“Fly from Van to Iraq?”
“I am sure. My cousin works for airport. He will be more sure. We will make you sure. But not today. Today you must be unsure. Until day after next day.”
“I will be gone then.”
“That is too bad.”
“Please find out more information,” I asked. “I will come back here after Mount Ararat.”
“You are climbing Mount Ararat?” Emre said, somewhat doubtfully. “Some do. Others try. Many don’t make it.” She hesitated. “You look tired,” a repeated phrase that I thought might be code for “smell.”
Now I really wanted that shower.
Aysenur spoke. “I am going. Home. I will phone cousin when he is back. See you before you leave for Ararat.”
In my room I propped up pillows; sleep crawled in beside me. As I fell away, I remembered Emre’s warning about the dangerous eastern Turkey region where battles regularly broke out and I should avoid: “Fighters, they are fierce. Fierce men. Women too.” She spoke of those on one side of the battle: Kurds. Their ambition is for a Greater Kurdistan.
On the flight over I’d read a magazine article in an old copy of The Economist that provided me a little context. Simmering like a Kurdish lentil soup dish, the local broth of separatism ranked near lawlessness in Western media, but the further east one was in Turkey, the more likely such rebels were seen to be fighting for independence from tyranny. Leading this fight is the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an organization many Western governments label a terrorist group.
The insurgent PKK began battling the Turkish and Iraqi governments in 1978, over the establishment of a homeland for all Kurdish people. Its tactics may have changed over the years, but its goal of independence has not. The role of militant women, referenced by Emre, came about in an equal mix of philosophy and strategy, backed by guns. Along with the fighting men are “The Women of Ararat,” a self-styled all-female mountain guerrilla militia that operates independent of the male army, intent on a focused revolution with patient purpose. It is a female army within a hierarchy dominated by men.
A 1918 CE petition for an independent Kurdistan delineated the nascent Greater Kurdistan depicted here. Ambitions for reconfigured borders are at the heart of Kurdish separatist movements.
Kurdish women fighters have been called the Women of Ararat, variously portrayed as freedom fighters or terrorists. Photo © BijiKurdistan.
The documentary Les Femmes du Mont Ararat (The Women of Mount Ararat) follows half a dozen women, a magna in the guerilla echelons. A unit within the PKK, their predecessor detachments have been around since soon after the PKK’s surreptitious activities in 1995. They are members of the Movement of Free Women of Kurdistan. The fight these women take against oppression has many aims, including to forestall Turkey’s assimilation of Kurds by forcing them to live in special jurisdictions, to reverse Turkey’s banning of the Kurdish language, and to counter what they see as one country’s indoctrination of another race. One woman soldier canvassed in the film claims, “As a Kurd, my choice is to fight or to live as a slave.” These women want their children to grow up in a Kurdistan, or at least in a Turkey where they are respected and free to be Kurdish.
The photographer wrote of the People’s Defense Units, known by their Kurdish initials YPG: “After the Kurdish YPG Forces have liberated the ISIS Stronghold Girê Spî, this Female Fighter found a weakened white dove on the battlefield and takes care of it.” Photo © BijiKurdistan.
As I fell asleep, I wondered: Where might Emre sit on this debate?
SIX
TURKISH HONEYCOMB
“There must have been a heritage memory of the destructive power of flood water, based on various terrible floods. And the people who survived would have been people in boats.”
—Irving Finkel
A slab of honeycomb lay on a saucer near the morning’s coffee service. A waiter crushed coffee beans into my morning java and added a spoon cut of the bee’s work, calling the honeycomb balari and smiling at my look of unfamiliarity as he handed it to me.
Emre hovered behind the desk as I reentered the lobby carrying my coffee. “Aysenur phoned for you, Richard. He said his cousin still away but airport friend says no flight from Van to Iraq. His cousin knows best. You wait two days.”
Accepting this confirmation, I said, “Emre, today I would like to get into Van, find a bank, maybe have lunch. Is there a taxi?”
