CHAPTER 6
THE RUSSIAN FRONTIER

The Invasion Route - The Turkish Soldier - The Forgotten
City of Ani - Frontier Relations - Armenian Churches -
The Dawn of Gothic Architecture?

In the office of the Vali of Kars there hangs a map. Its central portion is detailed, and marked, in black letters, Kars. The surrounding portions are blank, and marked, in similar black letters, Artvin, Erzurum, Agri, Soviyet Rusya - as casually as though Russia were no more than another vilayet, bordering that of Kars. Yet that hundred-and-eighty-mile stretch of the map which borders 'Rusya', together with another seventy miles in the province of Artvin, to the north of it, is the only stretch of the Iron Curtain (apart from a brief frozen stretch in the far north of Norway) where no buffer satellite separates Russia from the West. Here alone does the army of an Atlantic Power stand face to face with home-based Russian divisions.
    As a major defence commitment the frontier is shorter. To the north it is defended by the Pontic 'Taurus', over which I had come; to the south by the Ararat range, and - on the frontier of Persia - by the mountains of Kurdistan. But in between these natural barriers lies the stretch of plain, some sixty miles wide, which Kars commands. In four invasions of Anatolia the Russians have come this way, and they will surely come this way if they venture on a fifth, forcing the peasants to abandon their low stone houses and move westwards across the plateau with their herds and their possessions towards Erzincan and Sivas, as they have done before. This time a modern steam-roller will be after them; but this time it will face world war. Kars will inevitably be its first objective. The old rock fortress is of no value in modern warfare, and the town may well fall again. The main Turkish defence base is at Erzurum, a hundred-and-thirty miles back, where the plain narrows to a point between converging ranges of mountains. Kars today is merely an advanced garrison town, serving as a base for the force which holds the frontier itself.
    On my journey to Ani, the ruined Armenian capital on the frontier, I was accompanied by a Turkish captain, as guide and interpreter. His name was Hikmet, and he spoke good German, but promised to do his best in English. He had a large, plastic face, which puckered in an agony of concentration as he strove to stifle the German and extract the right English words. The two-pronged Russian peak of Alagoz, 12,000 feet high, floated ahead of us on the clouds as we bumped in our jeep across the rolling prairie. The threshing-floors in the villages were like so many circus rings, with small boys driving horse sledges around them at a hilarious gallop, and their fathers thrashing on their oxen in a vain effort to compete. Here and there, in the distance, was a gaunt ruined building which might have been an Armenian church. We passed a luminous blue lake, inhabited by thousands of wild geese, and presently reached the company headquarters where Captain Hikmet had recently served. He showed me proudly the vegetable garden which his platoon had planted on the dusty, stony soil, with the star and crescent striving to grow in grass, and introduced me to his brother officers, battle-dressed and hardened as desert rats. The troops lived in long, clean barrack-rooms, with stone floors and a stove at either end, their arms, well oiled, in piles down the centre, and two long, wooden 'shelves' against the walls, where they slept in line, at right angles to the wall, on bare boards and blankets.
    The life of the Turkish soldier is hard. He receives a mere token wage of a shilling or two a month. His family supplements this as a matter of course, and supports his wife, if he has one, regarding his service rather as a form of dedication to the State. But here on the frontier he has little to spend his money on. He does not drink; his cigarettes, at special canteen prices, cost him a penny-farthing for twenty. If he travels on the roads, lorries and buses will usually carry him for nothing. He is housed and clothed and well fed, being entitled to ten ounces of meat a day, with ample vegetables, rice and cheese. Captain Hikmet claimed that he was better fed than the Russian soldier across the frontier.
    "They give him black bread," he said, "and twice a week they give him peeg!" ...at which he shuddered with proper Moslem horror.
    I asked the captain what Russian forces lay ahead of us, and he re-plied, with an ironic laugh: "I suppose we have a platoon to each one of their companies and a company to each one of their battalions." But then he told me a story, such as Turks enjoy, of how, in a frontier dispute over a water-cap, a Turkish sentry had killed five Russian soldiers, single-handed.
