the latter half of the ninth century before Christ. Their language was neither Semitic nor Indo-European; and it is therefore impossible to connect them either with the Assyrians, who were Semites, or with the Armenians, who belong to the Indo-European family. They ruled over the tableland which is now Armenia before the Armenians had appeared upon the scene; and it was the movement of races with which was connected the Armenian immigration that seems ultimately to have occasioned their dispersal and the overthrow of their power. Their dominion appears to have been due in no small degree to the happy choice of Van as their capital. Assyrian history ranges beyond the probable date of that foundation, to a period when Urardhu was perhaps an obscure province in the neighbourhood of the modern Rowanduz in Kurdistan. The Assyrian armies in their marches northwards were opposed by a confederacy of petty princes whose country is called Nairi in the Assyrian inscriptions. That loose term evidently embraced a considerable portion of the Armenian tableland; for it was in the plain of Melazkert that the Assyrian king, Tiglath-Pileser I. (c. 1100 B.C.),[30] overthrew the united forces of the kings of Nairi and erected a memorial tablet which has been preserved to the present day.[31] In a restricted sense the name Nairi was applied by the Assyrians to the province about the middle and upper course of the Great Zab; and the lakes of Van and Urmi, between which that territory was situated, were both known as the Upper seas or seas of the land of Nairi, Lake Van being sometimes distinguished as the Upper sea of the West, and Lake Urmi as the Eastern or even as the Lower sea.[32] The kingdom of Urardhu is for the first time mentioned by the Assyrians in the reign of Ashur-nasir-pal (885–860 B.C.); but it is not before the ensuing reign of Shalmaneser II. (860–825 B.C.) that we have certain evidence of an Assyrian army marching into Armenia to attack the territories not of a league of Nairi princes but of a monarch of Urardhu. This prince, of whom no records have been discovered in Armenia, is called Arame. His capital, of which the site is at present unknown, but which certainly lay to the north of Lake Van, bears the name of Arzasku. Arame was signally defeated in 857 or 856 B.C. and abandoned his capital. His cities as far as the sources of the Euphrates (Murad?) were taken by Shalmaneser in 845 or 844 B.C. When next we hear of a king of Urardhu we are able to recognise in his name the earliest of the rulers who appear in the Vannic texts. And this monarch, Sarduris the First, the contemporary of the same Shalmaneser and his antagonist about 833 B.C., was the founder of the fortress of Van.

No better position for a stronghold against a Power operating from the lowlands in the south could have been discovered by the builders of an empire on the Armenian plains. In the later phases of the history of Armenia the movements of empires and peoples have generally proceeded between the east and the west. Against such currents the city of Van composes a minor obstacle, which they avoid on their more normal and northerly course. Always secure with a fleet on the lake and the passes of Mount Varag fortified, the true military value of the place only advances into first-rate importance when the centres of the hostile forces lie in Mesopotamia. It is screened in that direction by perhaps the most impenetrable section of the entire outer or Iranian arc of the peripheral mountains which support the tableland.[33] Moreover, the circumstance that the arc has snapped and sent out a splinter into the districts on the north, represented by the mountains in which the Great Zab has its source, and, further north, by the elevated but not impassable waterparting between the basin of Lake Van and that of the Araxes, has had the effect of concealing Van within the fork of a twofold parapet where it reposes with its back against the complex barrier and defies attack from the south or south-east. The approach from the west along the southern shore of the lake is interrupted by the spurs of the great range; and the Assyrian armies were compelled to make the détour by the plain of Melazkert, gaining the plateau by one of the passes north of Diarbekr and leaving it upon their return home through one of the passages east of Rowanduz where the sea of mountains settles down to a regular course. Such an immense circuit through a hostile country necessitated resources on a vast scale, the existence of which among the Assyrians fills the mind with admiration when we contemplate the squalor of the Oriental empires of the present day. But there can be no doubt that all the advantages lay on the side of their northern adversaries, to whom was offered a reasonable chance of annihilating their hosts, or, in the event of defeat, the secure alternative of shutting themselves up in their capital and there awaiting the passing over of the storm. These considerations serve to explain the comparative immunity and the rapid development of the empire of the successors of Sarduris the First; at a time, too, when Assyria was governed by such warlike monarchs as Shamshi-Ramman and Ramman-nirari.[34] It was reserved for Tiglath-Pileser the Third to beard the lion in his den, and to appear before the walls of Van. But even this gigantic figure failed to capture the citadel, although he appears to have destroyed the garden town at its feet (735 B.C.).[35] The ultimate effects of his campaign may be measured by the fact that the inveterate and sometimes successful adversary of Sargon (722–705 B.C.) was the Vannic king Rusas the First. And the northern empire is still a force with which the Assyrians have to reckon as late as Ashur-bani-pal, the Sardanapalus of the Greeks (668–626 B.C.).

Fig. 124. Bronze Shield from Toprak Kala (British Museum).

Fig. 125. Bronze Fragment from Toprak Kala (British Museum).

So far as our knowledge at present extends we may regard Sarduris the First as the initiator of a remarkable and far-reaching revolution among the peoples of the tableland. The title which this monarch bears, that of king of Nairi, as compared with that of his successors, kings of Biaina,[36] connects him with the earlier period of the confederacy of Nairi princes which his dynasty under the ægis of the god Khaldis was destined to supplant. His son, Ispuinis, and his grandson Menuas at once extended the empire and added to the works upon the citadel of Van; and the latter was the principal author of that magnificent canal which to the present day under the fanciful name of Shamiram-Su, or river of Semiramis, conducts the waters of the Khoshab to the suburbs of Van.[37] Menuas may, therefore, be considered as the founder of the garden town; although at that time it is probable that it was situated south of the citadel rather than, as is now the case, at some distance to the east.[38] During the reign of the successor of Menuas, Argistis the First, the Vannic dynasty reached the zenith of its power. The kinglets of the valley of the Araxes had been dispossessed of their fertile territories, and the great city which was afterwards known as Armavir rose from the banks of the river in honour of the god of Van. The whole extent of the Armenian tableland, such as it is described in the present work, with the possible exception of some of the most northerly districts, was subject to the rulers residing on the shore of the great lake; and their inscriptions recording conquests are found as far east as the province south of Lake Urmi and as far west as the Euphrates near Malatia. In that direction they came in contact with the Hittites; while their neighbours on the east were none other than the Minni of Scripture, residing in the more southerly portion of the Urmi basin and the adjacent districts.[39] The inscriptions on the rock of Van enumerate the feats of arms of Argistis the First and Sarduris the Second. No records have yet been found further north than Lake Gökcheh, Kanlija, near Alexandropol, and Hasan Kala, near Erzerum. South of their capital the wild districts of Shatakh, Norduz and Mukus have been scoured by travellers in quest of such monuments, but hitherto without result.

Fig. 126. Ornament from Toprak Kala (British Museum).