“Better you go out on the roadway. Stand there. When dolmuş comes toward you, wave. It is what you call a minibus. They will stop. Is our system.”
Out on the street, I looked up to see a minibus approaching. I waved, as Emre had instructed. The kids in the back seat waved back as the vehicle passed by. Soon a passenger van slowed in front of me without my having to wave. The door popped open, the driver’s beckoning hand an invitation to board.
“How much?” I asked, holding out half a dozen coins for his choosing. He picked those he wanted, put them in a pouch and shifted his vehicle into gear. I jerked toward a seat through a sea of smiles, feeling a sense of “it’s nice to be a stranger in a place where no one wants to take advantage of a stranger.” Three people moved their personal goods to give me room. I fell in beside an elderly woman wearing a dress printed with flowers, and I wondered if they were local flora.
In Van, I stepped out of the bus into a cacophony of stammering cars, five dangerous steps away from the curb; the sidewalk was a foot off the ground. Open boxes of fruit I thought to be cherries filled the full range of the first store width I saw. Next to it was a restaurant with its window open to the street and sweet baking on offer. Commerce happened as much in front of shops as within them. There was uninterrupted pedestrian flow; where four men sat around a square table further along the sidewalk, people streamed by them with ease. A shoeshine man polished a leather hat, bringing it a shine through quick strokes on the flimsy surface. I did not see a disgruntled face.
Emre had told me her city was “pearl of east,” yet I wasn’t so sure. In the heat, the streetscape shimmered. But if this was a pearl, it felt a bit like an artificial one, constructed by irritating the surrounding host lands with an intrusive commercial district.
Servicing an area population of several hundred thousand, these shopping streets had everything on display, but I was looking for an ATM that would give me the cash I needed for meeting my guide Zafer later in the day. In one of our email exchanges he’d specified, “You must provide me with cash payment, not traveler’s checks.” I’d left any thought of carrying cash behind—I did not want to take it on the train. Now I had to get some.
An ATM sign proclaimed “İş Bankası Van Şubesi.” I inserted my credit card. As it popped out, the screen displayed words I took to mean, “Not connecting, try again.” I tried my debit card, and it showed amount options. I punched keys. It slapped me with a low daily limit on this card. That would be a problem. Just today? This week? My only chance of getting what I owed Zafer, I quickly deduced, was to dart between five bank locations before the international transaction system cut me off. First one: I entered a lesser amount. The money came out. I grabbed it and left.
A block away was an Akbank ATM. I quickly withdrew the same “limit” on the same debit card. Feeling flush, I inserted my declined credit card. The machine coughed multicolored lira bills. I hustled into the nearby Yapi Kredi Bank, hoping I might still have luck on my side.
My credit card worked (but at a reduced amount) as two armed guards inside the bank watched me hurriedly stuff money in my pocket. I hustled over to a teller for assistance, thinking a personal touch might be more successful than the electronic dispenser. But both cards failed the teller’s test. The system told her I was overdrawn. She looked at me as though I was attempting fraud, handed back my cards, and glanced toward the guards. I walked over to a narrow table by the window.
Under the gaze of the bank’s security, I smiled a dumb-tourist smile, and then proceeded to empty one bulging pocket at a time, c
ounting up all the cash. I was short of what Zafer expected from me. I needed one more withdrawal, or I was hooped. I darted out of the bank, heading back to the first one, where I tried my credit card at the lowest amount needed. It was cut off. I tried my other card. Thankfully, the currency gods smiled on me.
Back at the hotel, I organized my money into an envelope that Emre had given me. I put it into the daypack and went down to the outdoor area for coffee. I thought of the next day, when I’d meet my expedition teammates and head out of Van and into the countryside.
A thirtyish-looking man wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and blue jeans approached. His open-toed, slightly torn shoes smacked to a stop beside my table. His hair was thick and curly, accompanied by long sideburns and an inch-wide soul patch. A less intense brush of black hair crept up both arms. He smiled warmly.
“I am Zafer,” he said, sitting down across from me. “I am your guide to the mountaintop.”
