The Shadow of Mt Ararat

This morning was bright and sunny, but last night was a different story.

The storm rolled off Mount Ararat like an avalanche barreling down the mountain and washing over the village of Shahumyan. Within minutes of hearing the first distant rolls of thunder, fat raindrops fell against our window sill and wind tossed the fig tree outside our window back and forth.

By the time I made it across the room to shut the window, the wind had driven enough water inside that it had formed a puddle on the sill which had spilled over onto the floor. The noise of the wind furiously blowing through the fig tree's leaves subsided when I shut the window, but the storm continued outside. By the time I mopped up the water, the first flashes of lighting lit up the sky overhead.

We have been in Shahumyan for 5 days now, and the way Mount Ararat's presence quietly dominates the village's existence continues to surprise me. The mountain takes up most of the western horizon. There is no where in the village where you cannot look towards the setting sun and not see the mountain top. Although it is often shrouded by a thick cover of clouds.

To the east, there is the Karmir Sar, the Red Mountain. Although these mountains are more subtle in their presence, they are no less beautiful. Shahumyan lies between Mount Ararat and Karmir Sar, just south of a small city called Artashat, very close to the Turkish boarder.

I wonder what it must be like, to be an Armenian living in Ararat's shadow. Despite the fact that the mountain resides within modern day Turkey, Armenian still call it "our mountain", and the streets of the capital city of Yerevan are decorated with flags and billboards reading "191.5: Remember and Demand" in reference to the 1915 Armenian Genocide, perpetrated by the then-Turkish government, claiming the lives of some 1.5 million Armenians within the Ottoman Empire. The government of modern-day Turkey (as well as many other governments, including the United States) does not officially recognize the genocide as a such, referring instead to the Armenian deaths as part of the cost of war and political instability which accompanied the start of World War I. In the aftermath of the war, Armenia- like many smaller nations in the area- was made part of the growing Soviet Union, borders were redrawn, and Mount Ararat ended up in Turkey.

I wonder what it must be like to live with a cultural heritage such as this and to have such a dominating symbol of your people's struggle silently watching your village, like some constant eternal sentinel. I wonder, but I don't ask. I am still too new to this place and these people to ask such personal and probing questions. Maybe someday I will have a be better equipped to have these discussions, but for now I watch and wonder.