Stage 37 – Georgia: Valleys of the Greater Caucasus
The modern state of Georgia occupies an area of mostly lush mountain valleys in the southern slopes of the Caucasus, bounded by the Black Sea in the west and the plains of what is now Azerbaijan to the east. A unified kingdom from the ninth to thirteenth centuries, from the Mongol invasion in 1243 until Russian annexation in 1801 Georgia existed often only as fragmented kingdoms and principalities, surrounded by much larger empires. Despite this however, the Georgian people have prevailed with a strong cultural identity, resisting incorporation into the neighbouring Muslim empires of the Turks and Persians and enduring almost two hundred years of Russian colonisation.
In 2010 I made my first visit to Georgia, driving from Azerbaijan into the breakaway republic of Abkhazia and on into Russia. I found a welcoming country of good-spirited people and unparalleled natural beauty, and left wishing to see more. On this second visit of more than three weeks I would loop around the country, visiting many of Georgia’s internal regions, often made up from the once distinct ancient kingdoms and principalities. Here I would find the enduring essence of the country, in picturesque villages with graceful stone churches, and mountains dotted by ancient stone towers and fortresses: the valleys of the Greater Caucasus.
Sapara Monastery, Samtskhe-Javakheti Region, Georgia
On the 10th August 2014 I enter Georgia from Turkey close to the village of Vale, and drive the short distance to the regional capital, Akhaltsikhe. The contrast in landscape with Turkey is stark; gone are the wide, open plains and denuded hillsides, replaced by thickly forested mountains, here in fact the northern slopes of the Lesser Caucasus. Turkey’s squalid highland towns and villages, still rather torpid following the ugly demographic upheavals of the twentieth century are gone, replaced by more benign and permanent-looking settlements where very little looks to have changed in recent history. I attend to a few matters in town, then drive up above Akhaltsikhe into dense pine forest towards Sapara Monastery, which lies beautifully sited on a cliff edge in a fold of the forested mountains, with the conical dome of the fourteenth century Saint Saba Church poking above the treetops; a beautifully Georgian landscape. As it’s early evening I decide to stop for the night nearby and find a tiny clearing in the dense forest where I sleep in the cab of the truck as a thunderstorm breaks in the mountains above.
Landscape. near Zekari Pass, Imertei Region, Georgia
In the morning I return to Akhaltsikhe, a small but pleasant town set under a large and recently restored thirteenth century castle. It’s here that I meet an old friend of mine, Marcus, a German whom I first met in Romania during the very first days of the Odyssey more than seven years ago, and with whom I stayed for a few days in Siliguri, India, in 2008. Marcus arrives in a hired Nissan 4×4 with his eleven year old daughter Tamuna, and eight year old son Samiran. We leave Akhaltsikhe just after midday, driving initially towards Batumi on the Black Sea, but soon turning north onto what is listed on my map as a secondary road. We stop in the resort town of Abastumani and have a very pleasant and welcome soak in a hot spring, then buy some supplies for the evening and head for the mountains. Soon after leaving Abastumani the road deteriorates into a rough and rocky track passable only with a high-clearance vehicle, but it’s a fun drive through thick forest and, nearing the top of the pass where the trees disappear, we’re rewarded with stunning views over the forested ridges of Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park, which fall away to the south.
Skyline, Kutaisi, Imereti Region, Georgia
As we continue our climb, thick fog closes in on us, the temperature drops and darkness comes quickly. We park on the only available piece of flat ground, on the edge of the road just below the pass, and begin to strike camp and start cooking dinner. My concerns that the children will feel uncomfortable in such an environment are however unfounded; they are neither fearful nor protesting, and do not seem to mind that it is cold and dark, or that we will sleep on the side of the road. To my delight, they seem to appreciate the adventure for the new experience that it is.
In the morning we walk briefly onto the surrounding hills from where there are stunning views of emerald-green grassy hillsides, topped by a muddy summer village consisting of a few ageing farm buildings. We cross the 2180 metre Zekari Pass, starting our descent towards the Greater Cacuasus, and there is noticeable change in vegetation with the damp northern slopes filled with shrubs and wild-flowers. The road becomes extremely rough as we descend back into forests, making slow progress until returning to asphalt in the town of Sairme which, filled with upmarket resorts and expensive black SUVs and luxury cars, feels rather ostentatious after the wholesome beauty of the mountains. We follow a river dropping gently through thick forest, emerging in the lowland town of Baghdati, birthplace of troubled Russia poet Mayakovsky, from where we drive to the capital of Imereti Region, Kutaisi, ancient capital of the Kingdom of Colchis.
Jewish Man, Oni, Racha-Lechkhumi and Kvemo Svaneti Region, Georgia
We stop for a late lunch in Kutaisi, enjoying good Georgian food in a family-run restaurant set on a wide road of thunderous lorry traffic. Despite its size, Kutaisi feels to be composed mostly of rambling, leafy back-streets of small houses with only a single, though rather elegant, central square. On the north side of the Rioni River we stop to visit the eleventh century Bagrati Cathedral, a masterpiece of medieval Georgian architecture with soaring white limestone walls of tall, narrow arcatures so emblematic of Georgian Church architecture. Built in the early eleventh century during the reign of King Bagrat III, the first monarch of a united Georgia, the cathedral was heavily damaged during an Ottoman invasion in the late seventeenth century, and a long and latterly controversial restoration was only completed two years ago.
We drive east out of Kutaisi in the evening and stop for the night on a patch of empty ground not far away. Judging by the number of old shoes poking out of the ground, the site seems to be a landscaped rubbish dump, though Marcus and I tell the children that it’s a mass-grave; not that this seems to faze them very much, with Samiran happily sleeping in a tent well away from the cars.
In the morning we stop at another significant building; the early twelfth century Gelati Monastery, founded by King David IV (‘The Builder’), probably the most celebrated of Georgian monarchs. Not long after the death of Bagrat III, Georgia fell to the Seljuk Turks and it was David IV who regained Georgian independence in the end of the eleventh century, promoted Christianity and ushered in a Georgian Golden Age. Gelati Monastery belongs to this Golden Age, and one can see an advancement in style from nearby Bagrati, with greater use of carved stone ornamentation, and a proportionately larger, conical dome.
Chveshura Valley, Racha-Lechkhumi and Kvemo Svaneti Region, Georgia
Leaving Gelati we head north-east, through Tkibuli and up the Nakerala Pass from where we catch our first glimpse of the snowcapped Greater Caucasus, whose spine marks the border with Russia. We pass through Ambrolauri, the tiny capital of Racha-Lechkhumi and Kvemo Svaneti Region, then continue to climb to the even smaller town of Oni where we visit the very elegant late nineteenth century synagogue and meet a member of the tiny community of Georgian Jews, who claim direct descent from the Babylonian Migrants. Beyond Oni the road becomes very quiet as we enter real mountain scenery, then bifurcates, with the right hand track leading to the border of the breakaway Republic of South Ossetia. We take the left fork however, entering a stunningly beautiful valley surrounded to the south and north by snowcapped peaks. In the large, picturesque village of Ghebi we turn north (after stocking up on beer) onto a narrow, rough track entering the yet more beautiful Chveshura Valley and stop to camp next to a small, tree-covered stream where I have a welcome bath. I am rather amused upon finding out that Samiran has fouled his trousers but am soon the subject of laughter myself when, sitting down too quickly with a bowl of boiling noodles, I spill some on a very sensitive part of my crotch and literally scream in pain.
Frescoes, Saint Nicholas Church, Nikortsminda, Racha-Lechkhumi and Kvemo Svaneti Region, Georgia
We leave the cars the following morning and walk up further into the valley, passing a few summer houses sitting in glorious isolation of the modern world, several of which seem to be uninhabited. After a couple of hours walk, we pass a border patrol post beyond which the track becomes a narrow footpath and we enter thick, mixed forest of birch, beech and pine, then drop down to the cold, milky grey-blue waters of the Chveshura River, looking north towards a dramatic wall of the Greater Caucasus; an ancient, pale grey granite massif with thick glaciers in each defile and sharply defined crags and towers; some of the most impressive mountain scenery I have seen in all of the Caucasus.
