Mount Ararat: The Mountain of Noah

Mount Ararat is a mountain of many names. The Turks know it as Ağrı Dağı, the mountain of pain. To the Persians, who have periodically conquered Armenia over the past two-and-a-half thousand years, and who have long shared cultural ties with the Armenians, the mountain is known as Kūh-e Nūḥ (Persian: کوه نوح ), the "mountain of Noah". As for the ethnic Armenians, who have since time immemorial lived under the gaze of Ararat's twin cones, two names predominate. In Old Armenian, the mountain was called Azatn Massis (Armenian: Ազատ Մասիս), meaning "holy and free". Beginning in the Middle Ages, the mountain came to be known by another, more famous name, Ararat (Armenian: Արարատ).

Mount Ararat viewed from the Ishak Pasha Palace, Doğubayazıt, Turkey.

    Situated within the modern borders of the Republic of Turkey in the extreme eastern province of Ağrı, Mount Ararat soars dramatically over the plains of the Armenian Highland. Mount Ararat is actually a mountain massif 35km across punctuated by two main summits, Greater Ararat (5,137m) and Little Ararat (3,896m). Towering some 4,300m above the adjoining plains, Ararat is the highest peak in modern day Turkey and the third most topographically prominent peak in West Asia. Ararat is a dormant compound stratovolcano, the two summits comprising the high points of both of its volcanic cones. Neither of the two peaks exhibit any evidence of a volcanic crater, but the mountain has been volcanically active as late as the 3rd millennium BCE, as pyroclastic flows overlay archaeological remains of early Bronze age artifacts and humans. The last instance of volcanism occurred on 2 June 1840 when a magnitude 7.4 earthquake caused pyroclastic flows to issue from radial fissures high on its north flank, as well as triggering an abrupt phreatic eruption that ejected projectiles and an eruption column.
    Mount Ararat has long captivated the imaginations of the various peoples who have encountered it. To most Christians worldwide, Ararat is believed to be the resting place of Noah's Ark after the Great Flood of the Christian Old Testament. The Armenians, who are predominantly Orthodox Christian have come to believe this too, but the mountain means much more than this to them. Ararat is also the perceived holy homeland of the Armenians, and in secular political culture, a symbol of their nationhood as well as an icon of the political ideal of Armenian irredentism.

Greater Ararat looming over the historic Armenian monastery of Khor Virap, Artashat, Armenia, October 2016.

Ararat and Noah's Ark: Textuality and Tradition

Noah's Ark on the Mount Ararat, painting by Simon de Myle, c. 1570.

And on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. ~ Genesis 8:4, New International Version

In the Genesis flood narrative of the Hebrew-Christian textual tradition, it is held that when the waters of the world-engulfing deluge that the Abrahamic God unleashed to remake creation abated, the Hebrew prophet Noah's Ark (a ship-like vessel that Noah constructed at God's command to shelter himself and his family as well as a selection of the world's animals) is said to have landed "on the mountains of Ararat." Though the Biblical narrative does not identify any particular mountain as the Ark's resting place, most Bible scholars agree that "Ararat" (Hebrew: אֲרָרָט) is the Hebrew translation of the Old Assyrian Urartu that described an Iron Age kingdom that encapsulated a broad swath of what would later be known as Armenia. Ararat is only mentioned in two other passages in the Bible, and both mentions clarify that it is a geographical area and a kingdom.

The Kingdom of Urartu, 9th - 6th centuries BCE.

Descent of Noah from Ararat, painting by Ivan Ayvazovsky, c. 1889.