    The Russians, on this south Caucasian front, have some twenty-five divisions, a force slightly larger than the whole Turkish Army, of which two-thirds are based in Central and Western Turkey. Their force is based largely on Leninakan, once Alexandropol, and on Erivan, both in Soviet Armenia. It is composed of three armies, and in-cludes a corps of Georgians and a corps of Armenians - troops who can be trusted to fight the Turk with enthusiasm. It is believed that no troops of Tartar or Turki stock, apart from Azerbaijanis of Communist persuasion, are included in it. Moreover the greater part of the Turki civilian population has been removed to Siberia or to other parts of Russia. Turks in a frontier village recall a night in 1946, when they heard a terrible commotion, followed by an uncanny silence, from a Russian village opposite. Its inhabitants had been forcibly removed from their homes. They were largely of Turkish origin.
    To the north of us ran the railway from Erzurum and Kars to Leninakan and Tiflis, built as far as Sarikamis by the Russians, during their occupation, and recently converted to the broad gauge on the Turkish side of the frontier. Before the war this railway carried the trade between Turkey and Russia. Today only a bi-weekly, single-coach Turkish train passes through the barbed wire and back again, carrying the odd Soviet diplomat as far as the junction with the Russian railway system. This is one of several gates in the Iron Curtain, which are otherwise kept firmly closed. Two are by bridges across the river frontier, farther south. There was a third bridge. But it disappeared one night in a violent thunderstorm, officially struck by lightning. The sounds of thunder and dynamite, said the captain slyly, are easily confused.
    As we drove on across the lonely plain, Alagoz shed its platform of clouds and stood firmly on the earth - Russian earth. To the south, on Turkish earth, the phantom dome of Ararat emerged for a moment from the distant haze, like a rival giant sentinel, then slowly vanished. We seemed to be heading straight for Russia, with no obstacle between, when there was a slight, sudden fall in the ground and a cleft opened ahead of us. I caught my breath with surprise, and even the captain exclaimed 'O-oh!' For on the brink of it, set alone in the midst of the infinite rolling downland, were the great brown walls and towers of a ruined city. This was Ani, and the cleft on which it stood had been carved through the downs by the Arpa Cay - the Harpasus, the Barley River. I walked slowly through the double city gateway, past the stone relief of a lion beneath a carved Armenian inscription, to be confronted on the inner wall by a swastika, inlaid in black stone. Around me, scattered over a wide expanse, were the architectural shapes, the cones and drums and blind arcades of a civilization utterly unfamiliar. It was an architecture with a mystery of its own, a promise of new aesthetic experience to be slowly absorbed and digested.
    Meanwhile a more momentous and more urgent mystery lay ahead. I found myself drawn involuntarily to the banks of the swift, muddy stream. For there, on the other side of it, a bare two hundred yards away, was Soviet Russia. I raised a finger towards the opposite bank. But Captain Hikmet hastily checked me.
    "Don't point," he said. "Please don't point." It's rude, I thought, recalling the injunctions of the nursery: rude to point at strangers, to point at Russia, the greatest stranger of all. For this muddy Arpa Cay, once the frontier between Armenia and Georgia, was today nothing less than the Iron Curtain itself, dividing the slave world from the free.
    Captain Hikmet was explaining. "The Russians," he said, "choose to be suspicious of us. We have meetings with them, once every two months or so, to discuss local frontier problems, and they like, whenever they can, to produce a whole dossier of trivial incidents, to suggest that we are threatening the peace. They are watching us now, of course, and if you point they may easily file a complaint that a tall man, disguised as a civilian, apparently a foreigner, was acting in an aggressive manner towards them."
