Арарат: Высочайшая гора Турции и национальный символ Армении

Highest mountain in Turkey
the place in Turkey

Mount Ararat ('/ær//ə//r//æ//t/, ARRərat; ), also known as Mount Ağrı (Ağrı Dağı) or Masis , is a snow capped and dormant compound volcano in eastern Turkey. It consists of two major volcanic cones: Greater Ararat and Little Ararat. Greater Ararat is the highest peak in Turkey and the Armenian Highland with an elevation of ; Little Ararat's elevation is The Ararat massif is about wide at ground base. The first recorded efforts to reach Ararat's summit were made in the Middle Ages, and Friedrich Parrot, Khachatur Abovian, and four others made the first recorded ascent in 1829. In Europe, the mountain has been called by the name Ararat since the Middle Ages, as it began to be identified with "mountains of Ararat" described in the Bible as the resting place of Noah's Ark, despite contention that does not refer specifically to a Mount Ararat. Despite lying outside the borders of modern Armenia, the mountain is the principal national symbol of Armenia and has been considered a sacred mountain by Armenians. It has featured prominently in Armenian literature and art and is an icon for Armenian irredentism. It is depicted on the coat of arms of Armenia along with Noah's Ark.

Mount Ararat forms a near quadripoint between Turkey, Iran, Armenia, and the Nakhchivan exclave of Azerbaijan. Its summit is located some west of both the Iranian border and the border of the Nakhchivan exclave of Azerbaijan, and south of the Armenian border. The Turkish Armenian Azerbaijani and Turkish Iranian Azerbaijani tripoints are some apart, separated by a narrow strip of Turkish territory containing the E99 road which enters Nakhchivan at
From the 16th century until 1828 the range was part of the Ottoman Persian border; Great Ararat's summit and the northern slopes, along with the eastern slopes of Little Ararat were controlled by Persia. Following the 1826–28 Russo Persian War and the Treaty of Turkmenchay, the Persian controlled territory was ceded to the Russian Empire. Little Ararat became the point where the Turkish, Persian, and Russian imperial frontiers converged. It formally became part of Turkey according to the 1921 Treaty of Moscow and Treaty of Kars. In the late 1920s, Turkey crossed the Iranian border and occupied the eastern flank of Lesser Ararat as part of its effort to quash the Kurdish Ararat rebellion, during which the Kurdish rebels used the area as a safe haven against the Turkish state. Iran eventually agreed to cede the area to Turkey in a territorial exchange. The Iran Turkey boundary skirts east of Lesser Ararat (or Little Ararat), the lower peak of the Ararat massif. as of 2004 the mountain was open to climbers only with "military permission". The procedure to obtain the permission involves submitting a formal request to a Turkish embassy for a special "Ararat visa", and it is mandatory to hire an official guide from the Turkish Federation for Alpinism.

Ararat (Western Armenian pronunciation: Ararad) is the Biblical Hebrew name (אררט ʾrrṭ) cognate with Assyrian Urartu, of a kingdom that existed in the Armenian Highlands in the 9th–6th centuries BC. In the 19th century Wilhelm Gesenius speculated an origin from Arjanwartah, an unattested Sanskrit word without any clear cognates, supposedly meaning "holy ground." Historian Ashot Melkonyan links the origin of the word "Ararat" to the prefix of a number of placenames in the Armenian Highland ("ar–"), including the Armenians. The mountain is known as Ararat in European languages, however, none of the native peoples have traditionally referred to the mountain by that name. This mountain was not called by the name Ararat until the Middle Ages; early Armenian historians considered the biblical Ararat to be in Corduene.

The Turkish name Ağrı Dağı (i. e. "Mount Ağrı) (; Ağır Dağ), has been known since the late Middle Ages. Although the word "ağrı" literally translates to "pain" the current name is considered a derivative of the mountain's initial Turkish name "Ağır Dağ" which translates as "heavy mountain". The 17th century explorer Evliya Çelebi referred to it as Ağrî in the Seyahatnâme. The Kurdish name of the mountain is Çiyayê Agirî , which translates to "fiery mountain". An alternative Kurdish name is Grîdax, which is composed of the word grî, presumably a corrupted version of the Kurdish girê, meaning hill, or Agirî, and dax, which is the Turkish dağ, meaning mountain. Despite the supposed meaning in Turkish Ağrı Dağı as "pain mountain" and Kurdish Çiyayê Agirî as "fiery mountain", some linguists underline a relationship between the mountain's name and a village on its slopes called Ağori that was decimated after a landslide in 1840. The exact meaning of these related names remains unknown.