With one exception no systematic excavations have yet been made upon any of the sites of the cities and strongholds of the Vannic kings. When these shall have been undertaken we may expect to have drawn an impressive picture of the attainments of their people in the arts. The single instance of such efforts—and it is not one of which we need be proud[40]—has been directed to the low limestone hills which overlook the gardens of Van upon the north, and which in their neighbourhood bear the name of Toprak Kala. In or about the years 1879 and 1880 operations were conducted upon this eminence under the direction, as I have gathered, of Captain Clayton, then our consul at Van, and of Mr. Hormuzd Rassam.[41] Tunnels were opened into that part of the site which disclosed the buried remains of an ancient settlement, and which was found to have been covered with buildings composed for the most part of sun-dried bricks. The most important result of the enterprise was the laying bare of a temple, still containing quite a number of bronze shields with cuneiform inscriptions, embossed and chased with ornamental designs and the figures of animals. Some of these may be seen in the British Museum and others in the Museum at Berlin. They represent votive offerings on the part of the kings, and were suspended upon the walls in the manner shown by an existing bas-relief from the palace of Sargon at Khorsabad. Indeed that sculpture portrays the destruction by the Assyrians of the temple of Khaldis in the city of Mutsatsir, not very far from the present town of Rowanduz. The dimensions of the edifice were small, only 69 feet by 44 feet, measured at the foundations. But the walls were built of great blocks of hewn stone, and traces of a pavement in a kind of mosaic were found. The doors appear to have been of bronze. Outside the entrance stood a block of marble which was hollowed out and was probably used for sacrifices. At the time of my visit little was to be seen of this interesting structure, for the vandal townspeople had removed its masonry for building purposes. Large faced blocks, taken thence and perhaps from other edifices, were being rolled down the hillside. Only a fraction of the objects found was brought away by Messrs. Clayton and Rassam; their workmen abstracted the remainder, from whose hands some portions have filtered into Europe. Toprak Kala has quite recently (1898) been the scene of further excavations, this time on the part of Messrs. Belck and Lehmann. They have dug out the substructures of the temple to its foundations, cleared away the rubbish which obstructed a long subterraneous passage, debouching into a large chamber which may have served as a reservoir, and which was fed by an artificial duct deriving its water from a neighbouring spring; and discovered a wine-cellar containing colossal vats, some engraved with Vannic writing and one with a Persian cuneiform inscription. We also owe to their labours the discovery not far from the temple of a space which seems to have been set apart to receive the bones of the sacrificial animals and of the human beings, captives of war, who had been offered up to the god. They have acquired numerous objects, of silver as well as of bronze and iron, including weapons and ornaments of various kinds. But the principal service which they have rendered is the identification of Toprak Kala with the city of Rusas mentioned in the stele near Keshish Göl on the slopes of Mount Varag. The inscription on that monument, if rightly deciphered, leaves little doubt that King Rusas, probably the first of that name, made use of that little lake as a partly natural and partly artificial reservoir, and conducted its waters along the foot of the Toprak Kala heights to the region occupied by the present site of the garden town. The earliest ruler mentioned on the shields is Rusas the Second; while we know from their contents that the temple was built or restored by Rusas the Third in honour of the god Khaldis. All the indications favour the assumption that in consequence of the depredations of Tiglath-Pileser the Third some change was made in the disposition of the city. The heights of Toprak Kala seem in some degree to have usurped the importance of the citadel, and to have been used as defences for the extension of the gardens in that direction.[42]

The culture of the Vannic kingdom was perhaps borrowed from the Assyrians and was certainly derived from the Mesopotamian plains. The legend of the passion of the queen of Assyria, the consort of the eponymous hero Ninus, for an Armenian king who suffers death at her hands and is restored to life,[43] contains, so far as it expresses the intercourse of the pre-Armenian peoples, a considerable kernel of truth. Ara and Semiramis are none other than Tammuz and Istar, the Adonis and the Aphrodite of the Hellenic myth; and the advent from Assyria of the voluptuous queen in quest of a beautiful but reluctant lover may be connected with the introduction from abroad of the worship of Istar.[44] However this may be, it is certain that the earliest inscriptions found at Van are in the Assyrian language and character; while those of the successors of Sarduris the First, although composed in the Vannic tongue, show but slight deviations from the cuneiform writing as practised at Nineveh. There is evidence to show that long after the disappearance of the empire of the Khaldians Assyrian influences lingered on in the land. I shall have occasion to remark these traces in the study of the architecture of the church at Akhtamar; and they compose a factor which should never be quite absent from the mind when examining the masterpieces of Armenian mediæval art. The Vannic dynasty are not the symbol of resistance on the part of rude mountaineers to the approach of civilisation moving up from its immemorial seats. Far rather do they represent the beneficent spread of arts and letters over the Armenian plains. The favourite sites of their cities are not the recesses of the mountains of the tableland, but some small eminence from a wide extent of level and fertile ground, as typically embodied by the rock of Van and the mound of Armavir. They are builders of canals to irrigate the land, of roads to traverse even the scarcely passable ridges of the peripheral region, of bridges to span the great rivers. If we are still in the dark with respect to their ethnic affinities, we need harbour no doubts upon the character of the civilisation which they contributed to diffuse.

Like Adonis they have been carried down the stream of time, and over them the eddy has long since closed. The spade of the archæologist reveals the charred remains of their later stronghold on the heights of Toprak Kala overlooking the gardens of Van. But by what people and at what date were they stricken to the ground, and their temples and palaces given to the flames? It is the disadvantage of a history which is derived from inscriptions, that issues as well as origins must remain obscure. I am not aware that any certain answer can be given to the first part of the question, and the date of the supreme catastrophe which must have overtaken the city can only be approximately fixed. The Vannic records differ in one important respect from those of Assyria; they do not contain a single date. The chronology is therefore dependent upon the mention in them of an Assyrian monarch or by the Assyrians of a contemporary ruler of Urardhu. The latest inscriptions hitherto discovered belonging to the northern kingdom are those of Rusas the Third, the son of Erimenas, who lived in the time of Ashur-bani-pal. But a successor of this prince is mentioned in the Assyrian annals as having sent an embassy to Nineveh about 644 B.C. His name is the familiar one of Sarduris, and he takes his place as the third king of that name. It would appear likely that at the time of his embassy he had only just begun to reign; and we should probably be justified in protracting the span covered by the Vannic dynasty at least as late as the death of Ashur-bani-pal (c. 626 B.C.). This date brings us down to the dawn of Oriental history as contained in the works of Greek writers. In the pages of Herodotus the Armenian tableland as well as Assyria form portions of the great empire of Darius (521–486 B.C.) and Xerxes (485–465 B.C.), which had succeeded the loose rule of the Scythians. And this new era has left behind it one of the most impressive of the monuments upon the rock of Van. On its southern face, in full view of the walled town at its base, is inscribed the trilingual record of the Persian conquest. “A great god is Ormazd, who is the greatest of gods, who has created this earth, who has created that heaven, who has created mankind, who has given happiness to man, who has made Xerxes king, sole king of many kings, sole lord of many. I am Xerxes the great king, the king of kings, the king of the provinces with many languages, the king of this great earth far and near, son of king Darius the Achæmenian. Says Xerxes the king: Darius the king, my father, did many works through the protection of Ormazd, and on this hill he commanded to make his tablet and an image; yet an inscription he did not make. Afterwards I ordered this inscription to be written. May Ormazd, along with all the gods, protect me and my kingdom and my work.[45]