    In Western Christianity, it has been maintained since as early as the 4th century CE that Noah's Ark came to rest somewhere in present day Armenia. The specific mountain of Ararat came to be associated with the Biblical flood myth since the 11th-13th centuries CE (before then, most Christian scholars believed the location of the Biblical Ararat to be located in Corduene to the south of Lake Van). The first literary association of Mount Ararat with the Biblical Ararat in the Western Christian tradition comes from the Flemish Franciscan missionary-traveler William of Rubrick in the mid-13th century, who identified it by its indigenous Armenian name Massis. The reason for this association is self-evident. As the 19th century British historian James Bryce put it, Mount Ararat is "very much higher, more conspicuous, and more majestic than any other summit in Armenia." Due to its tremendous vertical relief relative to the surrounding plains, it was reckoned that the summit of Ararat would have been the first to emerge from the receding waters of the world flood.
For global Christians, the most enduring distinction of Mount Ararat is its association with the Genesis flood narrative. To them, the mountain is a spiritual symbol of God's mercy and wrath, as well as the final resting place of Noah's Ark. As an interesting footnote, Mount Ararat has been the subject of various Western-led searches for Noah's Ark since the 19th century. Despite hundreds of search attempts and reported sightings, the Ark has not been verifiably discovered, nor has there emerged any scientific evidence to support the Ark's existence.

From Massis to Ararat: the Armenians and their Mountain

 

Mount Ararat and the Yerevan skyline, April 2014.

Mount Ararat's significance to the Armenians transcends its association with the flood myth. Since pre-Christian times, the Armenians have regarded Mount Ararat, or Massis as it had previously been known, as the sacred symbol of their origins.
In the patchy pre-Christian folklore of the Armenians, Masis was regarded as a creative force, a child-bearing mother. On its peak, the sun went to rest each night, and it was where the divine heroes of the Armenian people tasked to protect them from foreign invasion, were born and laid to rest.
    In stark contrast to this, another story, first compiled in the early-Christian period in the 5th century CE by the Armenian historian Movses Khorenatsi characterises the bowels of the mountain as a fearsome and taboo place. In an apocalyptic local adaptation of the Persian fable of Zahhāk, a great monstrosity was imprisoned within the mountain, who would rule the world in terror or destroy it if it were ever unleashed. This was the half-human half-dragon-changeling king Artavazd, a cruel personage who was cursed by his father Artaxias to be eternally clapped in chains in a cave on Massis. Two dogs gnawed at his iron fetters constantly, threatening to release the abomination onto the world. Even as late as the 19th century, Armenians continued to adhere to this folklore. Village smiths would strike their anvils three times on Sundays in a ritual that symbolically strengthened Artavazd's chains.
    By the Middle Ages however, the Armenians began to draw connections between the Genesis flood narrative and their own creation myths. They began to contend that Noah had planted the first vine and built the first town on the slopes of Masis, merging these new legends with the general Christian belief of the Ark's resting place as the second cradle of humanity from whence the world began anew. In the 12th century, the Syrian story of St. Hakob Mtzbnetsi and his search for Noah's Ark in the mountains of Corduene, which the Armenians had known about since the 5th century, transformed Massis into the Biblical Ararat. In this story, St. Hakob tried to climb Ararat-Massis three times, inexplicably falling asleep below the summit and waking up mysteriously transported to its base each time. On his third attempt an angel appeared to him in his dream, relaying to him God's wish that no mortal should ever step on the holy summit of the mountain. However, in recognition of Hakob's devotion, the angel brought down from the summit a fragment of Noah's Ark and placed it on his breast.

The Coat of Arms of the Republic of Armenia features Mount Ararat in its center.

Armenian postal stamp for the year 2010.

Mount Ararat features on and serves as the namesake of the Yerevan Brandy Company's ArArAt brand of Brandy.

Obverse of a 2017 issue of an Armenian 500 dram banknote depicting the reliquary containing a purported fragment of Noah's Ark (left), and the Etchmiadzin Cathedral with Mount Ararat in the background (right). 