Returning to the cars, we decide to stay in the same spot for another night, moving on the following morning. We back-track through Oni, and beyond Ambrolauri stop at the small village of Nikortsminda, home to the early eleventh century Saint Nicholas Church, which must be one of the most beautiful buildings in the country. Externally the church is small and well proportioned, stylistically of the Georgian Golden Age but covered in an unusual richness of decorative stone carvings; on the columns of the arcatures; a carving of Christ above two rosettes on the gable of the narthex wall, but most strikingly around each of the slot windows in the twelve sided drum supporting the church’s conical roof. Inside, the six apses of the hexagonal-planned church and the interior of the drum and dome are richly covered in sixteenth and seventeenth century frescoes depicting the life of Christ, unusually bold and well-preserved.
In the coal mining town of Tkibuli, which has an elegant main street of Stalin-era city blocks with arcaded ground-floor shop-fronts, we turn south towards Zestafoni where we join the horrendous traffic of the country’s main highway, which we take eastwards towards our overnight stop in Mtskheta. The heavy traffic and wild local driving style are a change of pace from the idyllic mountains we have spent the last few days in, only easing as the road turns into a much needed divided highway near Gori, after which we pass the southern edge of South Ossetia, from where the Russian Army made a brief incursion into Georgia in 2008.
We stay at a home-stay in Mtskheta run by Gerhard, a retired German civil servant and his Russian wife Julia whose good company, home-cooked food and wonderful, shady garden on a hillside just north of the Mtkvari River make for a relaxing rest stop and a rare chance to spend a day doing almost nothing. We’re also joined here by Lia, half Slovenian, half Japanese, whom I first met in Russia four years ago.
Jvari Monastery, Mtskheta-Mtianeti Region, Georgia
Mtskheta is Georgia’s spiritual capital, and its most important monument is the beautifully located Jvari Monastery, built atop a steep ridge overlooking the confluence of the Mtkvari and Argavi Rivers. Jvari harks back to Georgia’s oldest history, when its territory was divided into the two kingdoms of Colchis in the west and Iberia (Kartli in Georgian) here in the east. Mtskheta was the capital of Iberia and according to legend the site of the conversion of pagan King Mirian III of Iberia by the female evangelist Saint Nino of Cappadocia, thus converting the kingdom to Christianity in circa 327. Nino is said to have planted a miracle-working cross on the site of a former pagan temple, and it is on this spot that the current church was built in 590 to 605. Jvari is an elegantly simple tetraconch church, an evolution of an earlier Byzantine design whose origin of design is a matter of dispute between Georgia and nearby Armenia. Lia and I visit on a Sunday morning when the church is busy with domestic and foreign visitors, thronging around the large cross which dominates the church’s interior, spot-lit by shafts of brilliant sunlight from small slot-windows which pierce through the smoke-filled air of the church; the very origin of Georgian Christianity.
Sighnhagi, Kakheti Region, Georgia
Late in the morning the five of us set off, bypassing the northern edge of Tbilisi on the ring road and turning east into Kakheti, Georgia’s easternmost region, famed for its wine. We drive through a gently rolling agrarian landscape that looks much more like the Mediterranean than the valleys we have been in for the last week, climbing finally to the attractive town of Sighnaghi. Built on top of a hill in the eighteenth century, several hundred meters over the neat patchwork fields of the Alazani Valley, Sighnaghi is an extremely attractive walled city with cobblestone streets, galleried stone houses with terracotta-tiled roofs, small squares with street cafes and the modestly beautiful cobble-stone Saint George’s Church all giving one the feeling of being in Tuscany or Catalonia. We spend a warm, peaceful night camping on a nearby hilltop, then drive towards the Alazani River in the morning, stopping on the northern side of the river at Gremi, once the capital of the Kingdom of Kakheti and a flourishing Silk Road city, destroyed by the Persians in the early seventeenth century, leaving only the remains of a stone fortress and the slender sixteenth century All Saints Church with an almost needle-like dome.
Keselo Fortress, Upper Omalo, Kakheti Region, Georgia
We stop for lunch in the small town of Kvemo Alvani, then head north into the mountains, aiming for the historical region of Tusheti, across on the northern slopes of the Greater Caucasus in the far north-east of Georgia. What starts as a reasonable dirt track along the Stori River soon enters a narrow, rocky gorge filled with small waterfalls and beautiful beech forest where the track, in places hewn from the rock, becomes extremely rough and slow-going. After some time the road emerges from the forest, improves slightly and climbs along the steep, lime-green grassy hillsides, high above deep river valleys, cresting successively higher ridges in sets of tight switchbacks until, late in the afternoon, we cross the 2860 metre Abano Pass and enter Tusheti. We drop more than one thousand metres from the pass, back into a narrow forested gorge where we camp for the night.
In the morning we drive up to Omalo, close to the junction point of Tusheti’s two main valleys: the Tushetis Alazani and, further north, the Pirikitis Alazani, running under the peaks to the north which mark the Russian border. Omalo is Tusheti’s largest settlement and is overlooked by the recently restored Keselo Fortress, a series of blocky medieval towers built on a rocky outcrop, overlooking several nearby valleys. Tusheti has been settled since at least the third century BCE and was something of an outpost of paganism; though nominally Christianised in the ninth century, strong pagan influences persist in Tushetian culture. Today Tusheti is rather depopulated, with many Tushs having moved down to what historically were summer grazing grounds around Kvemo Alvani, visiting the highlands only for festivals or to serve the recently arrived tourism industry. This is not so hard to understand, given that the only access to the valley is via a rough track requiring a four-wheel drive vehicle, which was only completed in the early 1980s, and that the valley still lacks even an electricity supply.
Tushetis Alazani Valley, near Verkhovani, Kakheti Region, Georgia
We spend two days in Tusheti; first driving along the Tushetis Alazani Valley and stopping near the village of Alisgori where we camp next to the river and walk up into the hills the following morning, visiting a ruined watchtower and a traditional Tushetian khati, a small stone shrine made from flat blocks of shale and slate, topped by a cross; a pagan shrine which women are still forbidden to approach. The next day we back-track towards Omalo and drive along the wider Pirikitis Alazani Valley, through the large village of Dartlo with its defensive towers and wooden balconied stone guest-houses, surrounded by ruins and deforested hillsides, clearly once a far larger settlement. Further west, the valley passes the almost abandoned village of Chesho, also overlooked by a stone watchtower, then narrows and becomes even more beautiful as we near the village of Parsma and park the cars for the night next to the river, where we camp. In the morning I walk up into the village, consisting of perhaps thirty houses of stone stained orange by lichen, with rusty steel roofs and a few towers, of which all but one are ruined. Up above the village is a cemetery where graves are marked by unhewn river stones and a khati where thin, honey-coloured church candles have recently been lit. I speak to a local who tells me that in summer the population is around fifty as the Tush bring their flocks up to graze, but that the village is deserted in winter. Though this has been the way of life for many Tush for the last few centuries, it is clearly now in decline, though for once tourism may present a means for it to be sustained.
David Gareja Monastery, Kakheti Region, Georgia
We drive back down out of the mountains, retracing our route to Kvemo Alvani and on to reach the charming capital of Kakheti, Telavi, in the evening, then continuing slowly the following day southwards, crossing another forested ridge and dropping down to the torrid lowlands of Georgia’s far south-east. Here the country’s seemingly unending greenery finally abates, leaving a dry and dusty landscape which looks more like Central Asia than anywhere else in Georgia, with beautiful rolling plains of yellowed grass, flocks of sheep and goats and occasional, rather forlorn-looking villages. Beyond the shabby town of Udabno we camp on a smooth grassy ridge, enjoying the warm, dry night air and clear skies after several cool, damp nights in the mountains.
Just south of our campsite, hard up against the Azerbaijani border is the exotic looking monastery complex of David Gareja, highly fortified with a thick stone wall closing it off against a steep ridge, giving it a real sanctuary atmosphere. David of Gareja was one of the legendary ‘Thirteen Assyrian Fathers’, missionaries from Mesopotamia which the Georgian Orthodox Church celebrates for setting up thirteen monasteries and strengthening Christianity in early medieval Georgia. The monastery is said to have been founded by David in the sixth century, and has endured attacks by the Seljuk Turks, Mongols, Tamerlane and the Persians, then neglect and partial destruction by the Soviets, only returning to active use in 1988. We walk up a steep, dusty path to the top of the ridge, which marks the Azerbaijani border. Walking ahead of the others, I drop down from the ridge into what is Azerbaijani territory (a subject of dispute between the two countries) and walk along a string of collapsed cave churches, their half-vanished ceilings now open to the elements but still bearing remains of frescoes dating from the tenth to thirteenth centuries.
