This is the nineteenth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (This week, the bucket shop that is the Trump White House decided it would break no constitutional law if MastoDon accepted a $400 million jet plane as a gift from the government of Qatar, especially if the payday came with the blessing of Qatari lobbyist and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.)
The “lost” Armenian city of Ani, located in eastern Turkey, and sealed off from Armenian visitors. Photo by Matthew Stevenson.
I neither loved nor disliked the city of Kars. The Hotel Konak did not provide food, but around the corner I found a friendly restaurant that always seemed to be open, although it served the same soups for breakfast and dinner.
On my bicycle, I tracked down several Armenian cathedrals, testament that after the 1877 battle, Kars became a largely Armenian city. These churches have since become mosques. In Turkey, to go in search of “lost” Armenia is to travel through a ghostly landscape.
On one ride through the market streets of the city (think of goods piled everywhere), I spotted a tailor sitting at his sewing machine, and in less than ten minutes he had repaired a number of holes and tears that I had acquired in my biking gear.
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On another bike ride across the city I found the terminus of the Dogu Express, an imposing neoclassical structure of recent vintage, and on the station platform I inspected an outbound train about to leave for Ankara, although only a few passengers were aboard.
In the station—to amuse myself—I tracked down a station manager who was wearing a blue uniform and a red hat, and asked him about the new line that connects Kars to Tbilisi and Baku, a key link if you’re ever thinking of taking the train around the world. (Another gap in the RTW line is between Cambodia and Vietnam, but the work-around for that is the new Chinese rail link across Laos from Boten to Vientiane, a game-changer if you want to ride trains from Galway in Ireland to Singapore.)
In some of the railway magazines that I read, this line is called the BTK or Baku-Tblisi-Kars Railway, and in theory it became operational in 2017.
My friendly station manager explained that for the moment the service was freight only, and he shrugged when I asked about passenger service. It was in the 1990s that the passenger line from Kars to Armenia (a station at Gyumri, formerly Alexandropol) was discontinued when the Turkish-Armenian border was shut (in part because of Turkish unhappiness about the use of the word “holocaust” to describe the fate of Armenians in 1915).
This new BTK line avoids Armenia and allows for freight shipments between Turkey and the Caspian Sea, a key link given the economic and cultural ties between Turkey and Azerbaijan.
As I was heading to Tbilisi from Kars, I could only dream that passenger service would commence on the line during my short visit, but I am someone well acquainted with the shrugs of station managers on little-used branch lines, and I knew that fate would consign me to a bus that detoured to the Turkish coast and a bike ride along the coast to Batumi, the Black Sea city in Georgia, where I could pick up a train to Tbilisi and finally Armenia.
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Railroad politics—which are not a bad way to study the world today—got me interested in what happened to Kars after the Ottomans seized the city from the Russians in 1918, just as Russia was negotiating its disastrous peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk with the Germans.
In that accord, Kars was given to the Ottoman Empire. Then, a few months later, the equally, onerous (at least to Turkey) Armistice of Mudros assigned Kars to the First Republic of Armenia, which was one of the occupation zones established by the Treaty of Sèvres.
At that point Kars was an Armenian city, and non-Bolshevik in its outlook toward the Russian civil war; at the same time Turkish nationalists (akin to those who met at the 1919 Erzurum Congress) claimed that Kars was part of their Provisional National Government of the Southwestern Caucasus. Only the intervention of British forces drove out the Turkish claimants.
A year later, however, Turkish forces re-invaded Kars and took it from the Armenians, who were forced at gunpoint to cede Kars under the dictated terms of the Treaty of Alexandropol (now Gyumri).
After winning the Russian civil war, the Soviets once against invaded the Caucasus and eastern Turkey. The fighting ended with the 1921 Treaty of Kars, which established the borders between Turkey and the three Transcaucasian Republics: Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.
Under the terms, the Russians retook the Black Sea region of Adjaria, while southern Batumi (where the bus would drop me off in Hopa) was given to Turkey.
In Armenian history, the 1921 Treaty of Kars is the great betrayal, which saw thousands of Armenians lose their property in cities such as Kars. It is also the agreement that consigned such historical Armenian symbols as Mount Ararat and the ancient Armenian city of Ani to Turkey, which for most of the last hundred years has kept the border with Armenia closed.
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When I was done with my railway station interviews, I engaged a taxi to drive me to Ani, the lost city of medieval Armenia, still locked across the border in Turkey.
From Kars, it’s about a forty-five minute drive to Ani, which sits on bluffs above the curling Arpaçay/Akhuryan River (the current border between Armenia and Turkey).
On the way out to Ani, the driver stopped so that I could take a picture of Mount Ararat in the distance—a familiar snow-capped bump on the broad horizon—and in Ani, he agreed to wait for me while I walked around the ruins. It was a clear day in April, and neither one of us minded quiet time in the sunshine.
Although I now cannot be sure, I think I first came across mentions of Ani in the late 1970s when I read Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat, a memoir of a second generation Armenian-American who goes in search of both his family’s history and that of the holocaust.