    I looked across from the grassy Turkish slope to the identical Russian slope opposite. The Arpa Cay made a break which seemed purely accidental in the otherwise unbroken continuity of the landscape. To me that opposite slope showed not a sign of life or movement. In reality it was all eyes, and the two soldiers who guarded us, with their rifles at the ready, knew just where those eyes were, in their camouflaged defences and look-out posts. Their own eyesight was uncanny. They declared that they could see two Russian soldiers, wiring a new field telephone, and a man tending his bees below the crest of the hillside. I could see nothing - until a Russian lorry appeared from over the crest, and coasted slowly down the road to the unnaturally silent Russian village of Kharkov, about half a mile away. The landscape lay suspended in an unearthly stillness: the stillness of vigilance and tension. International frontiers, where neither side wants trouble, can be the quietest places in the world. But here was a quietness derived from strength, very different from the atmosphere on the Arpa Cay described by Hamilton ¹ in the eighteen-forties, when 'the Turks, weak and disorganized, helpless against their neigh-bour, and oppressed by their own rulers, leave the line of the frontier without a guard or a sentry, and their towns dismantled, in ruins, and unprotected by a single soldier, or piece of cannon'.
    Captain Hikmet told me more of the frontier meetings, between Turks and Russians. They are polite, punctilious affairs, held alternately on Turkish and Russian territory, and followed by a formal luncheon. The Turks usually kill a sheep for the occasion. The Russians supply caviar, and vodka and other delicacies. The Turks have learnt tactfully to turn their backs when the meal is over, to give the Russians the opportunity of finishing off the remains of a fare to which they are evidently unaccustomed. Conversation at the meal, through interpreters, is on strictly non-political topics. But once the Russian interpreter asked the Turkish interpreter for the name of some good book, on which he could improve his know-ledge of Turkish. The Turk promised to bring him a translation of Kravchenko's "I Chose Freedom".
    Official business is concerned, as a rule, with minor incidents. A Turkish cow or horse violates Soviet sovereignty, and is either shot dead or, after an interminable palaver, solemnly returned. Such incidents on the Turkish side are rare. Whereas the Turks plough their land and graze their herds right up to the frontier wire or the banks of the river, the Russians have moved most of their villages some miles back, creating a forbidden zone. They constantly urge the Turks to do the same, and thus avoid the risk of incidents. To this the Turkish reply is obvious.
    "We are," they say, "a democracy. Our people may live where they like and cultivate whatever land is theirs."
    The Turks declare that the Russians, all along the frontier, have a strip of land which is ploughed and raked but never sown: a tell-tale no-man's-land, where any footprint can at once be seen. Whether or not it is true, the story is symbolic. For this stretch of the Iron Curtain seems as much concerned to keep Russians from getting out as to keep Turks from getting in. Only two had in fact got out, during the past two years. One was a Red Army staff officer, armed with plans. The other was a peasant girl of sixteen, armed with a heavy sack. The sack was filled with loaves of hard, black bread. She must have been surprised by the new world in which she found herself: by the plentiful fare of the peasants, but equally by those groups around the radio in the coffee-shops, listening to the Parliamentary debates.
    Captain Hikmet echoed words which the Vali had said to me.
    "Do you know," he said, "when I look at Russia, barricaded behind this frontier, I begin to believe that she must really be afraid of us. I don't mean only afraid of our soldiers. I mean afraid of our democracy."
    It was tempting to believe that this could be the solution of the mystery beyond the Arpa Cay. Meanwhile I turned back to the mysterious shapes of Ani.
    The Turks are still sensitive on the topic of the Armenians: unnecessarily, since the massacres of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are now a matter of past Ottoman history: a deplorable but perhaps inevitable episode in the perennial struggle between East and West. The Turks, nevertheless, prefer to forget the Armenians. In Kars I had encountered the official Turkish 'line' on Armenia in general and Ani in particular. The Chief of Police had spoken of Ani as the historic city of Alp Arslan (its Seljuk conqueror). Dick Barton had assured me that it contained no Armenian ruins; and indeed he described the Armenian church at Kars as originally a mosque, in the Seljuk style. The colonel had taken the line that Armenia was largely a figment of American propaganda. All the buildings of Ani belonged to the Seljuk and later periods. This had been conclusively established, some fifty years ago, by a Russian professor who had unluckily disappeared on his homeward journey to, Moscow, before he had been able to tell the tale. It was well known, he added, that the Armenians, unlike the Turks, had no gift for architectural craftsmanship. The Vali had declared that Armenia ceased to exist as an independent state in the second century B.C., the period at which, in fact, it first assumed some degree of independence.