The traditional Armenian name is Masis (Մասիս ; sometimes Massis). The folk etymology expressed in Movses Khorenatsi's History of Armenia derives the name from king Amasya, the great grandson of the legendary Armenian patriarch Hayk, who is said to have called the mountain Masis after himself. Various etymologies have been proposed. Russian orientalist Anatoly Novoseltsev suggested that Masis derives from Middle Persian masist, "the largest." According to Armenian historian Sargis Petrosyan the mas root in Masis means "mountain", cf. Proto Indo European *mņs According to archaeologist Armen Petrosyan, the name originates from the Māšu (Mashu) mountain mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which sounded like Māsu in Assyrian. According to this theory, the name meant "twin," referring to the twin peaks of the mountain. Erkuahi, a land mentioned in Urartian texts and identified with Mt. Ararat, could reflect the native Armenian language form of this same name (compare to Armenian erku (երկու, meaning "two")). Today, both Ararat and Masis are common male first names among Armenians.

The traditional Persian name is کوه نوح, , Kūh e Nūḥ, Abos and Nibaros are the two peaks of Ararat according to scholars such as Nicholas Adontz, Vladimir Minorsky, Julius Fürst. The Serdarbulak lava plateau, at 2600 meters of elevation, separates the peaks of Greater and Little Ararat. There are Doğubayazıt Reeds on the western slopes of Mount Ararat. Mount Ararat's summit is located some west of the Turkey Iran border and south of the Turco Armenian border. The Ararat plain runs along its northwest to western side.

Ararat is the third most prominent mountain in West Asia. An elevation of for Mount Ararat is given by some encyclopedias and reference works such as Merriam Webster's Geographical Dictionary and Encyclopedia of World Geography. However, a number of sources, such as the United States Geological Survey and numerous topographic maps indicate that the alternatively widespread figure of is probably more accurate. The current elevation may be as low as due to the melting of its snow covered ice cap.

The ice cap on the summit of Mount Ararat has been shrinking since at least 1957. In the late 1950s, Blumenthal observed that there existed 11 outlet glaciers emerging from a summit snow mass that covered about At that time, it was found that the present glaciers on the summit of Ararat extend as low as an elevation of on the north facing slope, and an elevation of
on its south facing slope. They discovered that this ice cap had shrunk to by 1976 and to by 2011. They calculated that between 1976 and 2011, the ice cap on top of Mount Ararat had lost 29% of its total area at an average rate of ice loss of per year over 35 years. This rate is consistent with the general rates of retreat of other Turkish summit glaciers and ice caps that have been documented by other studies. Blumenthal estimated that the snow line had been as low as in elevation during the Late Pleistocene. He also found two morainal deposits that were created by a Mount Ararat valley glacier of Pleistocene, possibly in the Last Glacial Period, downvalley from Lake Balık. The higher moraine lies at an altitude of about and the lower moraine lies at an altitude of about The lower moraine occurs about downstream from Lake Balık. Both moraines are about high. It is suspected that Lake Balık occupies a glacial basin.

During the early Eocene and early Miocene, the collision of the Arabian platform with Laurasia closed and eliminated the Tethys Ocean from the area of what is now Anatolia. The closure of these masses of continental crust collapsed this ocean basin by middle Eocene and resulted in a progressive shallowing of the remnant seas, until the end of the early Miocene. Post collisional tectonic convergence within the collision zone resulted in the total elimination of the remaining seas from East Anatolia at the end of early Miocene, crustal shortening and thickening across the collision zone, and uplift of the East Anatolian–Iranian plateau. Accompanying this uplift was extensive deformation by faulting and folding, which resulted in the creation of numerous local basins. The north–south compressional deformation continues today as evidenced by ongoing faulting, volcanism, and seismicity. Overall, radiometric ages obtained from the volcanic rocks erupted by Mount Ararat range from 1.5 to 0.02 Ma. In response to its first ascent by Parrot and Abovian, one high ranking Armenian Apostolic Church clergyman commented that to climb the sacred mountain was "to tie the womb of the mother of all mankind in a dragonish mode." By contrast, in the 21st century to climb Ararat is "the most highly valued goal of some of the patriotic pilgrimages that are organized in growing number from Armenia and the Armenian diaspora."

