the Armenian King Trdat III became the first ruler to adopt Christianity – while in Rome the worst persecutions of Christians were yet to come.
When some years later Constantine chose the outlawed cult to be the cornerstone of Byzantine theocracy and the world’s greatest empire, the Armenians still stuck to their own interpretation. In 451, at the Council of Chalcedon, the Byzantine bishops agreed some sort of Christian orthodoxy; the Armenians didn’t even turn up – they were too busy fighting off the Sassanid Persians.
Even the earth itself seemed to conspire against them. Within a few hundred miles of Ani are the borders of half of the world’s twelve major tectonic plates. In a single earthquake in the ninth century, seventy thousand were recorded as having been killed in one Armenian town alone.
Yet during this first Christian millennium, between the earthquakes and invasions, between the Mazdaeans, Manichaeans, Muslims, dyophysites and dualists, the Armenians emerged briefly to stage brilliant half centuries of their own, writing and building with passionate skill, before being stifled again by some rampant horde. In the ninth century Armenia emerged again as an independent state, centred on the city of Ani. I had caught a scent of that city’s genius, sitting in its ruined cathedral a few years before. At one time Ani was bigger than most European cities. But in 1064 the Seljuk Turks swept up out of Asia and sacked it.
What should have happened then to this small people, occupying as it does the perennial buffer between empires, the most routed, trampled-over region on earth, was a gradual assimilation into its bigger and more powerful neighbours. Its scattered families should have struggled on for a couple of generations in exile, clinging proudly to traditions before intermarriage consigned them to history’s roll of honour: a set of dusty ruins on the Anatolian plateau and some glass cases in the British Museum.
Instead the Armenian princes travelled five hundred miles to the south-west. There in the lee of the Taurus mountains, in Cilicia, they established a new Armenian kingdom. Many of those who didn’t flee and who weren’t killed by earthquakes nor slaughtered during the Seljuk invasion, but who remained on the land, were driven in 1604 by the Safavid Shah Abbas down into Persia. And those who survived both the Seljuks and Shah Abbas, and who didn’t drift away beyond the Ottoman empire, who weren’t killed in the pogroms of the 1890s, nor those of 1909, but who stayed in the villages, were rounded up in 1915, pushed down one of history’s dark side-alleys and murdered.
More than a million Armenians died in the last years of the Ottoman empire, a half of Anatolia’s total. The Turks had managed to do what numerous powers had tried before them: they managed to finish Armenia, though not the Armenians. In most of the world’s cities you can find Armenians – Armenian newspapers in Armenian script, Armenian restaurants. In exile the Armenians are curiously resilient; only the Jews have resisted assimilation as fiercely. In the mountains of Colombia there is a small town actually named Armenia where they serve ‘Antioch-style’ beans. In Paris the first-ever café was opened in 1672 by an Armenian, as it had been earlier in Vienna, by the same Armenian spy who had helped break the Turkish siege. At the siege of Vienna the Polish King Jan’s private doctor had been an Armenian, as was the doctor to the harem of Akbar the Great, the Mogul emperor whose adopted Armenian son was regarded by the Jesuits in India as the greatest poet of his time.
The ‘Polish Byron’, Słowacki, had an Armenian mother, as does the chess-master Garry Kasparov, as did Gurdjieff, as did the Abbasid Caliph al-Mustadi who ruled the entire Arab world during the twelfth century, except for Egypt where a few years earlier Armenian vizirs held power, and Jerusalem where the hereditary Crusader rulers had long had Armenian blood coursing through their royal veins. When Richard the Lionheart was married, in Cyprus, his best man was an Armenian; the last king of Armenian Cilicia, exiled in France, taught the French king to play chess. It has even been suggested that the Man in the Iron Mask was none other than the Armenian patriarch of Constantinople.
The first yoghurt in the United States was manufactured by the Armenian family Columbissian. The particular green ink of the US dollar bills was developed by an Armenian, as was the MiG jet, named after Mikoyan, whose brother was the longest-standing member of Stalin’s Politburo, and the first to denounce him. Abel Aghanbekyan, an Armenian economist, produced the blueprint for perestroika.
They shouldn’t really exist at all. They should have been destroyed, written out of history by its worst horrors. But they have survived. Instead of a footnote to the story of these border regions, the Armenians can be read like a kind of subtext.
With the Gulf War imminent, the Soviet Union crumbling and Eastern Europe in a state of dangerous uncertainty, it seemed the perfect time to set off around the Armenian diaspora, to try and reach Armenia itself. I prepared to leave Jerusalem.
In the library of the Armenian quarter, tacked to the wall, were the lines of the Armenian writer William Saroyan:
I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have all crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without food or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.
Wondering what Saroyan meant by a ‘New Armenia’, and wondering what remained of the old, I said goodbye and left the monastary on a damp December evening. I headed for Venice, where there had been an Armenian community for more than eight hundred years.
They chose the Worst Thought, and then ran to join Wrath.
From the Zoroastrian Gāthas, yasna 303, in which the Deceiver tricks God into letting man acquire the wrong spirit.
I was looking a long while for Intentions,
For a clew to the history of the past for myself, and for these chants – and now I have found it,
It is not in these paged fables in the libraries (them I neither accept nor reject,)
It is no more in the legends than all else,
It is in the present – it is this earth today.
Walt Whitman
Venice was cold. Small ice floes littered the canals and drifted into the lagoon like soggy notes. No one lingered long outside; the piazzas were empty. But it wasn’t just the cold. From the balustrade of a palazzo on the Grand Canal, the students had draped a banner: NO ALLA GUERRA! NO ALLA CATASTROPHE! The catastrophe for the Venetians was that the Gulf war was scaring away the tourists. I had the place almost to myself.
The Mourad-Raphaelian school was the only one for the children of Venice’s Armenian community. Its director looked more Italian than Armenian; he wore scarlet socks and walked with short, urgent strides. I met him hurrying away from the school. ‘Please,’ he called back, ‘wait inside! My car is in the middle of the road. It is broken.’
‘Your car?’ In Venice? But he was already gone.
I pushed open the school’s heavy oak door and entered a panelled hall. Bright sun fell across the flagstones, and through