    Ani belongs to its final period of medieval renaissance. It blossomed from a fortress into a capital in the tenth century, at the height of the prosperity of the Bagratid dynasty of Armenian kings. Ashot III was crowned there under the auspices of the Baghdad Caliph, who provided the crown and dubbed him Shah-i-Armen, or Armenian Shah. The Byzantine Emperor later addressed him as Shahinshah of Great Armenia, the spiritual son of Caesar. One of his predecessors, another Ashot, had been arrayed in the purple and invested with his insignia in Constantinople. The dynasty, derived from a nobility which was Jewish in origin, had proved useful both to the crumbling caliphate and the crumbling empire, keeping in check the rebellious Arab emirs who harried their respective dominions. It was a stormy period, recorded by the Armenian historian John Katholikos, who denounces one of the emirs as a 'second Pharaoh, prince of wild-beasts, man-eater, astute serpent, Satan, foul-breathed basilisk'.¹ At times the Moslem horsemen would overrun the country, and the Armenians were 'like a harvest reaped by bad husbandmen amid encircling gloom and cloud'. For seven years, records Katholikos, ' we sow, but we do not reap; we plant, but gather not the fruit; the fig-tree bears not, and the vine and the olive-tree are barren. We collect a little and abandon the rest'. At other times there would be a respite. 'Our Saviour visited the country of the Armenians and protected their lives and property ... The harvests produced corn in excessive abundance; the cellars were filled with wine when the vintage had been gathered in. The mountains were in great joy and so were the herdsmen and the shepherds ... The chiefs and notables ... were free to bestow their leisure and zeal upon the construction of churches in solid stone, with which they graced the towns, the open country, and the desert places.' In Ani they constructed so many that it became known (like other places) as the 'city of a thousand and one churches'.
    Some twelve of them survive today within those great, forgotten walls, glowing darkly in their solitude against the rolling golden grassland. They are built from ample, fine-hewn blocks of stone, moulded by expert craftsmen, well faced and cleanly joined, coloured a deep terracotta, but alternating here and there with bands of pink and black and umber. Dating from the tenth century onwards, their forms and motifs are a blend of the strange and the familiar, born, or still being born, of the rival impulses of East and West. Often they have an air of experiment, of incongruity between appearance and reality. The strange conceals the familiar: the cone the dome, the flat surface the apse, the rectangle the cross, the ridge of roof the rounded vault. It is a style still flowering towards maturity, inspired, inventive, creative, destined to be cut short before its prime, but to spread its influence throughout the architecture of the civilized world.
    Strangest and most characteristic of its external forms is the drum - the rotunda - polygonal or circular, crowned by a cone. The Church of the Holy Saviour is a polygonal drum, with a circular drum, hardly smaller, surmounting it; then almost windowless walls, relieved with blind arcades and encircling bands of a blacker stone. This unbroken cylindrical form gives no inkling of the eight internal semicircular apses, rising narrowly to a height. The rectangular doorway has a classical moulding, but the band of sculptured stone-work, around the upper drum and its arcades, is of an oriental, geometric pattern. The chapel of St. Gregory is more complex in design. It stands above the 'Vale of Flowers', carved by a tributary of the Arpa Çay: a ravine honeycombed with caves, which sigh by night from the souls of those people of Ani who took refuge there during the siege. The twelve sides of the chapel are broken with arched doorways and slits of window, alternating with external niches, like those in the mihrab of a mosque, to balance six tall, pillared internal niches, like those of a Byzantine church. Within, a rounded cupola gives light to the cone-capped dome. The doorways and the pedi-ments of the niches are classical; but again the bands of stonework, around the arches, are oriental. The largest and most impressive of these drum-like buildings was the Palace Church of St. Gregory, built at the beginning of the eleventh century in imitation of a destroyed seventh-century church at Zvart'nots. Externally it was composed of three drums pierced with windows, one above the other in a dimin-ishing scale, and surmounted by the inevitable cone. Internally it was a quatrefoil, forming an apse and three open arcades, and surrounded by an ambulatory forming a complete circle. Today only the great, stone, circular floor of this church survives, with remnants of the piers which supported the dome, and vast, broken columns with capitals of an Ionic pattern.