Years before this noble pronouncement was engraved in its imperishable arrowheads the empire of Assyria had come to an end. Nineveh was laid desolate in 606 B.C. by her Babylonian subjects assisted by the hordes of the Scythian king.[46] Within a very brief period of the history of these countries ethnic changes on a vast scale had taken place. New nations had appeared upon the scene. The Cimmerian nomads, followed closely by the wild tribes of Scythia, had penetrated southwards from the countries on the north of Caucasus and swarmed over the settled lands. Ancient kingdoms tottered and fell into the human surge. It is just at this period that we come to hear of the Armenians. All the evidence points to the conclusion that they entered their historical seats from the west,[47] as a branch of a considerable immigration of Indo-European peoples crossing the straits from Europe into Asia Minor and perhaps originally coming from homes in the steppes north of the Black Sea. Just as their kinsmen, invading Europe, drove the old races before them, such as the Etruscans, the Ligurians, and the Basques, so the Armenians seem to have filled the void which may have been created by the ravages of the Scythians and to have supplanted the subjects of the old Khaldian dynasty in the possession of the plains of the tableland.

That this revolution was not accomplished until at least as late as the fifth century before Christ may be gathered from the pages of Herodotus. The Armenians are known to this father of historians as inhabiting the mountainous country about the sources of the Halys and those of the Tigris, extending round towards the Mediterranean in the neighbourhood of Cilicia, their boundary on this side being the Euphrates.[48] On the other hand the Khaldians or Urardhians have not already disappeared, although they have obviously declined to a subordinate position. They are mentioned under the name of Alarodians,[49] and they are joined with the Matienians and Saspeires or Sapeires in the eighteenth satrapy of the Persian empire.[50] Herodotus leaves us in the dark as to the exact localities in which they lived, although he indicates that the seats of the Saspeires lay to the south of the Kolchians, who inhabited the southern shore of the Black Sea in the neighbourhood of the Phasis.[51] He informs us that Alarodians and Saspeires were both armed like the Kolchians, and the fact that the satrapies were organised with a view to ethnic affinities suggests the possibility that the two names first mentioned had come to be applied to one and the same race. Other considerations seem to point in the same direction. Down to a comparatively recent period we find a people called Chaldians (as written in the Greek character) or Chaldæans occupying the mountains between Trebizond and Batum. There can be little doubt that they represented the remnants of the Vannic people, and they were almost certainly the same as the Alarodians of Herodotus and probably the same as the Saspeires, who have perhaps left their name to the present town of Ispir.[52] When the Armenians had expelled the ancient inhabitants from the settled country we know from a most interesting chapter in the Cyropædeia of Xenophon that the latter took refuge in the mountains. They fortified inaccessible peaks and lived by plunder, raiding down upon the plains.[53] Our knowledge of the geography may at this point assist our historical investigations; and we may be reasonably sure that we shall find the relics of the dispossessed Khaldians inhabiting the fastnesses of the peripheral ranges which border Armenia upon the north and south.

That this was the case in the northern region is proved by the long survival of the name Chaldia (= Khaldia) among those inhospitable heights. Professor Lehmann has collected with a thoroughness of which his countrymen alone seem capable, a catalogue of passages in Greek and Byzantine writers making mention either of the Chaldian people or of the province to which they gave their name.[54] That people are sometimes called Chaldæans in classical authors. But that this was an error seems sufficiently proved by the name of the province—Chaldia; by the survival side by side of the variant form—Chaldians, and by the practice of Armenian writers to distinguish between the name of the tribe on their northern frontiers and that of the Chaldæans. Chaldia with the capital Trebizond formed one of the military themes of the Byzantine empire; and I should like to add yet another reference to the lists of Professor Lehmann, this one taken from the travels of the Castilian ambassador, Don Ruy Gonzalez Clavigo, in the year 1404. Setting out from Trebizond on his way to Erzinjan, we find him travelling on the third day out through the snowy mountains of the province of Chaldia to the castle of Tzanich which stood on a crag; and on the morrow, in the evening, he arrives at the castle of the duke of Chaldia, where all caravans pay toll. The territory formed a part of the empire of the Grand Comneni; and the name has survived to the present day as that of a diocese of the Greek Church with the capital Gümüshkhaneh on the road from Trebizond to Baiburt.[55]

It is not so easy to trace the remnants of this ancient people in the southern zone of mountains. Their presence there is attested by the march of Xenophon with the relics of the Ten Thousand. A body of Chaldæan or, more properly, of Chaldian mercenaries oppose his passage of the Bohtan branch of the Tigris.[56] They are described as of independent spirit and warlike nature, and, like the Karduchi, the modern Kurds, as still maintaining their political freedom. One is tempted to enquire whether the present so-called Chaldæan or Assyrian Christians, who are spread about the districts in the neighbourhood of Julamerik watered by the Great Zab, may not supply the necessary and missing link. But here we approach a thorny and difficult question, upon which the limitations of the present enquiry forbid us to touch.[57] It will be better capable of discussion when some unanimity shall have been attained upon the origin and ethnic affinities of the subjects of the old Vannic kings. The Chaldæan Christians are reputed to have fled into the mountains from Mesopotamia as late as the era of Timur. Baghdad and then Mosul would seem to have been the earlier seats of their patriarchate. The name Chaldæan is not one which they apply to themselves, although they believe in their “Assyrian” origin. There is held by some scholars to be the widest etymological and original difference between the name of the people who were called after the god Khaldis and that of the Babylonian Chaldees or Chaldæans. But the question of a possible racial or cultural link between them cannot at present be regarded as already negatived.[58]

Although the whole subject of the Vannic kingdom has scarcely yet arrived beyond its infantile stages, the knowledge already attained serves to throw quite a flood of light upon the early history of Armenia and of the Armenians. In a former chapter[59] I had occasion to remark the obscurity of Armenian chronicles prior to the advent of their Arsakid dynasty. The people known as Armenians to Darius and to classical writers have always been accustomed to prefer the name of their reputed progenitor, Hayk, the son of Togarmah, great-grandson of Japhet. They call themselves the Hayk or children of Hayk. They believe that their ancestor emigrated from Babylon in a north-westerly direction and ultimately arrived upon the shores of Lake Van. They style the line of their primeval kings the Haykian dynasty, and they relate in a fabulous manner the early struggles of this dynasty with the Assyrian Power. Their historians admit that for this period they are destitute of native annals, and they deplore the illiterateness of their forefathers. It would almost seem as if they had presented us with a darkened and legendary account of the history of their predecessors, possibly mingled with the experiences of their own race. That the people of the Vannic kings were not Armenians is proved by the distinctive character of their language. That their empire continued to exist until at least as late as the latter half of the seventh century before Christ is a fact which is beyond doubt. Nothing which we might be inclined to attribute to the Armenians has been found at Toprak Kala. On the other hand, we may gather from Xenophon that after a period of mutual distrust the Armenians intermarried with the Khaldians whom they had dispossessed.[60] To this extent they may inherit the blood of that ancient people which gave to Armenia a degree of civilisation which in many respects it has not been privileged since to enjoy.