Rustavi, Kvemo Kartli Region, Georgia
We leave the monastery heading westwards on a rough track, eventually catching the edge of the irrigated farmland around the Mtkvari, driving along a distributor canal into the town of Gardabani which has a majority Azerbaijani population, but which with Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian and Armenian minorities has a curiously Soviet-cosmopolitan atmosphere. We have lunch in a nice open air restaurant, then continue north through the regional capital of Rustavi, a heavily industrialised city which looks to have changed very little since Soviet times; down at heel but with a charming centre of Art Deco influenced early twentieth century Soviet urban architecture. By-passing Tbilisi, we return to Mtskheta from where Marcus and the children spend a final day before flying back to Germany. I’ve really enjoyed their company over the last two weeks, but more than that, Marcus has shown me that children need not put an end to a traveller’s lifestyle and that, having brought his children up in multiple countries and without the awful influence of television, they look at the world without fear, and at strangers without any pre-judgement whatsoever; ideal qualities for a traveller.
Lebaiskari Tower, Mtskheta-Mtianeti Region, Georgia
Lia and I leave Mtskheta and head for the mountains again; this time due north along the first few kilometres of the Georgian Military Highway, which connects the capital to the only functioning border crossing with Russia, then turning off to pass the turquoise water of the Zhinvali Reservoir, onto a dirt track running along the Pshavi Arguni River, entering the historic region of Khevsureti. We cross the 2680 metre Datvisjvari Pass on a good dirt road, overlooking a wide, green, deforested valley punctuated only by the lone Lebaiskari Tower, which like the towers of Tusheti is built in the Vainakhish style, as seen in the Russian republics of Chechnya and Ingushetia directly to the north, and different from the more European-looking stone towers of Svaneti to the west. Khevsureti, like Tusheti, is an isolated mountain refuge of medieval traditions and architecture, and the Khevsur people have very strong pagan and animistic traditions below a veneer of Christianity. Famed as warriors, the Khevsur have traditionally fought with their Muslim neighbours to the north, and there is (perhaps mostly romantic) speculation that they are descended in part from a lost group of medieval crusaders, though this is no doubt influenced by the fact that the Khevsurs wore chain mail well into the twentieth century.
Mausoleum, Mutso, Mtskheta-Mtianeti Region, Georgia
The track descends gently, passing the striking medieval complex of Shatili, composed of perhaps fifty towers and stone houses with wickerwork balconies dating from the twelfth century and recently restored. Just beyond Shatili, the track comes to within a few hundred metres of the Chechen border, then doubles back up into the Andakistskali Valley, where we drive to the end of the road below the village of Ardoti and camp for the night. In Ardoti we see the ruined shell of a twelfth century stone church, still used it seems by villagers judging by the presence of candles and icons, then drive back past a number of Khevsur graves, one of which from 1930 depicts the deceased in full chain mail with sword and shield. A little further down the valley we stop below Mutso Fortress; a large rocky knoll covered in abandoned stone houses and towers, like a ruined Tower of Babel. We walk up a steep side valley, then cross a stream and walk towards Mutso, passing five open mausoleums full of skeletons, some still with scraps of clothing and traces of flesh. Unlike Shatili, Mutso itself is totally abandoned and in need of preservation. With most Khevsurs having moved to Tbilisi in the twentieth century, the isolated culture of this mountain community seems to be highly threatened.
Uplistsikhe, Shida Kartli Region, Georgia
We spend the next two days driving up the broad Mtkvari Valley, alternating between the busy main highway and quiet backroads, stopping-off at various churches; the huge, restored Cathedral of Samtavisi with massive stone carvings on its eastern wall; Metekhi Church with an unusual tapering drum, then stopping at the cave city of Uplistsikhe. One of the oldest settlements in the Caucasus, the heavily damaged caves of Uplistsikhe show architectural influences from Anatolia and Persia, and were a cultural centre of pre-Christian ancient Iberia. We continue through the elegant city of Gori, which since my previous visit in 2010 has lost its large statue of Stalin, who was born here, then continue to more of the Mtkvari Valley’s churches; the beautiful tetraconch churches of Ateni Sioni and Samtsevrisi, both very similar to Jvari, and the large, sixth to seventh century three-aisled basilica of the walled Urbnisi Monastery, built on the site of an even earlier city.
Lake Tabatskuri, Samtskhe-Javakheti Region, Georgia
We leave the main highway towards the coast at Khashuri, driving further up the Mtkvari Valley to the rather dull resort town of Borjomi, famed for its mineral water. Here we turn south and climb once more into the mountains, through dense pine forest to the resort of Bakuriani, filled with the Georgian nouveau riche in badly driven, black SUVs, and with children in expensive clothes; a place I take a strong and immediate disliking to. Leaving the crassness behind, an unpaved road climbs further into the beautiful forested ridges of the Lesser Caucasus, climbing up above the tree-line and into the clouds to the 2430 metre Tskhratskharo Pass where we turn east towards Lake Tabatskuri. Here the scenery becomes immediately very different; a high, rolling volcanic plateau which is physically part of the Armenian Highlands rather than the typical valleys of Georgia. We drive through a flat grassland on which farmers have made summer camps and are cutting the grass, piling it into neat ricks. Cresting a small ridge, we catch out first glimpse of the lake, with the almost Scandinavian-looking village of Tabatskuri located on a small peninsula jutting into the lake. We find a magnificent campsite on the northern edge of the lake, overlooking its steely-blue waters against a backdrop of volcanic peaks.
The next day we drive around the western edge of the lake on rough tracks, passing small, isolated and poor-looking villages up on the plateau. This highland corner of Georgia, known as Samtskhe or Meskheti, in addition to the region of Javakheti further to the south, was transferred from the Ottoman to Russian Empires in the nineteenth century, and was heavily populated by Armenians fleeing oppression under the Ottomans. When Stalin exiled the Meskhetian Turks from the area en masse in November 1944, Armenians settled the newly vacated areas. Today the region remains majority Armenian and, as we drive through rather far-flung villages such as Kochio and Baraleti, we see Armenian script used in local shops, and the characteristic pink tuff and black basalt churches; simple boxes with a pitched roof and small bell tower, usually in a state of disrepair. We rejoin the main road near the city of Akhalkalaki, then drive back to the Mtkvari Valley, following it upstream to the cave city of Vardzia.
Forest, near Apnia. Samtskhe-Javakheti Region, Georgia
Like Uplistsikhe, Vardzia has been inhabited since the Bronze Age, but it is famous for its connection with Queen Tamara, who reigned in Georgia from 1184 to 1213, during the height of the Georgian Golden Age which saw Tamara consolidate her Caucasian empire; it was said to be from here in Vardzia that she set off west in her campaign against the Muslims in the very early thirteenth century. Today Vardzia, once inaccessible due to its proximity to the sensitive Soviet – Turkish border, is popular with Georgian and foreign tourists, who come to see the beautiful late twelfth century mural of Queen Tamara in the rock-carved Dormition Cathedral. After visiting the caves, Lia and I go for a dip in some hot-springs just south of Vardzia, then drive up a steep and rough set of switchbacks on the cliff-face opposite the cave city, leading to the village of Apnia, set in a beautiful landscape of rolling green parkland, where we camp next to open, planted pine forest with magnificent views of the mountains of Turkey to the south-west.
Greek Men, Beshtasheni, Kvemo Kartli Reigon, Georgia
Leaving this wonderful campsite the next morning, we drive back towards the capital through the highlands of Javakheti; first through more impoverished-looking villages, past the abandoned railway station outside Akhalkalaki, then turning east in Ninotsminda onto a new road. At the slate-grey highland Lake Parvani we turn off the road temporarily, passing through highly isolated communities of Doukhobors; radically pacifist Russian dissenters exiled here by Tsar Nicholas I in 1830, who here live in distinctive sod-roofed wooden houses. Rejoining the main road it’s a very brief climb to the 2170 metre Tikmatashi Pass, from where the land steadily drops. We stop for lunch in the majority Greek town of Tsalka, then leave the main road again to visit the village of Beshtasheni which has a black basalt Greek Orthodox church, whitewashed around its sky-blue doors, above which is a stone with a Greek inscription. Just near the church I meet two Pontic Greeks, whose lives are a story of exile and flight; from a background of Turkish-speaking Pontic Greeks who fled Ottoman Turkey, born here in Soviet Georgia and now living in Thessaloniki in Greece, thus speaking Turkish, Georgian, Russian and Greek; four totally unrelated languages.