    Mount Ararat, as it was more popularly known by this point, gained a new dimension of importance to the Armenians in the early modern period amidst political displacement and successive rule by the Ottomans, the Iranians, and the Russians. By the 19th century, it came to represent the symbol of Armenian irredentism in the absence of a unified Armenian state. The Armenian historian and poet Ghevon Alishan encapsulated this idea aptly when he wrote in 1890: "There is no name or place throughout Armenia more notable than this mountain and it must be considered the symbol of all Armenians." In the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide in 1915, Mount Ararat once again took on new facets of significance as a memorial to the destruction of the Armenian population of eastern Turkey, as well as a symbol for the Armenian dream to reclaim their lost territories. This was especially the case after 1920 when Mount Ararat and its surrounds were formally ceded to the nascent Turkish Republic at the conclusion of the Turkish-Armenian War.
    Despite shifting political boundaries, Ararat has remained a constant visual presence for most Armenians. The Armenian capital city of Yerevan is situated only 55km away from its summit. The mountain dominates the city's skyline and is pervasively visible the windows and streets of many neighbourhoods in the city. Mount Ararat constitutes an indelible backdrop for the people who live in the Ararat Plains. Such that from the early 20th century to the present, depictions of Mount Ararat have featured heavily in Armenian material culture, political heraldry, and in public architecture and romantic poetry. Shops, stalls, and fairs in Yerevan continue to feature images of the mountain in all sorts of mediums, techniques and styles, even on the legal tender that shoppers exchange in their day-to-day transactions. In its reverence as the Mother Mountain of their primeval ancestors, its association as a Biblical Mountain, to its identification with the very psyche of Armenian nationhood, the mountain has always been the calling-card of the Armenian people. In the past, it was inaccessible because of religious taboos. Today it is inaccessible because of political realities.

Mountaineering and Climate Change

Triangular shadow cast by Mount Ararat.

An old man gave me quite a good reason why one ought not to try to climb it. They call the mountain Massis ... "No one," he said, "ought to climb up Massis; it is the mother of the world." ~ William of Rubruck, The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253–55.

Before the 19th century, the summit of Mount Ararat was regarded by the Armenians as a forbidden place. With reference to the story of St. Hakob, the Armenian Apostolic Church contended that Noah's Ark did indeed rest on the summit, and to preserve it, no mortal should be permitted to approach it. This taboo was finally broken on 27 September 1829, when the first ascent recorded in modern times of Mount Ararat was made by the German naturalist Friedrich Parrot, his Armenian interpreter and guide Khachatur Abovian, as well as two accompanying Russian soldiers and two other local villagers. The climbing party remained on the summit for about 45 minutes before starting their descent, pouring a libation to the Patriarch Noah out of respect. Armenian authorities remained objectionable to this climbing effort. They refused to believe that Parrot and Abovian had been on Ararat's summit, even though they submitted a detailed report, possibly because the existence of the Ark was missing from that report. On hearing about the ascent, one high-ranking Armenian clergyman commented that to climb the sacred mountain was to "tire the womb of the mother of all mankind in a dragonish mode."

An Armenian climber flying the national flag on the summit of Ararat.

    One hundred and ninety years later, Ararat has become a frequented trekking peak, climbable with little to no technical climbing experience. Armenian attitudes towards climbing the peak have also shifted significantly since. Climbing Ararat has become a nationalistic pilgrimage of sorts, a cherished dream for many native Armenians and members of the global Armenian diaspora. Today, various trekking tour operators offer guided ascents of the mountain, replete with multilingual guides and pack animals to act as porters. However, access to the mountain is currently regulated by the Turkish government. A special climbing permit is required to climb Ararat, and the Turkish government requires that all mountain guides on any expedition are licensed by the Turkish Federation for Alpinism.

Oblique view of Mount Ararat from the ISS as it orbited 421km above northern Iran, 18 February 2021.

    Nevertheless, the consequences of anthropogenic climate change throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have continued to make climbing and habitation around the mountain increasingly hazardous. Mount Ararat is home to the largest glacial mass in Turkey. Higher global temperatures have caused Ararat's glaciers to recede. In the late 1950s, Ararat had about 10 km2 of glacial ice. This ice cap shrunk to about 5.7 km2 by 2011. Rapid glacial melting especially in the summer months has destabilised the terrain around the mountain, occasionally triggering landslides. According to a 2020 geomatic study by Afyon Kocatepe University, it is estimated that if glacial retreat on Ararat maintains its current pace, Ararat's permanent glacier will likely devolve into a temporary glacier by 2065.

Ararat viewed from the summit of Mount Aragats (4,090m), 90km away.

Western view of the Ararat Massif from Doğubayazıt, Turkey.