    The rectangular churches of Ani are equally unfamiliar in their forms. One of them is the tall narrow rectangle of St. Gregory, with high-pitched roofs, which stands on the brink of the grassy cliff looking across the river into Russia. Beneath it are the ruined piers of a bridge, and beyond them, now on the Russian bank of the stream, the cone-shaped chapels of the monastery of Khosha Vank, where King Ashot was buried. The beauty of this church lies in the ornamental sculpture of its exterior. In sculpture, as in construction, Armenia has used both the classical and the oriental motif. The Byzantine eagle, the basket capital and the acanthus, both in capitals and scrolls, are to be found in its churches. But the predominant decorative tendency is oriental. The scroll becomes stylized, flatly carved in the manner of the arabesque, with abstract geometric patterns. The Armenians were, and indeed still are, skilled silversmiths, and the art of their stone-cutters recalls that of jewellery, from delicate filigree to bolder chain designs. Their plaited ropes, their interlaces of circles and lozenges, squares and triangles, zigzags and keys resemble modern jewellery: both intricate in conception and simple in effect. They derive from early Mesopotamian art, as at Ur of the Chaldees, which later influenced Moslem art. The Church of St. Gregory displays reliefs which are even more vividly oriental in their inspiration. The spandrels of its blind arcades are decorated not merely with geometrical patterns but with fabulous birds and beasts: eagles and fantailed doves with stylized plumage, rams and lions in flight and pursuit. These are directly derived from Sassanian art, recalling in stone the finely chased silverware and the finely embroidered textiles of Persia. The interior of the church is decorated with murals: Christ and the Apostles, the Magi and the Prophets, accompanied by inscriptions in the Georgian language, and defaced by the infidels. They are not of a high quality, suggesting that the Armenian talent is for sculpture rather than painting.
    The Church of St. Gregory is a cross within a rectangle, a characteristic elaboration of the basic Armenian plan. Its classic example is the late tenth-century cathedral, which stands alone in the centre of the plain of Ani. Its smooth external walls throw out no buttresses, since its supports are concealed in their thickness. They are broken only by those shallow, blind arcades which give so moving a quality to Armenian architecture, their blankness seeming to avow the humility of man. Their slim columns and delicate capitals, carved with flat geometric designs, have shed all classical influences. At irregular intervals are rounded slits of window, bordered by bands of a circular interlace, and embedded in three of the walls are slender niches in the style of the mihrab. The Armenian habit of imposing ridged on rounded shapes gives a curious awkwardness to the roof, with its gables and slopes at different levels, and this is doubtless emphasized by the fact that the dome and its cone have disappeared. The cathedral is not large, but the harmony of its proportions and the smooth simplicity of its masonry are such that its interior gives an impression of soaring height and space. The dome is (or was) supported on four great piers, stepped at the foot, and composed of clusters of slender columns, moreover rising to a pointed arch which frames the pointed semicircular apse. Here undoubtedly is a forerunner of the Gothic cathedral, a hundred years before it appeared in Western Europe.
