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Nature on Mt. Cudi
I saw this extraordinary bird on the way to the mountain.
These flowers were everywhere, and I thought they were a wonderful infusion of color into the dry landscape, until I touched one and it drew blood:
I don’t think this picture does justice to the size of these enormous grasshopper.
These were my favorites, the mountain goats or ibexes. Their agility and sure-footedness on the most difficult of terrain is astonishing. This was two females with a kid between them:
While the above were my own photos, the following are from motion-sensing cameras that Turkish biologists set up in 2013 to examine the wildlife around Cudi after its 30 years of isolation. They found striped hyenas:
Porcupines:
Foxes:
And more (or perhaps the same) mountain goats:
A couple of months later, a beautiful leopard was shot by a shepherd in nearby Diyarbakır province.
Locally, the Tigris River, which flows beneath Mt. Cudi, is said to have been given its name, the Latin word for “tiger,” because of the leopards that were once common around the upper reaches of this “Tiger River.” Apparently, they used the same caves, rough terrain, and remote location to stay clear of humanity as the guerrilla fighters now employ.
The Lost City of Thamanin?
The Ark atop Mt. Cudi
This is a satellite view of the summit of Mt. Cudi. Notice the roughly ship-shaped formation on the left (west) side of the summit (satellite photo courtesy of Bing Maps):
In ancient times, there were numerous pilgrimages to the top of this mountain to view what was said to be Noah’s Ark. However, with the exception of satellites, this artifact had never been photographed. I climbed the mountain for a closer look. Up close, the main line of that feature is just heaped up stones:
Circular depressions with larger stones atop them were distributed along the main line. These can also be seen in the satellite view above.
I wondered if this could be the remains of a building. However, unlike the other ruins here and elsewhere on the mountain and its foothills, the apparent wall was just loose heaped up gravel. The circles along the line reminded me somewhat of those along the city wall of Thamanin, which I had discovered in the foothills (the subject of my next blog post). However, those were regularly spaced along the wall, possibly the remains of guard towers. These looked completely random. (A close look at the satellite photography will confirm this.) And as I looked more closely, I noticed something about the order in which things had been done. The gravel-like stones had been heaped up first. Only later had someone stacked the larger stones around the perimeter of the circles, placing them on top of the heaped gravel. They were not original walls.
I noticed that elsewhere around the summit, the stones from crumbling but once well-built ancient walls had been harvested and stacked in crude semi-circles. These were not especially sturdy or durable, so I suspect that they had not been standing very long. Since the mountain has been occupied by guerrilla fighters for the past several decades, this was likely an attempt to form fortifications from the ancient shrines. Plowshares into swords. I suspect that the existing holes in the ship-like structure were likewise reinforced with stones from the old walls to make what look like machine gun nests. I found some shell casings near the summit, which seem consistent with this theory.
Thousands of years of historical accounts tell of people ascending Mt. Cudi to dig up pieces of wood covered in tar from Noah’s Ark (or its equivalent in their various great flood traditions). The Babylonian priest Berosus records pilgrimages to take souvenirs of the ship of their flood hero. The Assyrian king Sennacherib is said to have made an idol of the wood in 699 BC, promised to sacrifice his sons to said deity if he had military success, and then been bludgeoned to death with that very idol when his sons got word of the oath. In 537 AD, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian is said to have had the wood for the doors of the Hagia Sophia Cathedral brought from here. And with the rise of Islam, Umar ibn Al-Khattāb was said to have taken what remained and built a mosque from them. Since then, there have been additional claims of people digging up tar covered bits of wood.
For example, J. J. Benajmin II, who visited the mountain in the late 1840s (but did not summit), describes an annual Kurdish pilgrimage (since discontinued): “On descending the mountain they bring with them some remains of the Ark, which, according to their assertion, is still deeply buried in the earth. The little pieces received are in the form of planks; some whitish grey; some black and pierced with holes… I myself obtained several fragments of the Ark which appeared to be covered with a kind of substance resembling tar.”