The first recorded ascent of the mountain in modern times took place on 9 October 1829 [O. S. 27 September 1829]. The Baltic German naturalist Friedrich Parrot of the University of Dorpat arrived at Etchmiadzin in mid September 1829, almost two years after the Russian capture of Yerevan, for the sole purpose of exploring Ararat. The prominent Armenian writer Khachatur Abovian, then a deacon and translator at Etchmiadzin, was assigned by Catholicos Yeprem, the head of the Armenian Church, as interpreter and guide. Parrot and Abovian crossed the Aras River into the district of Surmali and headed to the Armenian village of Akhuri on the northern slope of Ararat, above sea level. They set up a base camp at the Armenian monastery of St. Hakob some higher, at an elevation of After two failed attempts, they reached the summit on their third attempt at 3:15 p. m. on October 9, 1829. The group included Parrot, Abovian, two Russian soldiers – Aleksei Zdorovenko and Matvei Chalpanov – and two Armenian Akhuri villagers – Hovhannes Aivazian and Murad Poghosian. Parrot measured the elevation at using a mercury barometer. This was not only the first recorded ascent of Ararat, but also the second highest elevation climbed by man up to that date outside of Mount Licancabur in the Chilean Andes. Abovian dug a hole in the ice and erected a wooden cross facing north. Abovian also picked up a chunk of ice from the summit and carried it down with him in a bottle, considering the water holy. On 8 November 1829 [O. S. 27 October 1829], Parrot and Abovian together with the Akhuri hunter Sahak's brother Hako, acting as a guide, climbed up Lesser Ararat.

Other early notable climbers of Ararat included Russian climatologist and meteorologist Kozma Spassky Avtonomov (August 1834), Karl Behrens (1835), German mineralogist and geologist Otto Wilhelm Hermann von Abich (29 July 1845), British politician Henry Danby Seymour (1848) and British army officer Major Robert Stuart (1856). Later in the 19th century, two British politicians and scholars—James Bryce (1876) and H. F. B. Lynch (1893)—climbed the mountain. The first winter climb was by Turkish alpinist Bozkurt Ergör, the former president of the Turkish Mountaineering Federation, who climbed the peak on 21 February 1970.

Most Christians, including most of Western Christianity, H. G. O. Dwight wrote in 1856 that it is "the general opinion of the learned in Europe" that the Ark landed on Ararat. James Bryce wrote that the ark rested upon a "mountain in the district which the Hebrews knew as Ararat, or Armenia" in an 1878 article for the Royal Geographical Society, and he added that the biblical writer must have had Mount Ararat in mind because it is so "very much higher, more conspicuous, and more majestic than any other summit in Armenia". Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, also mentioned it as the resting place of Noah's Ark in his speech at Etchmiadzin Cathedral in 2010. Those critical of this view point out that Ararat was the name of the country at the time when Genesis was written, not specifically the mountain. Arnold wrote in his 2008 Genesis commentary, "The location 'on the mountains' of Ararat indicates not a specific mountain by that name, but rather the mountainous region of the land of Ararat".

Ararat has traditionally been the main focus of the searches for Noah's Ark. According to a 1974 book around 200 people from more than 20 countries claimed to have seen the Ark on Ararat since 1856. A fragment from the ark supposedly found on Ararat is on display at the museum of Etchmiadzin Cathedral, the center of the Armenian Church. Despite numerous reports of ark sightings (e. g. Ararat anomaly) and rumors, "no scientific evidence of the ark has emerged." Searches for Noah's Ark are considered by scholars an example of pseudoarchaeology. Kenneth Feder writes, "As the flood story itself is unsupported by any archaeological evidence, it is not surprising that there is no archaeological evidence for the existence of an impossibly large boat dating to 5,000 years ago."

Despite lying outside the borders of modern Armenia, Ararat has historically been associated with Armenia, and Armenians have been called the "people of Ararat". It is widely considered the country's principal national symbol. The image of Ararat, usually framed within a nationalizing discourse, is ubiquitous in everyday material culture in Armenia. Tsypylma Darieva argues that Armenians have "a sense of possession of Ararat in the sense of symbolic cultural property." There is historical and modern mountain worship around it among Armenians. Ararat is known as the "holy mountain" of the Armenian people. It was principal to the pre Christian Armenian mythology, where it was the home of the gods. With the rise of Christianity, the mythology associated with pagan worship of the mountain was lost. "The sacred mountain stands in the center of historical and traditional Armenia " In 19th century era of romantic nationalism, when an Armenian state did not exist, Ararat symbolized the historical Armenian nation state. Theodore Edward Dowling wrote in 1910 that Ararat and Etchmiadzin are the "two great objects of Armenian veneration." He noted that the "noble snowy mountain takes the place, in the estimation of the Armenians, that Mount Sinai and the traditional Mount Zion do among the adherents of other Eastern Christians." Jonathan Smele called Ararat and the medieval capital of Ani the "most cherished symbols of Armenian identity."