The Armenians, like all capable and conquering races, borrowed much from the and attainments of the older inhabitants. Their most ancient cities—Van, Armavir, and perhaps Melazkert and Arjish—were foundations of the Vannic kings. The city of Hayk, as it has long been called, in the Hayotz-dzor, south-east of Van, has disclosed to the first essays of the modern archæologist the familiar features of a Khaldian settlement.[61] But Persian influences left upon them a more visible impression; and their supreme god during the pre-Christian era was not the Khaldis of the Vannic texts but the Ormazd of the inscription of Xerxes, “who has created this earth, who has created that heaven, who has created mankind.”[62]

Sequence of the Vannic Kings.[63]

Arame.—No inscriptions. Known only through those of the Assyrian king, in which he is styled king of Urardhu. Attacked in 860 or 859 B.C. by Shalmaneser II. and again in 857 or 856 B.C. in his capital, Arzasku (site?).[64] His cities as far as the sources of the Euphrates were taken by the same monarch in 845 or 844 B.C.

1. Sarduris I.—Son of Lutipris. Three inscriptions (Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, 1899, p. 315) on massive blocks of stone, forming part of a wall which extended from the western extremity of the rock of Van roughly in a northerly direction towards the harbour across the plain (Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, etc., 1897, p. 305). Appears to have been the initiator of the fortifications of the rock of Van. Bore the title: “king of the world (Šar Kiššati), king of Nairi.” Attacked about 833 B.C. by the general of Shalmaneser II.; styled king of Urardhu in the Assyrian inscriptions.

2. Ispuinis.—His son. Several inscriptions, in which he is more commonly associated with his son Menuas. The inscriptions are found as far apart as the Kelishin Pass between Rowanduz and Ushnei, the hill of Ashrut-Darga, east of the village of Salekhane, east of Van and the Van region, and Patnotz, north of Sipan. His title is given in the Vannic text of the Kelishin stele as: king of Nairi, king of Suras (i.e. of northern Syria[65]), inhabiting the city of Dhuspas; and in the inscription of Ashrut Darga as: king of Biaina, inhabiting the city of Dhuspas. Is probably the Uspina from whom the general of the Assyrian king Shamshi-Ramman III. (825–812 B.C.) captured 11 forts and 200 villages during his campaign against Nairi. His newly-discovered inscription near the Tabriz gate at Van appears to ascribe the construction of the works upon the citadel to himself, his father Sarduris, his son Menuas and his grandson Inuspuas (V. Anth. 1898, p. 575).

3. Menuas.—His son, associated with his father in the government, and afterwards with his own son, Inuspuas. To this king belong the largest number of the inscriptions yet discovered, ranging from the Kelishin Pass and the rock of Tashtepe, near the southern shore of Lake Urmi (Sayce, J.R.A.S. vol. xiv. p. 386; Belck, Z. Assyr. 1899, p. 313), the latter of which commemorates his conquests in the kingdom of Minni (V. Anth. 1894, p. 481) in the east, to Palu on the Lower Murad in the west; and from Van and the Van regions in the south to Hasan-Kala, near Erzerum, in the north. Perhaps his most important conquest was that of a great portion of the valley of the Araxes on the northern side of the Ararat system. Menuas may be regarded as the founder of the original garden city of Van, which probably occupied a somewhat different position than at the present day, and extended to the borders of the lake, where it received the waters of the canal since called the Shamiram Su, coming through Artemid—a work on a great scale, which we now know to have been constructed principally by this monarch, and which provided the volume of irrigation necessary for an extensive settlement. Records his conquests. Extensively restored Melazkert (Z. Assyr. 1892, p. 262; V. Anth. 1898, pp. 569 seq.) and founded Arzwapert, north-east of Arjish. His title is: the great king, the king of Biaina, inhabiting the city of Dhuspas.

4. Argistis I.—His son. Numerous inscriptions which show that he extended the conquests of Menuas, especially towards the north. These inscriptions are found as far north as Kanlija, near Alexandropol, and Sarikamish, on the road from Kars to Erzerum, by which route he probably advanced or retired from the districts north of the Ararat system. From those at Van, which are in fact detailed annals of his conquests, we learn that he met and overcame the armies of Assyria on more than one occasion in the regions south-east of Lake Urmi. His reign represents the culminating point of Vannic empire. He ascribes to himself works upon the rock and in the city of Van; and he was the founder of the city of Armavir in the valley of the Araxes (V. Anth. 1896, p. 313). He bore the title of: the great king, the king of Biaina, inhabiting the city of Dhuspas.

5. Sarduris II.—His son. Numerous inscriptions, distributed over a large area of country, one being found in the south-east corner of Lake Gökcheh, another (discovered by us) near the western summit of the Bingöl Dagh,[66] and yet another as far west as the Euphrates near Malatia in Asia Minor. The first and last record conquests in those countries. Ascribes to himself works upon the rock and in the city of Van, and gives a list of his conquests, including some over the Assyrian monarch Ashur-nirari II., 754–745 B.C. (V. Anth. 1898, pp. 570–77). But these successes were followed by disasters which dealt a severe blow at the Vannic kingdom. With the accession of Tiglath-Pileser III. of Assyria (745–727 B.C.) a new area is initiated in the relations of these two great Powers of the day. The clash seems to have come in the year 743 and in connection with the endeavour of Tiglath-Pileser to possess himself of the strong place of Arpad between the present towns of Aleppo and Killis, the key of northern Syria, a country over which the Vannic kings had for several reigns upheld pretensions. Sarduris headed the league against the Assyrians and drew off the king from the siege of Arpad. He was, however, signally defeated “near Kistan and Khalpi, districts of Kummukh” (Kommagene), and pursued as far as “the bridge over the Euphrates, the boundary of his kingdom.” Subsequently, in 735 B.C., Tiglath-Pileser carried the war into the very heart of the Vannic country, and at length appeared before the city of Van. Sarduris was obliged to shut himself up in the impregnable citadel, while his adversary massacred his warriors and his people in the city at its feet, and erected a statue of himself in front of it. He then ravaged the territory of Sarduris over a space of some 450 miles, meeting with no opposition anywhere. (For the sequence of these events, made known to us by the Assyrian inscriptions, see V. Anth. 1896, pp. 321 seq., and Smith’s Assyria, London, S.P.C.K. 1897, pp. 83 seq.). Sarduris increased the importance of the city of Armavir, and ascribes to himself works upon the citadel and in the city of Van. Bore the title: king of kings, king of the land of Suras, king of Biaina, inhabiting the city of Dhuspas. Styled king of Urardhu in the Assyrian inscriptions.