I suspect that this spot is where pilgrims dug for buried wood. As they dug down (on the left side of the line of gravel seen in the first pic), they heaped up earth toward the outside of the ship-shaped line. Being exposed to the elements for centuries, most of the dirt washed away in rains leaving the stone content of this rocky soil in rain-washed heaps in a line all along the perimeter of their excavations. Every now and again someone attempted a very deep hole. These naturally took the form of circles randomly distributed along the perimeter line. (Sometimes missing the mark as the mountaintop used to be covered by snow much of the year.) Later these holes (partially filled in by erosion) were repurposed by the PKK guerrilla fighters.
Summiting Mount Cudi
I also got myself captured by guerrilla fighters in the foothills and found a lost city. But we’ll save those stories for future posts. The summit and its ruins and artifacts are amazing enough on their own, and some of the photos here and in future blogs are the first ever taken of their respective ruins or artifacts.
This feature is at the summit of Mt. Cudi. It may be the remains of the Synagogue of Ezra, which stood atop the mountain through at least 1170 AD (when Benjamin of Tudela passed through), or of the church associated with the Cloister of the Ark, a monastery that was struck by lightning in 776 AD and burned down along with its unfortunate inhabitants. In antiquity, this mountain was the only place that people of all religions made peace and worshipped together, including Christians, Jews, Muslims (Sunni and Shia), Yezidis . . . , sort of the religious equivalent of the Olympics.
An intriguing hole in the ground near the summit:
Descending into the hole and finding a hidden, arched subterranean chamber:
Similar subterranean chambers having long ago collapsed?
Inscribed stones:
This is enough for now. The Noah’s Ark remains that made this mountain so famous and sacred for so many centuries deserve their own separate post.
An Alleged “Noah’s Ark”
During a rainy period in 1948, an earthquake and its aftershocks caused mudslides around the mountain now known as Ararat. One of these, 17 miles to the south, either uncovered Noah’s Ark or happened to create an island between two mud flows that looked like a ship.
An expedition in 1960 dug three archaeological trenches into the formation in search of wood or artifacts but failed to find anything but clay, dirt, and a few stones. Impatient to see deep inside it, they then turned to the meticulous archaeological technique of blasting holes in with dynamite. But even this failed to yield any artifacts and they concluded that it was a natural formation.
Interest in the site waned until 1977 when Ron Wyatt visited it with a metal detector and got hits, which he claimed were due to the use of metal in the construction of the Ark. Following up on this, David Fasold allegedly mapped out an interior structure. Although he later recanted and admitted that it was just a dirt formation and not a ship, the earlier claim retains many followers.
I went to see it for myself. The taxi ride to the ark passed through quaint little villages:
When I arrived at the “Ark,” I found villagers making hay around the formation:
Although I had baled and stacked a lot of hay growing up in rural Iowa, my first attempts with a scythe elicited laughter. But I kept trying, and it’s fun to laugh and make new friends. Afterward, I was invited to climb the ship, which normally can only be seen from a distant viewing station. (Something about a lack of respect for holy sites and the archaeological use of dynamite.)
It seems like an impressive coincidence that the feature has the general shape of a ship and sits within sight of the mountain now known as Ararat.
As you can see, there are actually two ship shapes overlapping each other. This was convenient because it allowed the researchers to choose between the boats and between different notions of the length of a cubit in order to find a reasonable match between the length of the formation and the dimensions of the Ark mentioned in the Bible.
With regard to the metal detector hits, I made a small accidental observation. Little clods of dirt from the “Ark” had a remarkable affinity for the magnet that is supposed to hold the (MagSafe) power cord against my laptop. They attached firmly and were difficult to pry free due to their high iron content. This was not only true of the “Ark” but also of the surrounding dirt.
A small local museum displays the sum total of the alleged artifacts removed from this “Ark”:
I found none of these “artifacts” even remotely convincing. And my understanding is that even Fasold no longer argues that this is Noah’s Ark.
Finally, our intrepid explorer dismounts the Ark, leaps across a creek, bounds up the other side of the ravine, and then trips on level ground. : )