    Many ambitious claims have been made for Armenian architecture. Joseph Strzygowski goes so far as to maintain that Armenia, in the fourth century, originated for church purposes the dome based on the square, as opposed to the Roman dome based on the circle.¹ He traces it back to the primitive wooden ceilings of Central Asia, where a square, with beams across its corners, became a polygon, and through a series of diminishing squares and polygons achieved, in terms of angles, a shape resembling that of the dome. It is easy to see that such a process might inspire the dome as an architectural feature. It may be observed in photographs of the nineteenth-century wooden churches at Van, which have now disappeared, and in the Ulu Jami mosque at Erzurum, where the dome has fallen in and has been re-placed by a makeshift 'dome' of wood, dwindling from a decagon to a hexagon, surmounted by a cupola. Strzygowski claims that in North Persia mud-brick construction was substituted for timber, with squinches replacing the corner beams, and that the Armenians first translated it into stone. 'Greek genius at St. Sophia and Italian genius at St. Peter's,' he declares, 'only realized more fully what the Armenians had originated.' Strzygowski pretends that the domed square, but-tressed by niches, found its way from Armenia to Georgia and North Mesopotamia and even through the Dobruja into Czechoslovakia; that it was adapted by the Byzantines, in terms of barrel vaults, at Daphni and other churches in Greece. Carried away by his theory, he transports the quatrefoil plan in its various forms from an Armenian fountainhead to North Italy and France, to Bulgaria and St. Lorenzo at Milan, and even to St. Sophia. He traces the Armenian eight-foil via Antioch to St. Vitale at Ravenna; the Armenian trefoil to Southern Russia, the Balkans, Lombardy, France and the Rhineland. Finally he declares that the cruciform domed church, as in the cathedral at Ani, originated in Armenia and found its way thence to Constanti-nople, inspiring the Byzantine plan which prevailed for several centuries.
    Unfortunately there is no concrete evidence to support these tempting theories; and, since Strzygowski wrote, much evidence to condemn them. Domed Armenian buildings may indeed have existed earlier than the sixth century, but none of them survive; whereas earlier such buildings still exist in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and elsewhere. I have seen, for example, a second-century Roman dome on a square at Petra, and another at Jerash, in Transjordan. It is more likely that such as these were the original domed constructions, and that they were elaborated later both by Armenia and Byzantium. The cruciform domed church has been traced back to Constantinople in the fifth century and to Mesopotamia in the sixth. St. Sophia probably evolv-ed from a combination of the Anatolian domed basilica and the multifoil plan. St. Vitale's antecedents may be seen rather in SS. Sergius and Bacchus ('Little St. Sophia') in Istanbul and the earlier Church of St. George at Ezra, in Syria. So argue the opponents of Strzygowski.
    Probably the truth lies somewhere in between. The Armenians in their architecture undoubtedly drew inspiration both from East and from West, from Persia and from Anatolia, and with their inventive genius and craftsmanship evolved from it a style which was a creative synthesis of the two. As such it undoubtedly influenced the Christian architecture of the West. Moreover Armenian craftsmen were known in Constantinople from an early date. From the ninth century onwards, for two hundred years, the Empire was governed by a long line of Emperors of Armenian descent, starting with Leo V ('whence, according to some, his obstinacy and his bad disposition').¹ Immigrations at this period increased, and Armenian architects and sculptors earned fame at their courts. They must have influenced the design of Byzantine buildings, and their sculpture certainly influenced the ecclesiastical art of Greece itself, Macedonia and Thrace. Armenia may not have inspired the dome of St. Sophia. But, when it was damaged by an earthquake in the tenth century, the expert called in to repair it was Trdat, the architect of the cathedral at Ani.