“Zafer, it is good to meet you. Would you like food?”
“I am here often. They know me. They will bring me what I like. Are we ready for payment so that we can go to Mount Ararat?”
The abruptness of it all was disarming; if my desperate search for cash had failed, would he have altered the plans?
The waiter served him coffee and a forkful of Turkish honeycomb.
“We all give you cash,” I said. “You will be carrying a lot of money. Is that safe?”
He ignored my concern. “You are first here. Two more are now in hotel. This afternoon. You will meet them tomorrow morning. We four go to Çavuştepe fortress. You want to see that. Also see Necropolis. And to Iran border. Or, well … near Iran border, to see mountains that tell stories.”
On the table, I’d set a sheet showing email exchanges with Zafer and Amy, outlining the amount already paid and leaving a fair balance owing. Nearer me was the envelope of cash that equaled that amount. I turned the printout right side up for him to see. “Is this still the amount?”
“It could be more,” he said. “You wanted to be part of a small group. That will be. Only six of you. Me, I am your guide. Two cooks. Horses. Help boys to pack the horses. Tents. Food. Many expenses.” It was his last minute of negotiation.
“Stop, Zafer. Are we good with the amount shown?”
“If you have that amount, we are good.”
I picked up the envelope of Turkish lira as more coffee arrived. “Give it a count, please.”
He sipped the coffee and, before setting it down, sipped more. Perhaps he did not want to seem eager.
“Exchange rate is not good,” he said in a practiced voice.
The envelope showed where I’d calculated the exchange rate, so I said: “At the bank this morning, on the wall, it was close to this. Banks favor themselves. It has not changed much since our emails. We are good to go with this.”
“Well …”
“Thank you for resolving that, Zafer. We’re square. Done.”
He had an immediate smile, that of a gamer who’d been called out. In America I’d have felt on the verge of being taken advantage of. Not here. This world was about slivers of money. Many slivers. Zafer’s revenue was periodic and the entrepreneur in him would never leave money in someone else’s pocket for lack of asking for it.
One could not but like him, even trust him. “Now let me tell you about other two climbers. First though, you should know, the weather for you is not for sure.”
“Unpredictable? Or bad?”
“Ararat is always unpredictable. Bad, not bad, maybe not bad.”
He scanned the bills again, stuffed them and folded the envelope. “Two climbers are at hotel today. After breakfast, tomorrow, I will meet you three here. We travel to countryside.”
He stood up to pocket the money. “He is Nicholas. She is Patricia. She is pretty. Him you might miss. But not her.”
Another coffee arrived for each of us. He said, “You look in shape. That’s good. I had wondered. Many trekkers are not knowing Ararat’s threat. Is a tough mountain and steep, and has dangers. People who like to hike only should not climb it. You need different skills to summit.” He bent his head, shyly, saying, “An American climber told me it is ‘attitude for the altitude.’”
“How many times have you climbed Mount Ararat?” I asked.
“I climb sometimes all the way, sometimes part the way. With you, I promised to be your guide to the summit. It will be third time this year—one time was with people who wanted to find Noah’s Ark. Do you want to find Noah’s Ark? It is not on Ararat. I know where it is. I can show you. After mountain climb I can take you to where is Noah’s Ark.”
“That would be interesting,” I said. “Are you certain it is there?”
“Very.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“What I show you, the formation is as Bible says. The measurements are truth. Height. Length. How wide it is. There is only one design for the Ark. Everyone knows that.”
Irving Finkel—curator, Assyriologist, and detective, with the rare ability to “sight-read” cuneiform. The “Ark Tablet” he deciphered predates by over one thousand years the Book of Genesis written version of the “Great Flood” story found in the Hebrew Torah and Christian Bible. He revealed ancient phrasing that animals boarded the boat “two by two,” something previously thought to be unique to the Hebrew telling of Noah’s Ark. Portrait © Simon Carr
Not quite a truth.
When the discovery of the ancient cuneiform “Ark Tablet” became public in recent years, it described the boat that saved people and animals from the destructive flood as round.