The Genesis flood narrative was linked to the Armenian myth of origin by the early medieval historian Movses Khorenatsi. In his History of Armenia, he wrote that Noah and his family first settled in Armenia and later moved to Babylon. Hayk, a descendant of Japheth, a son of Noah, revolted against Bel (the biblical Nimrod) and returned to the area around Mount Ararat, where he established the roots of the Armenian nation. He is thus considered the legendary founding father (patriarch) and the name giver of the Armenian people. According to Razmik Panossian, this legend "makes Armenia the cradle of all civilisation since Noah's Ark landed on the 'Armenian' mountain of Ararat. [ ] it connects Armenians to the biblical narrative of human development. [ ] it makes Mount Ararat the national symbol of all Armenians, and the territory around it the Armenian homeland from time immemorial."

Mount Ararat has been depicted on the coat of arms of Armenia consistently since 1918. The First Republic's coat of arms was designed by architect Alexander Tamanian and painter Hakob Kojoyan. This coat of arms was readopted by the legislature of the Republic of Armenia on April 19, 1992, after Armenia regained its independence. Mount Ararat is depicted along with the ark on its peak on the shield on an orange background. The emblem of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (Soviet Armenia) was created by the painters Martiros Saryan and Hakob Kojoyan in 1921. Mount Ararat is depicted in the center and makes up a large portion of it. It is also depicted on the emblem and flag of Yerevan since 2004. It is portrayed on the breast of a lion along with the Armenian eternity sign. Ararat also appeared on the coat of arms of the Armenian Oblast and the Georgia Imeretia Governorate (image), subdivisions of the Russian Empire that included the northern flanks of the mountain. They were adopted in 1833 and 1843, respectively.

In the aftermath of the Armenian genocide of 1915, Ararat came to represent the destruction of the native Armenian population of eastern Turkey (Western Armenia) in the national consciousness of Armenians. efn|"The lands of Western Armenia which Mt. Ararat represent " Ari L. Goldman noted in 1988, "In most Armenian homes in the modern diaspora, there are pictures of Mount Ararat, a bittersweet reminder of the homeland and national aspirations." Ararat has become a symbol of Armenian efforts to reclaim its "lost lands", i. e. the areas west of Ararat that are now part of Turkey that had significant Armenian population before the genocide. Adriaans noted that Ararat is featured as a sanctified territory for the Armenians in everyday banal irredentism. Stephanie Platz wrote, "Omnipresent, the vision of Ararat rising above Yerevan and its outskirts constantly reminds Armenians of their putative ethnogenesis and of their exile from Eastern Anatolia after the Armenian genocide of 1915." Turkish political scientist Bayram Balci argues that regular references to the Armenian Genocide and Mount Ararat "clearly indicate" that the border with Turkey is contested in Armenia. however the Armenian government has avoided "an explicit and formal recognition of the existing Turkish Armenian border." In a 2010 interview with Der Spiegel, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan was asked whether Armenia wants "Mount Ararat back." Sargsyan, in response, said that "No one can take Mount Ararat from us; we keep it in our hearts. Wherever Armenians live in the world today, you will find a picture of Mount Ararat in their homes. And I feel certain that a time will come when Mount Ararat is no longer a symbol of the separation between our peoples, but an emblem of understanding. But let me make this clear: Never has a representative of Armenia made territorial demands. Turkey alleges this—perhaps out of its own bad conscience?" The most prominent party to lay claims to eastern Turkey is the nationalist Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun). which claims it as part of what it considers United Armenia. In various settings, several notable individuals such as German historian Tessa Hofmann, Slovak conservative politician František Mikloško, Lithuanian political scientist and Soviet dissident Aleksandras Štromas have spoken in support of Armenian claims over Mt. Ararat.