    If Armenia, despite Strzygowski, cannot claim the exclusive patent of the dome, she is surely entitled to some credit for the Gothic arch. This originated in the East, and the Armenians undoubtedly helped to bring it to maturity. The interior of the tenth-century cathedral at Ani, with its pointed arches and vaults and its clustered piers, seems to foreshadow the later Gothic cathedrals of Europe. The slender pilasters of the blind arcades, in all the churches, are akin to those which have become familiar in Gothic buildings. But there is a more fundamental affinity. The drum-like 'shepherd's chapel' outside the walls of Ani - so-called because it was built, in about 1040, either by a wealthy shepherd or by a man who had re-nounced his wealth to become a shepherd - contained, before it was partially ruined, pointed arches radiating to a central keystone, which bore the weight of the cupola's ceiling; the porch of the Church of the Holy Apostles was composed of double arches, which intersected each other diagonally and equally acted as supports. The arches bear no relation to the Byzantine arch, and are in many ways similar to the cross-ribbed vaultings of later Gothic architecture. Ribbed and crossed arches, as Baltrusaitis has pointed out, figure in Islamic buildings, as at Cordova and Ispahan; but they do not support the dome, as these do: they are decorative rather than structural. 'It is the Armenian pointed arch,' he writes, 'resolving essentially architectural problems, and not the parasitic Islamic dome, charged with decoration, which seems most to conform to the spirit of Western architecture'.²
    It is probable that the Armenians brought the pointed arch from Persia, where it was built in brick; it is possible that they were the first people to build it in stone, and to translate it into functional terms. It could have found its way to the West with the emigrations which followed the Turkish conquest of Armenia in the eleventh century. There were Armenians then in Italy, and Baltrusaitis traces affinities, at this period, between Lombard and earlier Armenian buildings. But it was the Crusades which provided the main point of contact between Armenia and the West. It may well be that the first Europeans to see Gothic architecture were the Crusaders in Cilicia, then Lesser Armenia. Armenia was a catalyst between the architectural forms of East and West. Baltrusaitis sums up its influence: 'Among the various movements working in the Middle Ages on the ribbed vaults, Armenia was the first to realize, and perhaps alone in doing so systematically, a structure of crossed arches rationally combined and with a constructive logic, unequivocal and without deceptive tricks.'

    In the golden age of Ani 'princes with joyous countenances sat on the princely thrones; they were clad in brilliant colours and looked like spring gardens. One heard only gay words and songs. The sound of flutes, of cymbals, and of other instruments filled one's heart with the comfort of great joy'.¹ But it was an Indian summer, which endured for barely a century. For beneath the surface Armenia was crumbling. Already, in the seventh century, a historian had written: 'The nobles, by their lack of unity, have lost the country'. Already it was divided between two dynasties, the Bagratids of Ani and the Ardzrunids of Van. Now Ashot, the founder of Ani, established an-other kingdom, that of Kars, for his brother, and by the end of the tenth century there were no fewer than six Armenian kingdoms, at odds not only with one another but with the neighbouring Christian kingdom of Georgia. The Byzantines might have tried to unite these Christian feudal sovereigns against the infidel. But they had always regarded the Armenians as heretics, and preferred to divide and disperse them. Lynch rightly comments on 'the perversity of two cultured and Christian peoples, who, rather than compose or postpone their quarrels, threw this culture and this religion into the maw of savages'.² They now took over their kingdoms, one by one, in exchange for domains in Anatolia, and large sections of the Armenian population were transported, voluntarily or otherwise, to the West. The frontiers of the Byzantine Empire were thus extended to embrace Armenia. But within them lay a vacuum, and a new power from the East was waiting to fill it: the Turks.
    These warlike pastoral people from Central Asia, united by ties of language rather than race, had first emerged from beyond the Oxus in the sixth century A.D., migrating westwards. The peoples of the plateau came to depend on them, first as slaves and then as mercenaries. Unorganized at first, they soon held the caliphate of Harun al Raschid in their power; they became the mainstay of the Persian Army; they mastered Mesopotamia. They became converted to Islam, the religion of their enemies and employers, reinforcing their arms with the fervour of belief. In the form of disciplined tribes, commanded by Seljuk chieftains, they swarmed westwards through Persia, across the Asiatic table-land, the long hair of their bowmen floating behind them in the breeze, until they reached the frontiers of the Byzantine Empire. Thus an Armenian prophecy, foreshadowing calamities at the hands of a barbarian people a thousand years after the death of Christ, was fulfilled.
