It seemed more abandoned palace than school. Only the walls and ceiling, flourishes of rococo plaster, gilded swags and voluptuous oils, seemed alive. Too alive, in fact. The overnight train to Venice had been a sleepless affair, and so much early-morning baroque made me a little nauseous. I found a window overlooking the canal and watched the sunlight flicker on its filmy surface.
The Armenians have long been in Venice. When it emerged as a power in the twelfth century they were already well established. Their talent for innovation, an exile’s talent, litters the chronicles of the republic. Sinful Hagop set up a printing press in 1514 and produced the first Armenian printed book, while Anton Surian – ‘Anton the Armenian’ – built ships. Twice his own designs had helped save Venice: once with a frigate whose beam-mounted cannon swung the battle of Lepanto, and then again with a salvage ship that unclogged centuries of broken ships from the lagoon. But in recent years the community has been whittled away to almost nothing. Many of the old families have gone to Milan.
The director returned and showed me into a high-ceilinged office. The walls were refreshingly plain and hung with the familiar icons of Armenian exile: a view of Ararat, and large colour plates of half-ruined churches, standing alone in the mountain wastes of western Armenia, old Armenia, Turkish Armenia.
‘Yes,’ sighed the director. ‘Not many are left here. You know, it’s a full-time job being an Armenian.’ He stretched his arms open wide, nodding at each of his hands. ‘Here … and here. I struggle to keep up with my brother in Syria and Egypt, in America and Persia. If I relax for an instant, it is gone!’ His arms flopped to his sides. ‘You understand?’ He picked up the telephone and tried to track down a mechanic.
Running a car in Venice also seemed a full-time job, so I thanked him and walked out again into the frosty streets.
I telephoned Father Levon Zekiyan and we arranged to meet in a small café near the Chiesa San Rocco. Father Levon held Venice’s chair of Armenian studies. He was a tall man, with a distinct sartorial elegance. I’d been given his name in Jerusalem, but I’d seen it too at the head of various scholarly papers. He’d written a great number of papers, in several languages, and his footnotes were always a maze of different scripts. Enthusiasm for the minutiae of Armenian history set his conversation darting around the centuries, but did not make him shy of the broad sweep. When I asked him the big question – what keeps the Armenians Armenian – he paused for only a moment.
‘The whole thing,’ he explained, ‘comes down to a single idea. And the key to it is the script. Mesrop Mashtots was our greatest political thinker! In the fifth century he invented the alphabet – he realized Armenia as a power was finished. If the Armenians were to survive without territory, they had to have a common idea, something that was theirs alone. The script embodies the idea.’
‘And what is the idea?’
‘Ah, you cannot describe it! You can give it a name but you cannot describe it. If you are lucky, you will come to know it a little.’ He took a sip of wine and smiled. ‘Our poet Sevak called it simply Ararat.’
Ararat – of course. Ararat echoes around things Armenian like a persistent cliché. It is the name of Armenian journals, Armenian books, Armenian businesses and restaurants; in the United States there is an Armenian credit card called Ararat, as is an Armenian nursing home in California. The national football team is called Ararat, and the mountain’s dual-peaked profile had hung in every Armenian home I’d seen so far. I knew it as a symbol of exile, staring as it now does into Armenia from across the Turkish border. But Father Levon’s idea was much more than that. I began to see the mountain as something more enigmatic: an article of faith, the survival of an animistic past.
Osip Mandelstam, after several months in Armenia, also became aware of Ararat’s peculiar presence:
I have cultivated in myself a sixth sense, an ‘Ararat’ sense: the sense of attraction to a mountain.
Now, no matter where fate carry me, this sense already has a speculative existence and will remain with me.
I had seen Ararat too – from Dogubeyazit in Turkey. But it had left no particular mark on me. Perhaps I had to wait to see it from Armenia.
I left Father Levon in the Piazza San Marco and took a boat across the lagoon to the island of San Lazzaro. The afternoon was crisp and beautifully clear. Only two other passengers were on the boat; one of them was an Armenian monk. For more than two hundred and fifty years, San Lazzaro has been an Armenian monastery. It is now one of the great storehouses of Armenian culture, with its collection of thousands of manuscripts – pages and pages of Mesrop’s script.
The monk from the boat passed me on to another monk who guided me around the monastery, Climbing the stairs to the museum, he asked me for news of the Armenian monastery in Jerusalem. I went in to some detail about the new patriarch and the bishops and the old retainers of the Holy Places, but I could see he had lost interest; they were members of the Brotherhood of Saint James, he was a Mekhitarist, a wholly different sect.
San Lazzaro’s museum, on the other hand, was a testament to the cohesion of the diaspora. Each exhibit, brought to the island by devoted pilgrims, was another dot on the Armenian map. It was like the collection of some well-travelled Victorian philanthropist. Under a Tiepolo ceiling, Persian ceramics stood with Iznik dishes and Kutahya ewers; there was an ivory Taj Mahal, some ivory filigree orbs (seven inside one another, like a Russian doll), a silver Ethiopian hand cross, St Petersburg miniatures, stamps, banknotes, a Crusader sword, a Canova cast of Napoleon’s son, a Burmese boustrophedon manuscript explaining in Pali the initiation rites of a Buddhist priest, and a mummy. In 1925 Egypt’s foreign minister, an Armenian, had brought the mummy, along with a Bubastis cat. The mummy was the monk’s favourite exhibit.
He led me away from the main gallery to a room lined with the buckram spines of English classics. There, hanging over the door, was a portrait of Lord Byron. All through the winter of 1816, several times a week, Byron crossed the lagoon to visit the monks of San Lazzaro. He developed a fascination with Armenia, discovering among other things that it was the supposed site of Earthly Paradise.
‘Their country,’ he wrote, ‘must ever be one of the most interesting on the globe.’
In this room Byron took on the Armenian language. His letters tell of his endeavours: ‘In the mornings I go over in my gondola to hobble Armenian with the friars … my mind wanted something craggy to break upon … this was the most difficult thing I could discover … a Waterloo of an alphabet …’ In Venice itself, his pursuits were easier:‘… the lady has, luckily for me, been less obdurate than the language …’ After some months his visits to San Lazzaro dried up.
The next day, before leaving Venice, I called ahead to Cyprus. I told Garo Keheyan, an Armenian I’d met in Jerusalem, that I planned to be in Nicosia in a few days.
Crossing the Rialto that evening I saw the Grand Canal just beginning to ice over. In Trieste there was a night train to Yugoslavia. It snowed heavily in the night and at Belgrade a guard stumbled along the track to thaw the points with a flaming torch. The train ploughed on, south through Serbia, through dead valleys and silent forests, beneath swollen clouds. The day slid past in a series of frozen images: a man with a gun on an icy pond, the breath of a horse at a level-crossing, a yellow pig leaping in the snow.
The following afternoon at Piraeus was warmer. A ship from Odessa was in port and the Ukrainians lined the docks’ perimeter fence. By their feet lay piles of china plates, plastic dolls, knives, forks, and tins of caviar. I bought a bottle of Armenian brandy from a stern Russian woman and carried on past the ones with smiles and powder-blue