[[File:Stamp Armenia1992 1 3. jpg|thumb|The first stamps issued by independent Armenia in 1992 The first three postage stamps issued by Armenia in 1992 after achieving independence from the Soviet Union depicted Mount Ararat. The publications of the Social Democrat Hunchakian Party in Lebanon (Ararad daily) and California, U. S. (Massis weekly) are both named for the mountain. The Ararat brandy, produced by the Yerevan Brandy Company since 1887, is considered the most prestigious Eastern European brandy. Hotels in Yerevan often advertise the visibility of Ararat from their rooms, which is seen as a major advantage for tourists.

Rouben Paul Adalian suggested that "there is probably more poetry written about Mount Ararat than any other mountain on earth." According to Kevork Bardakjian, in Armenian literature, Ararat "epitomizes Armenia and Armenian suffering and aspirations, especially the consequences of the 1915 genocide: almost total annihilation, loss of a unique culture and land [ ] and an implicit determination never to recognize the new political borders." The last two lines of Yeghishe Charents's 1920 poem "I Love My Armenia" (Ես իմ անուշ Հայաստանի) read: "And in the entire world you will not find a mountaintop like Ararat's. / Like an unreachable peak of glory I love my Mount Masis." In a 1926 poem dedicated to the mountain Avetik Isahakyan wrote: "Ages as though in second came, / Touched the grey crest of Ararat, / And passed by ! [ ] It's now your turn; you too, now, / Stare at its high and lordly brow, / And pass by !" Ararat is the most frequently cited symbol in the poetry of Hovhannes Shiraz. The first lines of Paruyr Sevak's 1961 poem "We Are Few " (Քիչ ենք, բայց հայ ենք) read: "We are few, but they say of us we are Armenians. / We do not think ourselves superior to anyone. / Clearly we shall have to accept / That we, and only we, have an Ararat". In one short poem Silva Kaputikyan compares Armenia to an "ancient rock carved fortress", the towers of which are Ararat and Aragats.

English Romantic poet William Wordsworth imagines seeing the ark in the poem "Sky prospect — From the Plain of France." In his Journey to Arzrum (Путешествие в Арзрум; 1835–36), the celebrated Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin recounted his travels to the Caucasus and Armenia at the time of the 1828–29 Russo Turkish War. Russian Symbolist poet Valery Bryusov often referred to Ararat in his poetry and dedicated two poems to the mountain, which were published in 1917. Bryusov saw Ararat as the embodiment of antiquity of the Armenian people and their culture. Russian poet Osip Mandelstam wrote fondly of Ararat during his 1933 travels in Armenia. "I have cultivated in myself a sixth sense, an 'Ararat' sense," the poet wrote, "the sense of an attraction to a mountain." During his travels to Armenia, Soviet Russian writer Vasily Grossman observed Mount Ararat from Yerevan standing "high in the blue sky." He wrote that "with its gentle, tender contours, it seems to grow not out of the earth but out of the sky, as if it has condensed from its white clouds and its deep blue. It is this snowy mountain, this bluish white sunlit mountain that shone in the eyes of those who wrote the Bible." In The Maximus Poems (1953) American poet Charles Olson, who grew up near the Armenian neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts, compares the Ararat Hill near his childhood home to the mountain and "imagines he can capture an Armenian's immigrant perspective: the view of Ararat Hill as Mount Ararat." The world renowned Turkish Kurdish writer Yaşar Kemal's 1970 book entitled Ağrı Dağı Efsanesi (The Legend of Mount Ararat) is about a local myth about a poor boy and the governor's daughter. In the 1984 science fiction novel Orion by Ben Bova, part three entitled “Flood” is set at an unspecified valley at the foot of Mount Ararat. The antagonist, Ahriman, floods the valley by melting the snow caps of the mountain in a bid to stop the invention of agriculture by a band of Epipalaeolithic hunter gatherers. Several major episodes in Declare (2001) by Tim Powers take place on Mount Ararat. In the book, it is the focal point of supernatural happenings.

Besides Ararat being the Hebrew version of Urartu, this Iron Age state is often referred to as the "Araratian Kingdom" or the "Kingdom of Ararat" (, Arartyan t'agavorut'yun) in Armenian historiography. Levon Abrahamian argues that this name gives it a "biblical and an Armenian touch." The First Republic of Armenia, the first modern Armenian state that existed between 1918 and 1920, was sometimes called the Araratian Republic or the Republic of Ararat (, Araratyan hanrapetut'yun) as it was centered in the Ararat plain. In 1927 the Kurdish nationalist party Xoybûn led by Ihsan Nuri, fighting an uprising against the Turkish government, declared the independence of the Republic of Ararat , centered around Mount Ararat.