Look at this stone bridge,” said writer Vedat Akcayoz, gesturing towards the decaying remnants of a 10th-century bridge over the Arpacay river, which serves as the closed border between Turkey and Armenia.
“The fish under the bridge, are they Turkish or Armenian?”
The spectacular ruined city of Ani stands on one of the world’s most sensitive borders, dividing two countries’ daggers drawn over their painful past.
Deserted now amid snow-capped peaks, Ani was once the capital of a mediaeval Armenian kingdom before it fell to the Seljuks in 1064, the first city taken by the Turks as they swept into Anatolia. Their sultan Alparslan converted its cathedral into his “conquest mosque”.
But its sack by the Mongols and an earthquake sent Ani into terminal decline.
“This is the land conquered by our ancestors,” said Ziya Polat, governor of the nearby Turkish city of Kars. “Sultan Alparslan’s first Friday prayer, the first Turkish mosque, the first Turkish cemetery, the first Turkish bazaar are all here,” he added.
With such symbolic importance to both sides, historians and officials hope restoring the UNESCO world heritage site might ease relations poisoned by the mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, which Turkey refuses to recognise as genocide.
Akcayoz, who wrote a book on the ruins, said Ani is “humanity’s common heritage”.
“Ani was Zoroastrian, Ani was shaman, Ani was pagan, Ani was Christian, Ani was Muslim, Ani was yours, Ani was ours,” he told AFP.
Turkey and Armenia have no formal relations. But peace talks between Yerevan and Ankara’s ally Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Baku retook last year after a lightning war, has sparked hope that one day Turkey and Armenia could also sit down around a table.