Mtkvari Valley, Mtskheta-Mtianeti Region, Georgia
As we drive further eastwards, we drop back into the typical Georgian landscape of wooded river valleys, past the rather drab town of Manglisi. It’s after midnight when I drop Lia off at Tbilisi Airport and continue alone to Mtskheta in the small hours, passing Gerhard and Julia’s place and driving to the monastery named after another of the thirteen Assyrian Fathers: Shio-Mgvime. After a brief sleep I visit the monastery before any other visitors arrive, then climb up a beautiful ridge of dwarf oak forest to a small chapel overlooking the broad Mtkvari Valley. Here I have a serene moment looking over the very heartland of Georgia, where the hills fall away into the late summer haze; green and thickly wooded on their higher slopes, parched and dry where they flatten to reach the river, with small areas of greenery marking the patchwork of villages which spread from here to the Black Sea. This, I think to myself, is the real Georgia.
Bolnisi Sioni Church, Bolnisi, Kvemo Kartli Region, Georgia
I spend three days relaxing in Mtskheta with Gerhard and Julia, enjoying the late summer days in their shady garden. The sting is now starting to go out of the sun, the leaves beginning to turn and my thoughts are focused towards finally entering Armenia; the only country in the Former Soviet Union which I have not yet visited. On my last drive out of Mtskheta I choose to drive through Tbilisi, a city I have very fond memories of from my visit in 2010, then drive south through Marneuli to Bolnisi. Bolnisi was founded by German settlers in the early nineteenth century and retains a few scruffy pitch-roofed German houses, but is otherwise like any other of the nearby towns; rather shabby, impoverished-looking and inhabited mostly by Azerbaijanis whose style-less new mosques look rather out of place in the Georgian countryside. Just outside of Bolnisi however, I visit one final church; that of Bolnisi Sioni; a three-aisled basilica constructed between 478 and 493, built from beautiful blocks of green and pink tuff, the oldest extant church in Georgia. In addition to Christian symbology, the church has pagan-influenced carvings of animals and plants, as well as the oldest example of the Georgian alphabet found in Georgia; here the in the early Asomtavruli script, in which one can see clearly the similarity with the Armenian alphabet.
From Bolnisi the road turns south, passing the archaeological site of Dmanisi, home to a 1.81 million year-old Homo fossil, the oldest found outside Africa. I then climb on an empty road into beautiful beech forest and further, upwards to the edge of a plateau and the border with Armenia where I leave Georgia from the bleak village of Guguti.
On this second trip to Georgia I have gone beyond the country’s most obvious attractions, finding it to be surprisingly polyglot and decentralised for such a small country. The Georgians, with whom I have sadly had rather little contact on this trip, seem to be sitting back in their slice of paradise, enjoying new-found independence and waiting to see what the future brings, though as a pawn between Russia, the EU and the US, this is not at all certain. My strongest impression is unchanged however; that Georgia is overwhelmingly, unendingly beautiful, no matter which part one visits.
Stage 36 – Iran, Azerbaijan & Turkey: The Armenian Highlands
Modern Armenia is a small, mountainous country, lacking in natural resources and highly isolated both physically and politically. In the past however, successive Armenian kingdoms spread across a far greater area surrounding legendary Mount Ararat, including much of what is now called Eastern Anatolia, the far north-west of Iran, and parts of Azerbaijan and Georgia: an area known as the Armenian Highlands.
I would start my journey visiting Armenian sites along the north-western borders of Iran, a country which still has a thriving Armenian minority, before crossing the Aras River into the intriguing Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan. From here I would re-cross the Aras, this time into Turkey, where I would loop around the troubled, Kurdish south-east of the country, revisiting a few sights I had passed during my first overland trip to Asia as a backpacker in 2003. Despite the fond memories however, my overwhelming impression would be one of melancholy and tragedy from the glaring cultural decline; the impoverished Kurds, themselves victims of repression by the Turkish state, living amongst the ruins of their vanished Armenian forebears whose crumbling churches lie in neglected, silent testament to the forced movement of Christians out of Anatolia. Ninety nine years after the Armenian (and Assyrian) Genocide, the brutal demographic upheavals of the twentieth century still appear very obvious on the cultural landscape of the Armenian Highlands.
Salt Flats, Lake Urmia, West Azerbaijan Province, Iran
I leave Tabriz on the morning of the 26th July 2014, heading south-east towards Lake Urmia. In 2003, on my very first visit to Iran, I had crossed the gap in the then unfinished causeway across the lake in an ancient Chevrolet savari (share taxi), using a pontoon ferry. Today, the bridge is complete and the ferry lies scuppered and rusting in a briny pool, but ironically, and rather tragically, the water of the lake has almost disappeared. Due to intensive use of water for agriculture, Lake Urmia is just ten percent of its original size, and what was a large lake eleven years earlier is now a large area of parched, salt-flats which look very much like the bed of the former Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. In what used to be the centre of the lake, a few stretches of lifeless, hyper-saline water remain in a landscape of furrowed white salt mounds which stretch to the point where the lake surface seamlessly merges with the sky, looking almost like melting pack-ice. I stop on the causeway to look out over this bleak landscape, watching a man shovelling and raking salt into the back of a blue pickup truck. It’s quite disturbing to see personally such disastrous environmental change occur over so short a period of time.
I turn north on the far side of the lake, soon passing a weathered, third century Sassanian bas-relief near the village of Khan Takhti which shows a victorious King Ardeshir and Prince Shapur returning from the successful conquest of Roman Armenia. The fact that one may find such ancient artwork almost unmarked, and unprotected at the side of what must be a very ancient road, is another great joy of Iran. Continuing north, beyond Khoy I turn off the main road to the village of Bastam where I see my first Urartian site; the stone-walled remains of a small settlement, perched on a naturally defensible cliff overlooking the entrance to a green, watered valley. The Urartians were an Iron Age civilisation, contemporaries of the Hittites, centred on the Lake Van region, who flourished from the ninth to sixth centuries BCE and are thought to be the ancestors of the Armenians. As I loop across the Armenian Highlands, I will encounter several more of their intriguing ruins.
Dzordzor Chapel, West Azerbaijan Province, Iran
From Bastam I drive north-west on a small road, climbing onto a beautiful upland of Azerbaijani villages where women still wear colourful dresses. Here, tucked away in a small valley is the imposing Monastery of Saint Thaddeus, which legends tell was originally built in 68 AD by the Apostle Jude Thaddeus, who preached the Gospel in the area. However, much of what can be seen dates from the early nineteenth century and while it is impressive, particularly for its fine stone carvings, its black roof and heavy stone defensive walls against dark volcanic hills make it a rather dour and austere structure. More beautiful is the nearby chapel of Dzordzor, which I reach after driving through Chaldiran and into another hidden valley on a dirt track. The chapel is all that remains of a larger monastery whose ruins have been inundated by the nearby Zangmar Dam, with the chapel having been moved stone-by-stone by the Iranian authorities in the late 1980s; a touching example of the respect the revolutionary Iranian authorities have for the Christian Armenian minority in Iran, and in general for historical architecture. I camp next to the chapel in a compellingly beautiful location, passed in the evening by a local shepherd with his flock but otherwise totally alone. Dzordzor is a stunning piece of Armenian architecture, amongst the very finest I have seen; a slender, white limestone miniature cross-church with a soaring, pencil-like drum, topped by a delicate, faceted cone roof supported on zigzagging gables.
Saint Stepanos Monastery, East Azerbaijan Province, Iran
I leave Dzordzor on a beautiful morning, crossing a high pass to the north and descending to the town of Maku, very close to the Turkish frontier. Here I turn east, leaving the main highway and driving to the Aras River, which marks the boundary between Iran and the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan. I follow the river downstream, initially through flat plains, passing the Aras Reservoir, then entering a striking, steep, red-rock gorge, with the road narrow and perched immediately on the river’s right bank. It is in a steep side valley from this road that I find a third piece of preserved Armenian architecture; the elegant pink tuff Saint Stepanos Monastery, set in a walled compound with a lush garden fed by a cold spring, in stark contrast to the dry red mountains which soar all around it. Originally built in the ninth century, the current structure dates from Safavid times and is magnificent in its elegant proportions with a fine bell-tower, ornate carvings on the tambour (drum) and a bas-relief of the Stoning of Saint Stepanos on the gable of the narthex.