The oblong floating zoo portrayed as Noah’s Ark is a reflection of Hebrew texts. The “Ark Tablet,” which predates Hebrew texts, describes a novel shape, a practical circular design large enough for the job. Without a rudder, it would move at the behest of winds and tides. The round design would provide for a buffered landing without breaking apart.
Dr. Irving Finkel is Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Script, Languages and Cultures in the Middle East Department of the British Museum, which houses 130,000 ancient clay tablets moved there from old Mesopotamia well over a hundred years ago. In 1985, an English collector of odd things, Douglas Simmonds, brought a cuneiform tablet to Finkel’s attention. Simmonds’s father had served with the Royal Air Force in the Near East when World War II was winding down. He’d acquired a collection of memorabilia from the area, among which was a clay tablet, which he left to Douglas. When Douglas first showed this tablet to Finkel, the expert—being among the very few able to sight-read cuneiform—recognized the piece as unusual. He attempted in vain to persuade Simmonds to leave the tablet behind for complete deciphering.
Fourteen years later, the two men met again at an exhibition and Finkel was at last loaned the treasure for in-depth review. Many clay tablets record financial transactions or marriage information or community details, and there is little marginalia. But this one told a Babylonian flood story, with a twist.
In the Atrahasis Epic, the god of water, Enki, informs Atrahasis the god Enlil has decided that the world will be destroyed by flood. Written earlier than the three existing tablets known to tell the Atrahasis Epic, Simmonds’ tablet also has Atrahasis in the hero role. It proves to be an adaptable story, modified over time.
It took Finkel weeks of painstaking work, patient translation of uncertain strokes, and double-checking the wedges of cuneiform craftwork before he could be certain of what he was reading. What he read astonished him. The Simmonds tablet provided comprehensive instructions for a man to build an ark:
Draw out the boat that you will make
On a circular plan;
Let her length and breadth be equal.
This Ark was round. The structure was to be 220 feet wide with a height of twenty feet, and waterproofed with bitumen, a derivative extracted from prehistoric fossilization. The directions stipulate the length of rope required to help construct the unusually large coracle. Finkel shared the resul
ts of his discovery in his book The Ark Before Noah, which indicated that Mesopotamians modeled this Ark after the coracles commonly used for transport in those times (actually, the practice continues today). Round and with a shallow draft, these boats were never large, nor did they carry much weight. They were capable of being navigated by an oar. For the size of Ark coracle indicated by the clay tablets, Finkel determined that the rope, uncoiled, “would have stretched from London to Edinburgh.”
This time-worn tablet differs from the Epic of Gilgamesh in many ways, but there are similarities between the two (its opening line, for example, begins, “Wall, wall! Reed wall, reed wall!”). It then provides complete instructions for building a barge to save the life of Atrahasis and his family, along with plants and animals, from a flood caused by a disgruntled deity. The instructions for the circular boat are clear, complete, and precise.
The tablet stipulates that this ark be used to rescue “wild animals.” Perhaps it was assumed that domestic animals would be an obvious inclusion. It specifies that the menagerie be gathered “two by two,” creating a phrase that would much later become ubiquitous and synonymous with animals surviving Noah’s flood.
The Ark Tablet. In the hands of an Assyriologist, the 60 lines of this cell phone-size tablet convey a fascinating Ark story about a boat 220 feet (67 m) in diameter. What other ancient texts may yet be found that will alter our common assumptions about a flood and an ark?
Woven like a basket or other wicker structure, an oval boat or coracle (or gufa) is constructed by entwining branches or young trees into a stable vessel. Wrapped in waterproof skins and covered with tar or resin, they are sturdy and can bear significant weights, such as large animals or stones. For thousands of years, these have been used in shallow lake areas or rivers around the world (including Mesopotamia). Photo © Sreeraj PS.
In a dramatic conclusion, the person identified as a shipwright in the Atrahasis Epic is instructed:
Full Moon over Noah's Ark Page 9