    Year after year they raided farther into the Empire, laying waste the settled lands and putting the Christians to the sword. In 1055 the inhabitants of Ani were massacred outside the walls by a detachment of Seljuks, reinforced by the troops of a Kurdish chieftain. The final siege, under Alp Arslan, took place in 1064, two years before the surrender of Britain to those other 'barbarians'. I am indebted to Mr. Harold Bowen for the translation of a first-hand account of it. 'When I saw what a formidable look this city had,' wrote an eye-witness, ¹ 'its conquest seemed unimaginable. It is not indeed recorded that any king ever attempted it. For it is surrounded on three sides by a river of great defensive value, from which on the fourth a moat has been made to take off, and the water descends into it from a distant height with a great rushing, its current being so strong that if a large stone is thrown into it, it carries it away and smashes it. The way to the gate of the city is across a bridge, facing it; and its walls are of huge hard stones. It is said to comprise seven hundred thousand houses and a thousand churches and a monastery. Nor does it offer any place or position for attack. Yet there came from God that which could not be withstood, an extraordinary thing, which was clearly the work of Him who is worshipped. For the fighting dragged on and the soldiers grew tired and dispirited from the opposition they met with, since victory seemed inconceivable, when, after less than an hour, a portion of the walls collapsed for no reason or through any action that weakened it; and the soldiers entered the city and killed the inhabitants and looted it and set it on fire and destroyed it, taking prisoner those who escaped the sword ... not less than five hundred persons. I wished to go into the city myself, to look round it, and attempted to find an approach where there were no slain, but was unable.'
    The siege lasted for twenty-five days, while mass was said in the 'thousand-and-one' churches by a population said by the Turks to consist of the greater part of the Armenian nation.¹ The warriors finally entered the city, each with a knife in his hand and another between his teeth. Turkish soldiers climbed to the roof of the cathedral and flung the Cross to the ground. Ani, the capital of Armenia, was no more. Seven years later the Seljuks completed the conquest of Anatolia at the battle of Melazgirt, where the Roman Emperor was captured, thus kindling the flame which eventually led to the Crusades.
    Ani, as a city in subjection, survived for another two hundred and fifty years. The Seljuks sold it to a dynasty of Kurdish chiefs, whose mosque, with a high polygonal minaret, still dominates the Arpa Cay. The Christian Kings of Georgia recaptured and occupied the city several times, restoring its Christian worship. Still prosperous in the thirteenth century, it was pillaged by the Tartars of Jenghiz Khan, but was finally killed by earthquakes, some time in the fourteenth. Many of its inhabitants emigrated, to Cilicia and farther afield to Russia and Poland, carrying with them their talent for art and craftsmanship. The laws of the Armenian kings survived until modern times in the Armenian colony of Lemberg. The Georgian branch of the Bagratid dynasty, protected from the Turks by its northern mountains, continued to reign until the end of the eighteenth century, when the last of its kings ceded his throne to the Tsars. His descendants, the family of Bagration, served them well and survives today - in exile.
    After the first World War a half-hearted effort was made by the Western Powers to re-establish the independence of Armenia. In 1918 the Armenians themselves proclaimed it at Erivan. At the Treaty of Sevres, in 1920, the Allies recognized, on paper, a sovereign Armenian state, including parts of the Caucasus, and in Turkey of the vilayets of Van, Bitlis, Erzurum and Trebizond. But they took no concrete steps to support it, and Armenia's last hope was crushed between the armies of Republican Turkey from the one hand and of Bolshevik Russia from the other. All that remains to Armenians today is the so-called Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia beyond the Arpa Cay: an ironical mockery of that autonomy which they once enjoyed.
    I looked across to it in the momentous quiet of the evening, as the last strange shadows of Ani's churches faded out from the grassland. To the west, behind me, Turkey staged a triumphant flaming sunset. But to the east, over Russia, all was grey.