Back on the main road it’s a short distance to the border town of Jolfa, where a bridge connects Iran with Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic. Jolfa has been heavily redeveloped as a part of the Aras Free Trade Zone, but the border, even by Iranian standards, is utterly chaotic and totally unaccustomed to foreigners crossing with a vehicle. Nobody speaks English or Russian and I am led around by a ‘fixer’ who seems not even to speak Persian; only through a German-speaking Turkish lorry driver am I able to understand what is going on. I have to visit various offices in order to stamp my carnet, pay a spurious diesel surcharge for fuel I am taking out of Iran and eventually barter with the fixer who demands an exorbitant sum for his services. My nerves are shot by the time I finally cross the bridge into Azerbaijan where, expecting worse, I find the exact opposite; procedures are conducted in a calm and professional manner and several of the customs officers speak Russian and one even English. They are curious to see a foreigner driving across the border, but swiftly process my documents so that by mid-afternoon I’m free to drive to the capital, Nakhchivan.
Mausoleum, Qarabağlar, Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, Azerbaijan
This tiny exclave of Azerbaijan was once an independent khanate and today is a geographical oddity resulting from intense historical manoeuvring between Persia, Ottoman Turkey and Imperial Russia, leading the Soviets finally to cede it (and Nagorno Karabakh) to Azerbaijan. Undoubtedly once part of historical Armenia, the Azerbaijani authorities are guilty of the rather pathetic practice of destroying all Armenian churches and cemeteries in the territory in order to remove all traces of their historical inhabitants, in petty retaliation for the Armenian occupation of Armenian-majority Nagorno Karabakh, the conflict at the root of Armenia’s intense present-day political isolation.
I’m thrilled to have made it without any issue into this geopolitical oddity. However, having always been a sensitive border region of the USSR, and now an exclave separated from the ‘mainland’ by hostile Armenia, Nakhchivan has something of a reputation for official paranoia and mistrust of foreigners and as I carefully drive on the new highway to the capital, I notice that I am being followed. Reaching Nakhchivan I meet my local host Tale who speaks briefly with my tail and explains that I am his guest; the last time before the border that I have any interaction with the local authorities. I stay with Tale in a room rented out by his great aunt Sonja, a cheery seventy year-old widow who plies me with ice-cold watermelon and peaches; very welcome after the fierce afternoon heat. Tale and I head into town where, after a month in dry Iran, my most urgent wish is to drink a beer. We head down into an underground bar, where we drink the local Nakhchivan beer with small plates of chickpeas, served by an English-speaking Nigerian waiter who is a student in the local university, and tells me he is studying, of all things, French. What a perfect day.
Cowboy, near Tazakand, Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, Azerbaijan
On my first full day in Nakhchivan, Tale and I start by driving north on the main highway towards the Turkish border, turning right into the small village of Qarabağlar where I admire a stunning piece of Islamic architecture; an unnamed, round, tower-mausoleum consisting of twelve semi-circular facets, each with stylised Kufic verse in turquoise tiles. Unusually, the mausoleum has four portals, each with niches of fine stalactite moulding. It’s a highly distinctive piece of architecture, reminiscent only of a similar, taller but plainer minaret in Jarkurgan, in the far south of Uzbekistan. We return back to Nakhchivan by a circuitous route, leaving the road near Tazakand into a landscape of cowboys and dry red hills, cutting cross-country to the next green, oasis-like valley where stork’s nests sit on rooftops and telegraph poles, then return southwards to the capital.
Azerbaijani Shepherd, near Diza, Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, Azerbaijan
In Nakhchivan we meet Tale’s friend Murad, who works for the country’s customs service and has an impressive knowledge of regional geopolitics, explaining the careful balance of power between Azerbaijan and Armenia as proxies respectively of Turkey and Russia; age old adversaries in the Caucasus. Nakhchivan is a small city, but one endowed with the ministries and other official buildings of a national capital, which seem quite out of place given the tiny size of the city. It is the hometown to former president of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev (father of the incumbent) and boasts a particularly large and centrally located Aliyev Museum. Nakhchivan is nevertheless a historical place, with its finest building, the thirteenth century Momine Khatun Mausoleum located in a central park, a ten-sided tomb-tower with finely restored geometric brickwork, a beautiful turquoise Kufic frieze and stalactite-moulding around a simple dome roof; more intricate but less architecturally exuberant than the mausoleum in Qarabağlar. Down in the backstreets in the south of town is the simpler, more common style of hexagonal-plan mausoleum of Yusuf ibn Kuseir, built by the same architect, and beyond in park still under construction a modern shrine dedicated to what is claimed to be the tomb of Noah, labelled ‘6th Millennium BC’, which is rather hard to take seriously.
On my second day in Nakhchivan Tale and I head south, leaving the main road running south back towards Julfa and heading towards the tooth-like volcanic plug known as Ilhan Dağ, which rises abruptly from the rolling plains along the Aras Valley. We drive on dirt tracks, passing sharply eroded badlands grazed by the flocks of friendly shepherds, then reconnect to the main highway and head for the far south-eastern tip of the Republic, past a seventeenth century bridge in Aza, then climbing inland to the town of Ordubad.
Shahsahar Mosque, Ordubad, Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, Azerbaijan
Ordubad is exactly the kind of place I was hoping to find here: a picturesque, largely unmodernised Azerbaijani mountain town. Backed by views of mountains on almost all sides, Ordubad has steep, winding streets of mud-brick houses with old wooden gates and walled gardens of walnut and mulberry. In one street a local points us to an opening in the ground, through which a flight of steps leads down to an old, still functioning karez, an ancient hand-dug underground water conduit used to bring water down from mountain springs to arid areas. A number of mosques dot the town; none of them spectacular but nevertheless adding to the traditional atmosphere, particularly the Shahsahar Mosque which spans adjacent streets with fine brick arches. My favourite place however is the central square, where an open-air chaikhana (tea house) is set out under large, old chinar (plane) trees, and where the older Ordubadis come to chat over endless cups of tea served in small tulip glasses.
Having only a seventy two hour customs allowance to keep the truck in Azerbaijan, I must leave the next day, and so bid a fond farewell to Tale, Sonja, Murad and the rest of Tale’s family. I drive north on the main highway, passing a succession of farming villages and small towns to reach Azerbaijan’s tiny border with Turkey. The road forks left, revealing a fine view of the twin peaks of Mount Ararat and very soon reaches the border crossing where I’m stamped out of Azerbaijan without fuss. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Nakhchivan for its architecture, unspoiled towns, for its geopolitically intriguing location, but mostly for the fantastically welcoming people who have hosted and guided me around; something I am very grateful for.
Mount Ararat (5137 m), Aralık, Iğdır Province, Turkey
Crossing the Aras River, I am entering Turkey at its easternmost point, just east of Ararat. After three exciting days in Azerbaijan, I am altogether less thrilled to find myself in Turkey; the thought of being around groups of western tourists worries me, knowing how different one’s experiences are of a foreign country when visiting areas heavily frequented by tourists. I’m also put off somewhat by swingeing fuel prices in Turkey, higher than those in much of Western Europe. I get stuck at the border as the insurance salesman has left early for the day and end up staying overnight, though it’s a quiet spot with magnificent views of Ararat, making it no great hardship. Loosed into Turkey the next day, I drive around the northern and western edges of Ararat, crossing a pass and dropping down to the rather bleak Kurdish city of Doğubeyazıt.
İshak Paşa Palace, Doğubeyazıt, Ağrı Province, Turkey
Perched in the mountains south of Doğubeyazıt sits the seventeenth century İshak Paşa Palace, an extravagant melange of Ottoman, Seljuk, Armenian and Persian architectural styles overlooking the plain. Although an unsightly glass roof has been built across much of the palace since my previous visit in 2003, the view remains almost impossibly romantic with the palace’s exuberant red dome and piercing, banded minaret sitting high above a wide valley backed by hazy mountains. It’s an iconic image of Turkey and, sitting just next to the country’s busiest border crossing with Iran, an iconic stop on the Asian overland trail. I drive up to the palace and stay overnight in a campsite where a few other foreigners are breaking long overland journeys. In the morning I have a walk around the palace and the mountains behind it where there are a few traces of an Urartian city, but the views never seem quite as good as I remember from eleven years earlier. Perhaps it’s the light, but I suspect one shouldn’t revisit places which stand out so romantically in the imagination.