6. Rusas I.—His son. The author of at least two important extant inscriptions, that of Kölani-Girlan (Alutshalu), on the face of a rock overlooking Lake Gökcheh, and that of Topsanä (Sidikan), in the district of Rowanduz in Kurdistan, discovered by Rawlinson and recently examined by Dr. Belck (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Berlin, 1899, pp. 99–132). The first records conquests and the restoration of a palace; the second, which has, however, not yet been published, conveys noteworthy facts bearing upon the relations with Assyria. We know from the Assyrian inscriptions that the Vannic kingdom was by no means crushed by the campaign of Tiglath-Pileser; for the son of Sarduris, this Rusas the First, displayed great activity in inciting the neighbouring principalities against the successor of the conqueror, Sargon (722–705 B.C.), among which may be specially mentioned the kingdom of Minni, south-east of Lake Urmi, and the almost impregnable territory of Mutsatsir or Ardinis near Rowanduz. Sargon tells us how, in 714 B.C., he penetrated into Mutsatsir, which contained a temple of the god Khaldis, the god of the Vannic kingdom; how its king Urzana fled, and how he plundered and burnt the city, rifled the temple and carried off the statues of the gods. He relates that Ursa, king of Urardhu (i.e. Rusas I.), upon hearing of this disaster to his ally and of the carrying off of the god, committed suicide. The contents of the inscription of Topsanä throw doubt upon this latter statement. They are to the effect that Rusas restored Urzana to his kingdom, led his armies as far as “the mountains of Assyria,” and restored the offerings to Khaldis in Mutsatsir.

If, as seems probable, the Rusas of the shattered stele of Keshish Göl near Van be this first king of that name, then we must ascribe to this monarch the various works which are mentioned in that inscription (Sayce, No. lxxix.), and which, as Messrs. Belck and Lehmann have conclusively shown, should be referred to Toprak Kala, an eminence from the plain some little distance east of the rock of Van and close to the present garden town. These works appear to have been: the constitution of the Keshish Göl into a reservoir, the conduct of its waters to the Rusahina, or city of Rusas, as distinct from Dhuspas; the laying out of this new city, with numerous vineyards and gardens, and the building of a palace there. Rusas I. may therefore be regarded as the author of the transference of the site of the garden town from the south to the east of the rock of Van, where it was protected by the heights of Toprak Kala. The necessary irrigation was drawn from the Keshish Göl instead of or in addition to that derived from the canal of Menuas. The change was probably made in consequence of the destruction by Tiglath-Pileser of the old town, although he was unable to effect the capture of the citadel or rock of Van (Z. Ethnologie, 1892, pp. 141 seq.; V. Anth. 1893, p. 220; Z. Assyr. 1894, pp. 349 seq.; Deutsche Rundschau, Christmas 1894, pp. 411 seq.; V. Anth. 1898, p. 576; Z. Assyr. 1899, p. 320). Rusas I. is styled Ursa, king of Urardhu, in the Assyrian inscriptions. Those of the Vannic Monarchy, hitherto published, do not furnish a title.

7. Argistis II.—His son. The mention of this ruler in a Vannic text was discovered by Messrs. Belck and Lehmann in an inscription on a shield from the temple at Toprak Kala, now in the British Museum (Z. Assyr. 1894, pp. 82–99; cp. Z. Assyr. 1892, pp. 263 seq.; V. Anth. 1895, p. 595); and two of his own inscriptions have recently been found by these investigators in the neighbourhood of Arjish (V. Anth. 1898, p. 573). They have not yet been published. This prince is alluded to in the Assyrian annals. He appears to have endeavoured to repeat the tactics of Sarduris III. against Tiglath-Pileser III., and to have succeeded in inciting the king of Kummukh (Kommagene) against Sargon. But his efforts only resulted in the subjugation of Kummukh by the Assyrian monarch in 708 B.C. (Smith’s Assyria, 1897, p. 116).

8. Rusas II.—His son. So known to us from the inscription on the shield above mentioned (Z. Assyr. 1894, pp. 82–99, and 339 seq.; V. Anth. 1895, p. 596). Two new inscriptions of this king have been found by Dr. Belck at Adeljivas (V. Anth. 1898, p. 573), in which he is stated to have conquered the Hittites and Moschians. He is also mentioned on a clay tablet discovered by Messrs. Belck and Lehmann at Toprak Kala (Van). He was the contemporary of Esarhaddon of Assyria (681–668 B.C.), and is mentioned in an Assyrian inscription of that reign (H. Winckler, Altorientalische Forschungen, 2nd ser. vol. i. 1898, p. 41; and see Z. Assyr. 1894, p. 341).

9. Erimenas.—Known only from an inscription on a shield from the temple at Toprak Kala, now in the British Museum, as being the father of Rusas III.

10. Rusas III.—His son. Rebuilt the temple of Khaldis on Toprak Kala (shield inscriptions in the British Museum published by Prof. Sayce, No. lii. in J.R.A.S. 1882, pp. 653 seq. For Tuprak Kilissa read Toprak Kala, Van, and cp. Z. Assyr. 1892, p. 266; Z. Assyr. 1894, p. 97 and pp. 339 seq.; V. Anth. 1895, p. 595). An inscription of this king has been found at Armavir (Sayce, lxxxv.). Sent an embassy to Ashur-bani-pal of Assyria about 655 B.C. (Z. Assyr. 1894, p. 342). Bore the title: the great king, inhabiting the city of Dhuspas.

11. Sarduris III.—Known through the Assyrian inscriptions as having sent an embassy to Ashur-bani-pal about 644 B.C. (Z. Assyr. 1894, p. 342).