Arlen’s father, also Michael, was a famous novelist (The Green Hat), playwright, and literary figure in the years before World War II. In the 1970s his son Michael went in search of both his father (who died in 1956) and his scattered Armenian family.
The son Arlen is also a writer, often for the New Yorker magazine, so his voyage of discovery is well written. The account takes him not just to his father’s literary haunts on Broadway and in Hollywood but to Istanbul and finally the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia. That was all that was left in the Near East of the Armenian nation that was once spread, in satellite communities, across the Ottoman Empire. (Arlen writes: “In 1912, the Armenian patriarchate in Constantinople has estimated the Armenian population in Turkey at two million one hundred thousand.”)
Reading Arlen encouraged me in the 1990s to visit the Armenian quarter in Jerusalem, where I saw many pictures of decaying Armenian churches and buildings in Ani.
In turn, in 2002, I went to what was now called the Republic of Armenia, and from my hotel in Yerevan I drove around the country to see its many sites.
On that trip everyone I met reminded me that both Mount Ararat and Ani were “lost,” locked up behind the barbed-wire fences along the Turkish border.
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I loved my walk around Ani, although at the same time it made me sad. There were perhaps three or four other visitors there. The footprint of the city—once the capital of the medieval Armenian kingdom—is larger than New York’s Central Park.
The ancient city, which had its heyday around the 10th century, sits on the west bank of the river. There are stone trails that lead between the some fifty churches (all mostly dilapidated) that have survived the last millennium.
It is possible to scramble among the boulders and strewn rocks and enter what remains of a church or chapel, nearly all of which still retain their distinctive cupola cones.
I had only planned to make the shorter loop walk, around the city ruins closer to the entrance and parking lot, but once I was footloose among the Ani ruins, I kept going to the fortress that marks the southern extremity of the old city.
Here and there on the walking trails, I came across warnings that Ani sits astride the closed Turkish-Armenian border, and that it was forbidden to cross the river and enter Armenia, although the real risk from a Turkish point of view is that Armenians would want to sneak into the hallowed city.
Ani was the sacred capital of what was once Bagratid Armenia, which flourished from about 880 A.D. into the 11th century, when it fell to the encroachments of Seljuk Turks. All that now remains is a city of ghosts, but even in ruin Ani retains the ability to inspire wonder.
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As I walked around these stations of the cross, I took note of various churches and buildings, and when they were built, but mostly what interested me were the modern politics between Armenia and Turkey that have kept the border closed and Ani a forbidden city on the “wrong” side of the border.
In the 19th and early 20th century, Armenia was more an idea (scattered around the Ottoman Empire) than a specific place, and the two million Armenians living in Anatolia found themselves a Christian minority within the Ottoman Empire. Those havens lasted so long as the Western powers had an interest in protecting minority Christian rights and in propping up the sick man of Europe.
The 1878 Treaty of Berlin changed some of the handwriting on this wall, and the outbreak of war in 1914 against the Ottoman Empire (allied with Germany and the Central Powers) broke it down.
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The 1915 Armenian genocide scattered the remnants of that nation to the winds, although many sought refuge in the Russian Caucasus, especially after Russia occupied Erzurum and Kars in 1916.
Come the collapse of the Russian empire in 1917-18, those lands were up for grabs, although by the terms of the (brief) Treaty of Sèvres, Armenia was to become a legatee of the dispersed Ottoman Empire. That era gave way to successive Ottoman and Soviet invasions.
In the end it was the imposed Treaty of Kars (1921) that divided Ani from the First Republic of Armenia, and all subsequent iterations of Armenia in and out of the Soviet Union. But only after the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne did the Arpaçay/Akhuryan river become a hard border between Turkey and the Soviet Union, which became even more rigid when Stalin made occasional claims for Kars and Erzurum.
In the Cold War, after World War II, the line between Turkey and Armenia had aspects of the Iron Curtain (as it does today).
In 1968, Turkey and the Soviet Union discussed a swap of two Kurdish villages to Turkey in exchange for Ani going back to Armenia, but the talks went nowhere. For the longest time Turkey demanded that anyone who went to Ani first needed a permit from the police. (Michael J. Arlen never got there.)
Then with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the independent Republic of Armenia sought international recognition for the idea that what happened in 1915 to the Armenians was a genocide—something Turkey fiercely disputes and which led, yet again, to the closing of the Turkish-Armenian border, which remains blocked today (even to passenger trains).
In 2021, one senior Turkish minister called for what remains of Ani “to be wiped off the face of the earth”, just so that the issue could never been raised again; but a local military commander refused the order.
In my mind (easy to say as I am neither Turkish nor Armenian), it would be a small gesture of goodwill for Turkey to redraw its borders and return Ani to the Armenians, but that perspective overlooks the extent to which foreign relations trade on symbolism, which may explain why divided Jerusalem is the source of so much conflict, why the Serbs remain in a fury that so many of their churches have become inaccessible in Kosovo, or why the Greeks still grieve their lost civilization in Smyrna and Asia Minor.