I drive south from Doğubeyazıt towards Lake Van, passing fields of black lava where Kurdish children play in crystal-clear mountain streams. After crossing a pass, the road descends towards the inky-blue lake, which on a sunny day is eye-catchingly beautiful. I drive up to the Urartian site known as Ayanis Castle where large, finely carved blocks of black basalt bear beautiful cuneiform inscriptions, then spend the afternoon driving around the south-eastern shore of the lake, turning off the main highway to the tiny village of Altınsaç in the early evening, beyond which I climb into a tranquil valley of fragrant junipers overlooked by the ruins of the Armenian Saint Thomas Monastery, high above the lake shore. It’s a perfectly still and silent night under a star-filled sky and I have one of the best nights of outdoor sleep that I can remember.
Lake Van, Van Province, Turkey
In the morning I climb up to look at the ruins of what once must have been a very beautiful church; structurally still largely intact, but missing some of its characteristically Armenian fine stone rendering. Signs of deliberate destruction from treasure-hunting local looters can be seen and the rather fetid, dank interior now has the unmistakable odour of cattle. It’s a rather ignominious decline for a structure which is of a far higher quality of construction than anything in the surrounding villages.
I backtrack along the shore with stunning views across the lake’s shimmering deep-blue water, and stop at a small ferry dock just off the main highway to take the boat to scrubby Akdamar Island (Ahtamar in Armenian), once the seat of an Armenian Catholicosate. Here one finds the beautiful tenth century Cathedral of the Holy Cross, built from pink tuff, with a large conical dome and tall bas-reliefs of Biblical scenes such as David fighting Goliath. Now a museum and tourist attraction, the Cathedral has been the subject of serious controversy and is emblematic of the hugely contentious issue in modern Turkey of Armenians in Anatolia; itself one of the most important political problems in the region.
Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Akdamar Island, Van Province, Turkey
The line of Ancient Armenian kingdoms in Eastern Anatolia came finally under Ottoman rule in the sixteenth century, and although facing persecution as second-class citizens, Armenians remained a significant minority. However, as the Ottoman Empire began to collapse in the early twentieth century, a policy of Anatolian de-Christianisation was applied, leading to the deliberate extermination of Armenians and other Christian groups such as Assyrians and Greeks. Massacres and forced labour of Armenian males culminated in ‘Death Marches’ of men, women and children into the Syrian Desert to the south. It is estimated that one and a half million Armenians perished, with many more fleeing to form what is today a huge diaspora.
Heavily de-populated and almost entirely Kurdish, Eastern Anatolia fell into cultural decline. Akdamar Island became a military training ground and the cathedral was subject to vandalism, even being used for target practice. Narrowly escaping demolition in the 1950s, it was eventually restored in 2006, though the question of holding a liturgy or raising a cross on the roof became the subject of protests and turned into a contentious political issue. While across the border in the Islamic Republic of Iran, roundly vilified in the western press, Armenians are free to worship and erect crosses on churches, here in Turkey, nominally a secular, democratic republic, an ugly mixture of religious intolerance and chest-pounding nationalism turned such a triviality into a national incident, and highlighted an ongoing, official agenda to eradicate Turkey’s Armenian history.
Ruins of Tushpa, Van, Van Province, Turkey
In the afternoon I stop in Van, a scruffy and rather characterless Kurdish city, but visit the fine ruins of Van Castle, site of the Urartian capital of Tushpa. From this ridge overlooking the lake, the Urartians controlled the Armenian Highlands in the ninth century BCE, their presence evident today in the form of extensive cuneiform inscriptions, including a large panel by Persian King Xerxes the Great, and a large rock-cut tomb which I am lucky to enter with some visiting archaeologists. In the evening I am hosted by Mehmet, a local Kurdish teacher with whom I talk at length about life in the area. Though not eradicated in the same way as Christians at the end of the Ottoman Empire, the Kurds have long been subject to persecution in modern Turkey and since the 1980s this region has been the centre of a smouldering conflict between Kurds and the Turkish authorities, who have historically denied the Kurds their ethnic identity in a continuation of the ‘Turkification’ of Anatolia. As beautiful as the landscape of this region appears, the underlying demographic tragedy seems to become ever more obvious as I travel. The Kurds however are undoubtedly a highlight among this. I am yet to meet people who are kinder, more generous or more welcoming.
Highway D400, Yukarİarus, Şırnak Province, Turkey
I leave Van the following day, heading east and stopping in the village of Çavuştepe where, again on a ridge there are the ruins of an eighth century BCE Urartian palace, which according to Armenian folklore was built by Hayk, legendary founder of the Armenian nation. The quality of the 2750 year-old stonework is magnificent, setting an architectural precedent for the Armenian masters who dotted the highlands with graceful churches. Turning south the road passes a dramatic Kurdish Castle which towers above the village of Hoşap, then twists through narrow valleys between towering mountains. I turn off into the city of Hakkari, which is rather bland and shambolic but located spectacularly above the valley in which the road runs. I drive straight out of Hakkari up into the mountains, crossing a 2700 metre pass to reach the village of Konak. Depopulated of Kurds in the 1980s, the site of the forcibly abandoned village is a beautiful green upland, but I have come to see the ruins of the Mar Shalita Church. A stone box from the outside without any dome or bell tower, walls plain aside from tiny slot windows and a few intriguing geometrical bas reliefs, the interior has a fine vaulted stone ceiling and a carved stone nave wall with a large, arched opening to the sanctuary and a smaller one to the sacristy on the right. This silent ruin was, until the Assyrian Genocide of 1918, seat of the Assyrian Church of the East; ancient followers of the Nestorian Doctrine unincorporated into any other Christian denomination, and whose diasporic seat is now in Chicago.
Street, Bİtlİs, Bİtlİs Province, Turkey
From Hakkari the road heads south-east through dramatic mountains scenery, approaching the Iraqi border then winding down on a spectacular section of road to parallel the Little Khabur River, which here marks the border exactly. Being so close to the border, deep inside the insurgent south-east, the military presence is very pronounced with frequent roadblocks and armoured vehicles speeding through the Kurdish villages, a reminder of just how militarised a state Turkey is. Heading west along the Iraqi border I pass through a landscape of sparse oak forest similar to the Zagros Mountains of western Iran, passing through the nondescript provincial capital of Şırnak and continuing north-west past Siirt, close to the sweltering lowlands of Mesopotamia, then climbing once more north-east back towards Lake Van. In the morning I stop in the city of Bitlis, which comes as a relief after all the scruffy, forgettable cities I have so far passed through in Turkey. Bitlis winds around a steep river valley with just a couple of parallel streets and houses spreading up the valley-sides, often of high quality stone-masonry. Dotted throughout the town are examples of austere, stocky Ottoman-era mosques, medreassas (seminaries) and turbesi (shrines) whose heavy, militaristic architecture is executed in coal-black basalt. In the centre are time-worn streets of old shopfronts with groups of friendly men sitting out on the pavement, chatting and drinking tea. I like Bitlis.
Just outside Bitlis I drive up to the village of Değirmenaltı, home to a number of Armenian khachkars, ‘cross stones’; highly decorative memorial stelae which are very distinctive of Armenian culture. Değirmenaltı is a squalid village made partly of slowly crumbling Armenian stone houses, partly of rude, modern Kurdish dwellings. I find the three metre high, ornately carved khachkars near a crumbling church, just next to a recently built house. A troop of feral-looking children are throwing stones at each other in between staring at me whilst I take photographs. One boy of about twelve, sensing my interest in the historical monuments, prises a piece of masonry from the crumbling church (which is being used as a barn) and throws it at one of the khachkars. Nothing in this part of Turkey more clearly illustrates to me the cultural decay of Eastern Anatolia than these ragged urchins; children of the peasants in their impoverished modern hovels, marginalised by the central government, living in and around the finely crafted homes and monuments of their long-evicted Armenian forebears.