III.—Van towards the Close of the Nineteenth Century

With the single exception of the remains of a mosque enriched with traceries and Arabic legends in a style worthy of the best traditions of Saracenic art, there remains no vestige in Van of any period of prosperity and splendour subsequent to the era of the pre-Armenian kings. It is true that the whole region is subject to seismic influences, and that many of the monuments of later ages may have succumbed through this cause. There exists a tradition that the isolation of the rock of Van itself is due to an earthquake in very ancient times, resulting in its severance from the heights adjacent on the east. Several visitations of considerable severity have probably occurred during the historical period; thus we learn that in the year 1648 of the Christian era one-half of the wall of the fortified city, as well as churches, mosques and private houses, were shattered by successive shocks and fell to the ground.[67] But it is at least doubtful whether posterity has been deprived of many treasures by this agency or by the scourge of such a destroyer as Timur. Van must have occupied a subordinate position among the capitals of the Achæmenian empire; and her ancient temples, together with the structures of her former magnificence, appear to have been demolished at a very early date. A restoration is ascribed to an Armenian king of the Haykian dynasty, who is said to have lived a little prior to the Asiatic conquests of Alexander the Great. But the very fact that this monarch is named Van, and is related to have rechristened the city of Semiramis after himself, invests the story with a fabulous character.[68] Greater credit may be attached to the statement of Moses of Khorene that the place was rebuilt by the first ruler of the Armenian line of the Arsakid or Parthian kings.[69] A colony of Jews, with the high priest of their nation, were settled in Van by one of his successors, the contemporary of King Mithridates of Pontus and his ally against the Roman Power.[70] These Jewish captives appear to have prospered in their new seats; and about the middle of the fourth century of our era they are said to have numbered 18,000 families, who were again transported into captivity, this time into Persia, by the ruler of the new empire which had arisen in Asia, the Sasanian king Shapur.[71] Neither Arsakids nor Sasanians appear to have laid much store by the city; and, indeed, the centres of political gravity in the Asiatic world had undergone a marked change since Assyrian times. The tableland of Persia had become incorporated into the imperial systems of Asia, giving ready access into the Armenian highlands. Europe had already appeared upon the changing scene of Oriental despotisms, and the real struggle was between the East and the West. When the Mohammedan empire of the caliphs had supplanted that of the Sasanian fire-worshippers, Persia and Armenia formed parts of the new structure. With the decay of the edifice it might appear that a fresh era had dawned for the Christian Armenians, supported on the west by their co-religionists of the Byzantine dominions, and capable of fortifying Van against the assaults of the Arabs operating from Baghdad and the lowlands in the south. In such circumstances was born the Armenian kingdom of Vaspurakan, which flourished for awhile during the Middle Ages, and of which this city was the capital. We have already glanced at its history while pursuing the annals of its contemporary at Ani, and have had to deplore the lack of cohesion among the Armenians at that period, which precluded them from playing a part of first-rate importance in the world movements of the time. We have seen the kinglets of Van bowing the head to the Seljuk invasion and creeping for safety into the bosom of the Byzantine empire.[72] Perhaps we have not overlooked the picturesque interest of the pact they concluded, under which the heirs of the Romans took over the city of Sarduris and Menuas as an outpost of the civilised world. After the Byzantines had been carried away by the storm of barbarism the annals of Van, in so far as it is possible to follow them, are of scarcely more than local interest. The place must have settled down to that long spell of half-conscious existence under which it sleeps and heaves and moans at the present day. Its garrison of Turkomans offered a prolonged resistance to the armies of Timur; and, if the citadel was indeed virgin after the lapse of ages, to the savage Tartar belongs the boast of having torn her defences away. When Van was visited by a European traveller at the commencement of the sixteenth century, the Persian Shahs of the Safavid dynasty were in nominal ownership and a Kurdish chieftain in real possession of the fortress. This individual went so far as to coin money with his own stamp; but he was ejected after a prolonged siege by the general of Shah Ismail the First (A.D. 1502–24) and the inhabitants brought over to Persian allegiance.[73] In the year 1534 the keys of the city were brought to the vizier of the Ottoman sultan, Suleyman the First.[74] The Ottoman Turks thus became masters of a fortress on the side of Persia which they converted into one of the strongest places in their empire. In the seventeenth century it is said to have fallen to Shah Abbas I.,[75] but it was recovered by the Turks. Their rule has perpetuated the abuses of the Kurds; and in the forties of the nineteenth century Van was again in the tender keeping of a rebellious chief of that turbulent people, Khan Mahmud.

In spite of all these revolutions the Armenian people still maintain themselves in large numerical preponderance in the city and neighbourhood of Van. It was about the shores of this lake that, according to their traditions, their ancestor, Hayk, established some of their earliest seats. For at least 2500 years they have kept their hold upon them, and have become accustomed and inured to see the empires come and pass, reaping their harvest of tears from the Armenian peasantry. Since the impressions which I am about to record were committed to paper a fresh massacre has decimated their community. And now, as I put them together, comes a piteous appeal from the American missionaries, despairing of preserving the lives of the famished survivors who have lost their livelihood, but begging for help on behalf of their crowded orphanages. The perspective of history helps to correct the sentiment of blank despondency engendered by the contemporary condition of the Armenian inhabitants. At the time of my visit they numbered two-thirds of the population of the town and gardens of Van. This proportion has no doubt been reduced by recent events; but it is almost equally certain to be redressed. The fecundity of this people is not less remarkable than their persistency; and their presence is needed by the officials who exploit the land. It would seem that the Armenian inhabitants of Van have been increasing during the present century. There can be little doubt that the proportion which their numbers bear to those of the Mussulmans has been tending to become greater. Consul Brant records that in the year 1838 Van contained not less than 7000 families, of which only 2000 are ascribed by him to the Armenians.[76] This estimate represents a population of about 35,000 souls, of whom 25,000 would be Mussulmans and 10,000 Armenians. The total agrees approximately with the most reliable statistics which I was able to obtain. At the time of my visit the town, including the gardens, was believed to be inhabited by 30,000 people; but the Mussulmans numbered only 10,000 to the 20,000 of the Armenians. I received the impression that these figures were correct in respect of the proportion of the Armenian and the Mussulman element. In the aggregate they appeared to be a little too low. If we include the population of the caza or neighbourhood of Van, we shall probably not err much in arriving at a total of at least 64,000, made up of 47,000 Armenians and 17,000 Mussulmans. Consul Taylor in 1868 reckoned the inhabitants “of Van and the neighbourhood,” by which he would appear to mean of the town and caza, at 17,000 Mussulmans and 42,000 Christians. For Christians one might almost write Armenians.[77]

When one contemplates the vast extent of the garden suburbs and the closely-packed quarters of the walled town, it is difficult to believe that not more than 30,000 people inhabit so imposing a place. Let my reader refer to the plan which accompanies this chapter. I based it originally on one published in the fine book of M. Müller-Simonis,[78] and I filled it in during my daily rides. It at once enables me to dispense with a tedious topographical narrative, and serves to show the distribution of Armenians and Mussulmans. On the left of the paper is represented the rock of Van with the cuneiform inscriptions and the city or fortified town at its southern base. On the right extends the hill ridge of Toprak Kala, commencing on the west with the bold crag of Ak Köpri, and making a bay towards the gardens as it stretches in an easterly direction, presenting the side of what is actually a nearly meridional mass. Between the two lies the plain—a bower of leafy gardens, most dense along a line drawn south of Ak Köpri, but continuing westwards from the southerly outskirts of those thickly-planted quarters to the district of Shamiram or Semiramis, south of the citadel. Mussulmans and Armenians are distributed over the area of these suburbs, and they share between them the population of the walled town. Some quarters in the gardens are peopled exclusively by Armenians, some by Mussulmans, and some by both alike. The names which I have placed upon the plan are in some cases those of quarters, and in others of blocks of houses and enclosures. The citadel or rock of Van is occupied by the garrison alone, and none of the townsmen are permitted to ascend that delicious platform.