Lake Nemrut, Bİtlİs Province, Turkey
I reach the western edge of Lake Van once more near the city of Tatvan, turn north and climb on a newly paved road up to the volcanic crater of Mount Nemrut (Nimrod). Crossing the crater rim, I enter a small sanctuary of greenery in this otherwise arid landscape. Underfoot is an almost tundra-like growth of fragrant mosses and shrubs, overlooking a deep-blue lake contained within the steep crater walls. I descend into the crater which is partly filled with lush green forests of birch and aspen, and drive to the far edge of the lake, parking up on a scree slope above the lake’s northernmost point. As I sit in the truck reading and admiring the scenery, clouds gather over the crater and a storm breaks, a magnificent sight. In the morning the skies are clearer again, and the air incredibly fresh and fragrant, a very pleasant change after days of driving through the torrid far south-east.
I take a different route out of the crater, ending up on the highway again and soon reaching the town of Ahlat. Here one finds a huge medieval Islamic graveyard with fine, intricately carved tomb stones of pink tuff, patinated with white lichen and often leaning distinctly off-vertical. Whilst the graves are Islamic, the masons were almost certainly Armenian given the similarity of style and stonework. Several larger mausoleums may be found amid the fields of gravestones, and south of the road is the fine, deep-red Ulu Cumbet (great dome), a conical roofed round structure, where I am followed by a pack of begging children. Ahlat was once a centre of culture on the Silk Road between Constantinople and Bukhara, but the fine monuments to this past are in total disconnect to the surrounding poverty and evoke again melancholy, compelling me to leave.
Kurdish Shepherds, near Kağızman, Kars Province, Turkey
The road follows the northern shore of Lake Van, passing the harbour town of Adilcevaz where white deposits on the shallow lake bed give it the appearance of a shelving tropical lagoon. Not far beyond I turn north, climbing through Patnos whose name suggests Greek heritage, but which turns out to be just another scruffy Kurdish town. I camp beyond Patnos and continue the following morning, passing through the regional capital of Ağrı (the Turkish name for Ararat) and then climbing on a dirt road into a beautiful landscape of green pastures dotted by Kurdish shepherds with white, conical tents. Cresting a pass, the road drops down through poplar-filled valleys amid eroded red and purple volcanic hills, joining the Aras River once again, then turning north, climbing continuously until reaching a beautiful high, flat grassland at around two thousand metres elevation, backed by low, flowing hills and looking far more like parts of Mongolia than any landscape I have recently encountered.
Kars is a raffishly charming place with potholed streets and the occasional gutted or collapsed buildings in the city’s central blocks, but with women rarely wearing headscarves and a handful of turn of the century Tsarist Russian architecture dating from the forty years under which the city was part of the Russian Empire, Kars feels very different from the conservative and shambolic cities of the south-east. The city’s population is mixed Turkish and Kurdish, but I see the word ‘Kafkaz‘ (Caucasus) often written in names of local businesses and imagine there are plenty of Armenian, Georgian and perhaps even Russian genes in the city’s populace. It’s a nice place to spend a day, with an excellent museum and a rambling castle overlooking the city, the subject of numerous Russian sieges in the nineteenth century.
Saint Gregory of the Abughraments Church, Ani, Kars Province, Turkey
The highlight of the region however is the ruined ancient city of Ani, capital of Bagratid Armenia between 961 and 1045 with a population that may have exceeded one hundred thousand; a huge city in the medieval world. Ani was sacked by the Mongols in 1236 (who had failed to capture the city ten years earlier), then devastated by an earthquake in the early fourteenth century, leading the once great city to become a half-forgotten village, and then an enigmatic ruin. I had visited Ani in 2003 and was mesmerised by the beauty of its dark red and black churches, set in wildflower-filled meadows on the very edge of the country, overlooking the Arpa River which marks the border with modern Armenia. Photography in 2003 was forbidden, much to my frustration, but with mindless state paranoia evidently somewhat diminished, I am now free to photograph the somnolent ruins and thus realise something of a frustrated ambition.
Chapel of Hripsimian Virgins, Ani, Kars Province, Turkey
One enters the city through a gate in the towering pink tuff walls which surround it, closing it off against the steep river valley. Inside is a huge plain of long grass dotted by a few largely intact structures, the stumpy ruins of many more, and everywhere piles of broken stones. I first pass the ruined base of the huge King Gagik’s Saint Gregory Church, once a huge, arcaded rotunda but now just stumps of columns with the odd fallen capital whose almost Celtic swirls are covered in bright orange lichen. Next is the Saint Gregory Church of the Abughamrents, a pleasing pepper-pot church which is the most intact structure of in Ani. Getting close to the river there is the chimney-like minaret of a ruined mosque whose exact origin is unknown and beyond, the scant remains of a citadel on a piece of high ground. From here, one can look down something of a salient of Turkish territory to the farthest-most structure of Ani, the Virgin’s Castle, a monastery which was the last part of the city to be inhabited until the monks finally left in the eighteenth century.
Other noteworthy ruins are the Ani Cathedral, a huge structure whose tambour has vanished, but which retains soaring walls and pillars of pink tuff and black basalt; the bisected shell of the Church of the Redeemer, and the Church of Saint Gregory of Tigran Honents with beautiful exterior stonework and relatively well preserved frescoes on its interior walls. My favourite monument however is the poignantly beautiful Chapel of the Hripsimian Virgins, part of a heavily ruined monastery on a cliff-top overlooking the Arpa River, near a long-collapsed stone bridge. It’s a beautifully slender structure with a delicate faceted roof, covered in damaged pink tuff rendering which glows a warm orange in the evening light. I find these monuments overlooking the river particularly tragic; forgotten at the far end of a country which seems set on total cultural cleansing of its Armenian heritage, overlooking the isolated modern state of Armenia.
Şeytan Castle, Ardahan Province, Turkey
I camp for the night just outside of Ani, in the fields to the north of the city from where I have a clear view of the scale of the imposing, red-orange city walls. In the morning I set off through the quiet nearby villages, stopping at the beautiful Karmir Vank (Red Church) which is being used as a barn in the village of Bekler and has dung patties stacked against its wall, then cutting north across the fields to reach the Kars – Gyumri Highway, which would be a busy international border crossing if the border with Armenia had not been sealed since 1993. Further north I pass beautiful Lake Çıldır, close to the point where the borders of Turkey, Armenia and Georgia meet, and stop briefly at the spectacularly located Şeytan (Devil’s) Castle, poised above a vertiginous incised meander of the Kara River. The road turns north again just short of the provincial capital of Ardahan, through very attractive countryside of rolling green hills dotted with stands of pine forest, then crosses a pass and drops into the neat farmland of the Karaman Valley, where I leave Turkey to enter Georgia.
I leave the Armenian Highlands with mixed feelings. At once very beautiful and rich with history, I find it personally rather tragic how the world’s historic legacy can be erased for the sake of vein, puerile nationalism. The painful human history of ethnic cleansing and of the ongoing oppression of minorities weighs heavily on the land, and on me. I look forward to the coming weeks of uncomplicatedly beautiful scenery in the valleys of Georgia.
Stage 35 – Iran: The Alborz And Zagros Mountains
Much of the Iranian Plateau is defined by mountains, which have historically separated Persia from the deserts which surround it to the west, north and east. Arriving in Iran in the height of summer, when much of the country is uncomfortably hot, and having seen nearly all of the country’s main historical sites on three previous, lengthy visits, I planned to spend much of my time in Iran’s two major mountain ranges: the Alborz and Zagros. In the far north of Iran, running along the south coast of the Caspian Sea are the thickly forested ridges of the Alborz, which create a sharp physical divide between the humid coast and the near desert of the interior, crowned by Mt Damavand, the country’s highest peak and the highest volcano in Eurasia. The Zagros are quite different; far less sharply defined, lower, and occupying much of the west of the country, but historically very significant; home to the forebears of modern Iranians and still inhabited by Luri nomads whose lifestyle cannot be far removed from the very first Iranians who had migrated from Central Asia around three thousand years ago. Driving roughly along the axes of these two mountain ranges, my journey would take me across much of northern and western Iran, ending in the caravan city of Tabriz.