PLAN of VAN

Engraved and printed by Wagner & Debes, Leipzig

Published by Longmans, Green & Co., London

The tall poplars and luxuriant undergrowth hide the houses of the suburbs as you approach Van from the plain in the south. But penetrate within the foliage and you will find clusters of habitations which grow in frequency and importance as the central avenue is reached. Along that well-trodden thoroughfare—filled at morning or in the evening by a stream of pedestrians and riders, wearing the fez and more rarely the turban, some in flowing Oriental robes, others attired in European dress—a number of stately residences abut on the road with their gardens around them, and dissemble the squalor which for the most part reigns within. Extremely picturesque are some of these lofty houses, with verandahs disposed in various and fanciful manners, as may be seen in my illustration of the dwelling of a wealthy Armenian inside the precincts of the walled city ([Fig. 127]). The fact that a large number of the inhabitants of the garden town proceed daily to their different places of business in the city partly accounts for the paradoxical smallness of the population, which ebbs and flows between the two. Here in the gardens are the private residences of the Vali or Governor of Van and of the principal officials. Most of the rich Armenian merchants have their dwellings among these quarters, where are also situated the various European Consulates. It is here that are housed the principal schools, and are located the most considerable of the churches. It is therefore scarcely correct to speak of the garden town as a suburb; far rather does it bear to the narrow and crowded streets at the base of the citadel a relation analogous to that of the West End of London towards the City and the Strand.

Fig. 127. House of an Armenian Merchant at Van.

Among these groves we spent a pleasant and fairly restful fortnight, housed in the empty apartments of the British Consulate near the cross-roads of Khach-poghan. There, in the great room containing the safe, and the scroll enumerating the consular fees payable by the only two subjects of Her Britannic Majesty who, besides the Consul, are resident at Van, my companions erected their camp beds. Mine was placed in a little chamber on the further side of the spacious landing, which was open to the air. Here I could receive visits and read and write. My windows, paned with glass, looked out upon a sylvan scene of fairy-like character. All this verdure is produced by irrigation; and it is the peculiar quality of such artificial sustenance that plants and trees preserve the perfection which in northern latitudes can only be admired in a conservatory. The storm clouds, dissolving in rain, do not disturb this southern climate and play havoc with the leaves. Moss and mildew are unknown beneath this dry, continental atmosphere and the rays of this brilliant sun. The air is saturated with light, streaming from a heaven which is always blue. Into the liquid canopy start the needle forms of the poplars, forced from the soaking earth with wand-like stems. Apples and peaches and pomegranates—all the hardier fruits which can withstand cold winters—attain a beauty of form and an excellence of flavour which would do credit to better gardeners. Here at Van they grow much as they please. Melons and cucumbers find just the conditions under which they thrive. All this pulsing and exuberance extends unchecked through the long summer; and when the autumn is at length at hand, towards the end of October, the change is only marked by the gradual passing over of shades of green into shades of gold. The leaves remain on their branches until the withered stalks can hold no longer; but of violence there is rarely a trace. The sky becomes black and rumbles; some showers fall, and Sipan is clothed in white to his lower slopes. But the passing darkness of the day only enhances the goldness of a foliage which awaits the first coming of the snows. Such were the phases of the year, which, towards the middle of November, were silently being accomplished before our windows.

These cross-roads, Khach-poghan, are situated almost in the centre of the most thickly-populated districts of the garden town. On the whole it is a painful impression which one receives from daily intercourse with one’s fellow-creatures at Van. The salient feature of the situation is the war between two opposite elements—the one of restless energy, measured almost by a European standard; the other passive, suspicious, fitfully aflame. Neither is endowed with the capacity of government; and the least numerous and least capable rule. The Armenian subject majority spend lives which are certainly laborious and create whatever wealth the city possesses. The Mussulman dominant minority grow fat in the mostly highly-paid sinecures, or employ the most keen-witted among the Christians to devise ingenious schemes for robbing the public or the public funds. Over all presides an imported official of little ability and no education; and a few troops, under the orders of an independent commander, who is a centre for intrigue, redress the balance in favour of the least enlightened and most corrupt.

Things are in the habit of going on in this haphazard manner, jolting and creaking along. But within the last decade or two a new spirit has been born, which my reader knows under the name of the Armenian movement. Here at Van, no less than elsewhere, it has been a clumsy birth, as might be expected from its parentage. It springs from the two elements above indicated, and flourishes most in the circumstances described. In its ultimate origin it is at once a product of economical conditions and a reflection of the spirit of the times. It causes the old elements to ferment beyond recognition and to assume the most incongruous shapes.

The phenomenon is most remarkable in the case of the Turks. One may remark, by way of parenthesis, that there does not appear to be any evidence of an actual settlement of Turks in Van or the neighbourhood. Among the Mussulman inhabitants of the town about six families or clans, comprising each on the average some fifty persons, may be classed as of Turkish descent. Of these the most prominent are the Timur Oglu; then the Jamusji Oglu, or sons of the buffalo driver, and the Topchi Oglu, or sons of the artilleryman. From their ranks was formed a kind of oligarchy, which ruled the city in former times, and, as was natural, developed a fine taste for faction and had its counterparts of Guelphs and Ghibellines. The passion for intrigue has survived among them longer than the ability to indulge it in methods of their own choosing. Their power has been much curtailed by the progressive centralisation of all government at Constantinople. But they still maintain their hold upon much of the machinery of the administration, filling the offices which are not under the direct patronage of the imperial authorities, such as the presidencies of the municipality, the administrative council, and the judicial courts. With the exception of these families there are very few real Turks in Van; and in the country districts the Mussulman population are probably for the most part of Kurdish origin. They speak both Turkish and Kurdish. The more peaceable among them, who are accustomed to settled pursuits, disown the name of Kurds and affect that of Osmanli, or Turks of the ruling race. They do not belong to any Kurdish tribe. Their sympathies are on the whole on the side of law and order; and their aversion to the turbulence of the tribal Kurds counteracts and perhaps outweighs their jealousy of their Christian neighbours.

An enlightened Government would seize upon these points of union and forge from them strong links to connect society in defence of common interests against the excesses of the Kurds. Van is situated upon the threshold of the Kurdish mountains, close to the immemorial strongholds of Kurdish chieftains, whence they descend with their motley followers into the plains. No sooner had the centralising tendencies in the Ottoman Empire come near to establishing upon a permanent basis the unquestioned supremacy of Ottoman rule in these remote districts, than the Armenian movement commenced to make itself felt. The truth is that those tendencies were of impure origin. The officials at Constantinople were concerned with nothing less than the extension of good government. But they were clever enough to perceive that such modern inventions, as, for instance, the telegraph, gave them the means of controlling for their own purposes distant territories which in former times had been left more or less to themselves. The telegraph substituted the authority of a clique in the Palace at Constantinople for the rough-and-ready but often honest and, on the whole, well-meaning methods of a Turkish pasha of the old school. It is quite possible that the good old pashas would have brought about the ruin of the country, which, indeed, was in effect ruined long before they appeared on the scene. But things might have gone on longer; their rule could not have cost one quarter the existing misery; and the travelled person would at least have preferred spending his life in their shadow than within reach of the wings of the eagle of Russia and the quills of her bureaucrats.

From one cause or another the whole character of Mussulman government has undergone a marked change within recent years. It is scarcely possible to recognise in the ruling circles of such a city as Van the Turkey of our fathers. Fear and suspicion are written upon every face. These passions are transmitted to the rank and file of their co-religionists; the air is full of rumours of Armenian plots. In the old days there would have been a riot and quite possibly a massacre; and everything would settle down. At present a swarm of spies, under the direction of emissaries from the Palace, keep the old sores open and daily discover new opportunities for inflicting wounds. All the vices of the Russian bureaucracy have been copied by willing disciples in the capital, and sent down to the provinces to serve as a model. One may assert without exaggeration that life is quite intolerable for an inhabitant of this paradise of Van.

The spies smell out a so-called plot and denounce its authors to the Governor, who, poor man, is tired to death with their reports. If he fail to follow it up, he is accused at Constantinople, and runs the risk of losing his post. If he interfere, his action may quite well lead to bloodshed at a time when his efforts at pacification were commencing to bear fruit. I gathered that a certain Vali of Bitlis had discovered a working solution of the difficulty. His principle was to go one better than the informers, and himself to organise a huge plot against himself. When this sedition had been quelled by his soldiers just at the time that suited him best, his zeal would be rewarded by the despatch of a decoration from the Palace, and he would be left in peace for some time.

Of course the power of the Kurds is daily on the increase in such circumstances as these. The Palace leans towards them; their petty leaders are taken to the capital and invested with high orders. The wretched puppet of a Governor does not dare to overawe them, as even his slender resources would well enable him to do. On the other hand, the former docile, cringing spirit of the Armenians has given place to a different temper. Partly they are goaded by the spies into so-called rebellion; and, in part, they have been aroused to a consciousness of their own real miseries by the persecution of the most respected of their clerical leaders and by the spread of education.

The Armenian movement has had the effect of resolving their community at Van into two distinct parties. The one is animated by the spirit of the present Katholikos, His Holiness Mekertich Khrimean. The memory of his noble life, spent so largely among them, outlives his long absence from their midst. The evidence of his work and example is spread over the city, and may readily be recognised in the demeanour of those who have shared his thoughts and aims. His last period of residence in this, his native place, would appear to have come to an end in 1885. At that time he was bishop of Van as well as abbot of Varag. His labours were directed to the education of his countrymen; “educate, educate”—the girls no less than the boys—may be said to have been his watchword. His personal influence and the power of the pulpit, when occupied by such a preacher, were thrown into the endeavour to awake those dormant feelings which few human beings, however much their spirit may have been broken, are entirely without. To realise their manhood, and what they owed to themselves and their race was the constant exhortation which ran through his sermons and penetrated to the inmost selves of his flock. Schools sprang up in abundance beneath the magic of his individuality, and teachers were imbued with that enthusiasm for their high calling without which their profession savours of drudgery and tends to produce a similar impression upon their pupils. But the spirit of truth is too often akin to the spirit of revolution, and there are bonds from without as well as from within. When the scales fell from the eyes of this downtrodden people, the naked ugliness of their lot as helots was revealed. Their native energies were transferred from the domain of money-making to that of social improvement and political emancipation. The craft of their minds, abnormally quickened by the long habit of oblique methods, exchanged the sphere of commerce for that of politics. What wonder if they infused their politics with a character at which your superior European would sometimes frown and more often smile? He has been trained by a long spell of comparatively pure government; while the Armenians have been a subject race for over nine centuries, are honeycombed with the little vices inherent in such a status, and are quite unused and as yet unfit to govern themselves.

So the old Armenian nature underwent and is still experiencing a process of fermentation and change. At the same time it threw off some of the characteristics which had been hitherto among the most pronounced. Rashness and contempt for calculation took the place of the old qualities of servility and time-serving. In the domain of the community these discarded qualities were represented by individuals and by a party. The watchword of this party has been submission to the powers that are, and the solid argument which underlies the counsels of those who inspire it is based upon the apparent hopelessness of resistance and the tragic failures which such resistance has already involved. But the sympathy of the impartial spectator can scarcely be enlisted on their side, even if his judgment incline to their views. They are not the new Armenians, chastened by sorrow and sobered by reflection, but, for the most part, the very dregs of the old. Their leader in Van is the bishop of Lim, commonly known as Bishop Poghos. This prelate has long been resident in the city. His talents have been employed to counteract the influence of the present Katholikos; and he has stood at the head of his opponents. When Khrimean departed from his see he named Bishop Poghos his vekil or deputy, it would seem in the hope of promoting peace. But the inhabitants do not appear to have favoured this solution, and the bishop has not held the office for the last several years. He did me the honour of coming to see me—a man of great bulk of body and in advanced years. His features are of the blunt order characteristic of so many Armenians; and one might doubt whether he could ever have understood the personality of such a man as Khrimean.

Such, perhaps, is not an unfair analysis of society at Van and of the transformation which the principal elements have been undergoing. Several massacres of the Armenians have done less to exasperate them than the importation of Russian methods into their daily life. The place swarms with secret police. Should a Mussulman harbour a grudge against an Armenian, he endeavours to excite the suspicions of one of these agents; the house is entered and searched from roof to cellar. Perhaps some harmless effusion of patriotic sentiment is found in the desk of a son of the house, a student. The poem is seized and the youth thrown into prison. Arms are said to be concealed, and a pistol may be discovered. The whole family is at once rendered suspect. One might multiply these instances almost to any extent; but my object is not to excite resentment against the Turkish authorities, only to show the folly of their procedure. If they would only return to their old traditions and try to govern less, the situation would be immensely improved.

I feel sure that such counsel would be appreciated and even tendered by the Pasha if he were consulted by those from whom he takes his orders. But it would have been in doubtful taste to speak one’s mind out to him, the intercourse between us having been confined to the courtesy of an exchange of visits. Nor was he the man to enter usefully into a discussion of the subject. He had come to Van in the pursuit of his profession of Governor some twenty months ago. A Mussulman Georgian of good family, whose ancestral estates lie in Russian territory, not far from the coast of the Black Sea, he could probably lay better claim to a preference for straight over crooked dealing than to any of the more special qualities of a statesman. The Mohammedans who emigrate from the Russian provinces into the dominions of the Sultan are most often those who are unable to sustain competition with stronger elements, given fuller economical play under Russian rule. The Vali of Van, notwithstanding his name and a certain dignity of presence, could scarcely hope to occupy a position of equal importance in the empire of the Tsar. I found in him a man of little or no education, about fifty years of age. Tall and of large frame, his features were almost handsome, except, perhaps, the mouth. He habitually wore a smile upon his face. There he would sit in his long, bare room from morning until evening, sipping coffee with his visitors and puffing cigarettes. He appeared to encounter all kinds of difficulties in the vicarious management of his property in Russia; but one could not doubt that the comely beard would grow white in the Turkish service, and the groves of Kolchis know him no more.