Beech Forest, near Sari, Mazandaran Province, Iran
It’s the 28th June 2014 and after a comfortable overnight stay at the border, I am quickly passed through customs in the morning by the friendly customs officers. Driving away from the border, the landscape is initially similar to the barren, hard-baked mud of western Turkmenistan, but soon the signs of irrigation appear, then beyond the Turkmen town of Aq Qala, the Alborz Mountains; rolling green in their upper reaches and a patchwork of fields and settlements on their lower slopes. This is the fertile Gorgan Plain, an almost Mediterranean looking landscape of olive trees, golden fields of wheat and even the odd rice paddy. Pickups are parked at the roadside selling a wide range of fruit and vegetables. Men stand selling fresh fish, dangling them on lines hung from the ends of long sticks. Farmers in straw hats work the paddies and rest on their tools, watching the heavy traffic pass. Shepherds graze sheep on the grassy roadside, squatting in the shade of the old plane trees which grow aside this ancient artery of the Silk Road. All this comes from the presence of the mountains, which channel rainwater down onto the coastal plain. The difference between this and the dry, barren wastes of western Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan show acutely the contrast between the nomadic and settled worlds.
Old City, Gorgan, Golestan Province, Iran
I reach Sari early in the afternoon and set about looking for my old friend Kiavash. I go to what used to be his clothing boutique, which is closed, but one of the staff from a nearby fast food restaurant knows him and takes me a few blocks to the location of Kiavash’s new business, a coffee shop. I call Kiavash from the coffee shop and soon we’re happily re-united after more than four years. I stay with Kiavash for five days, reliving somewhat the slightly debauched weeks I spent with him in 2010; smoking, partying and meeting his friends. I meet Khazar, who helps me recover photos deleted by the Turkmenistani security services from my memory card, and other friends Shahin, Bahar and Shiva with whom we drive up into the lush foothills of the Alborz, walking into beautiful, thick, atmospheric primeval beech forest whose trees are in vivid lime green leaf, the ground thickly covered in crisp, brown, fallen leaves.
Sadly I don’t have the same open-ended itinerary that I did in 2010, and must pull myself away from old and new friends, and start my journey across the country. I double back to the city of Gorgan, a city of great antiquity, once capital of the region known to the ancient Greeks as Hyrcania, famed even then for its fruit. Surviving through Achaemenid, Parthian, Sassanian and Arab eras, Gorgan was razed by the Mongols in 1220 and rebuilt in its current location, and remains today the provincial capital. From this rich history however, almost nothing stands out in modern Gorgan, and apart from a very small centre of traditional Caspian-style buildings, with overhanging terracotta-tiled, pitched roofs, the city is a rather ugly sprawl of unplanned modern development.
Radkan Tower, Golestan Province, Iran
I leave Gorgan after one night, turning south the city’s eastern edge, driving initially through irrigated farmland and bright green rice paddies, then climbing steeply into the densely forested mountains on relentless switchbacks, passing through cloud and across a 2270 metre pass. Beyond the pass the cloud soon clears, revealing a rocky upland dotted with juniper trees, from where the road descends slightly to the small town of Chahar Bagh. Here the landscape has changed again and I find myself in the familiar high mountain valleys of Asia, in surroundings that bring to mind Pakistan’s Hunza Valley, or the Bamyan Valley in central Afghanistan. Small villages of mud and stone houses are surrounded by patchwork fields of wheat and barley, sometimes stone-walled and terraced above rocky streams lined by tall brush-like poplars. The people are extremely friendly, the sky is a clear, deep blue and the air crisp and fresh making for a slow and very enjoyable drive on empty dirt tracks, heading west along a valley high in the Alborz. I camp amongst some poplar trees and enjoy a cool night, with temperatures dropping down to 8º C, most welcome after weeks of sweltering heat since leaving Ukraine. In the morning I stop to admire the thousand year old Radkan Tower, a brick tomb-tower with a well-preserved Kufic script running below a sharp conical roof; architecturally impressive in itself, but all the more so given its beautifully remote location.
Travertine Terraces, Badab-e Surt, Mazandaran Province, Iran
Beyond the tower, the road climbs over steep ridges of dry oak forest, passing occasional ramshackle villages, then descending to the rice-growing town of Sefid Chah which has an unusually large and old graveyard with hundreds of carved gravestones. The road then climbs to the south once again, crossing a 2400 metre pass towards Dibaj and entering the high, dry plains of Semnan Province, which typify much of the country; the contrast between these dusty plains and the lush, humid forests of the northern slopes of the mountains, less than twenty kilometres away, is quite staggering. High in these barren southern slopes of the Alborz a little further to the west, I drive up a rough track to reach the striking travertine formations of Badab-e Surt, which have built up naturally into stacked white terraces of turquoise and red-tinged water below a hot mineral spring, and are particularly beautiful in the late afternoon light.
Returning to the main road, I turn north and cross another pass, beyond which the air becomes humid once again and hazy in the early evening. I drop down further on the following morning, through steamy small towns set amidst fluorescent green rice paddies, winding over successive ridges thick with unspoiled forest, dropping eventually onto the Firouzkuh Road which leads over the southern edge of the Alborz, rolling down into the endless sprawl of western Tehran.
Nightscape, Tehran, Iran
Tehran’s traffic is infamous, but the city’s infrastructure is impressive, particularly the system of expressways, often consisting of elevated or fenced-in highways which allow one to drive at full speed through the heart of the city; for me, a peculiar attraction in a city which is otherwise almost singularly charmless. Coming in from the Firouzkuh Road, I’m swept onto the expressways; Babayi which becomes Sadr, turning onto Niayesh and plunging into a new tunnel which bifurcates underground, emerging in the district of Sa’adat Abad in the affluent north of the city where I will stay with another old friend of mine, Pouria.
I first met Pouria when he was a student in Mashhad in 2007, where I stayed with him for ten days. Then a thoughtful, slightly unsure young man, Pouria now lives with his wife Sepideh in a new apartment overlooking the north of the city, works for a large multinational company and as a photographer, and it’s wonderful to see his confidence and success in life. We spend evenings catching up and discussing future plans, or driving around the humming night-time streets of North Tehran, eating ice cream and visiting parks.
Shepherd, Vararu, Mazandaran Province, Iran
Whilst in Tehran I make a side trip west to the Alamut Valley, driving out of Tehran in the early hours of the morning, winding up into the mountains north of Qazvin to enter the valley at dawn, and stopping in the village of Gazorkhan. Here, on a near-vertical rock outcrop, a huge natural tower, are the scant remains of Hassan Sabbah Castle. It was here that the Persian polymath Hassan Sabbah, an adherent to a breakaway Islamic sect known as the Nizari Ismailis, after capturing the castle by subterfuge in the late eleventh century, made it the headquarters of a state of unconnected fortresses spread across Iran and Syria, known as the Nizari Ismaili State. The basis for Hassan Sabbah’s campaign appears to have been rebellion against the Seljuks, who controlled much of the region at the time, but his small, highly trained army who carried out propaganda, psychological warfare and assassination of both contemporary Islamic rulers and invading Christian Crusaders have endowed his state with a romanticised and semi-mythical history both in the Middle East and the in the West. It’s a steep climb up to the castle, which is surrounded by dramatic, misty mountain scenery, but little remains of the legendary fortress, and nothing of the libraries or luxuriant gardens for which the castle was famed, all destroyed by the Mongols in the mid thirteenth century when, with considerable difficulty, they finally subdued the Nizari Ismaili State, the last outpost of resistance in Persia.
I drive further west along the valley where red-rock mountains and mud-brick villages contrast against bright green rice paddies, to Lambsar Castle, the other major stronghold of Alamut. Like that at Gazorkhan, Lambsar Castle towers over its surrounding from a very strong natural position, but very little remains apart from some stretches of perimeter wall which are slowly crumbling away, and by mid afternoon I’m back on the road to Tehran.
Damavand (5610 m), Lar Plains, Mazandaran Province, Iran
After four nights staying with Pouria in Tehran I head back into the mountains. My aim is to relieve a frustrated ambition dating back to my very first visit to Iran, as a backpacker in 2003: to get an unobstructed view of Mount Damavand, which at 5610 metres is, by a considerable margin the highest peak in the country. I leave Tehran on the Haraz Road, turning off in the small town of Polour and winding up first towards the Lar Dam, then right at a camp of bee-keepers onto a dirt track which climbs past sparse clumps of beautiful wild vermilion poppies which sway in the summer breeze, up onto the Lar Plains. The road bumps and winds up through 3000 metres elevation, then splits again. I continue climbing, now past the summer camps of shepherds who dot the mountain-sides with stone corrals and khaki tents, and whose herds fill the air with the unmistakable scent of sheep. The track eventually reaches an altitude of 3700 metres from where there is a magnificent and totally unobstructed view of the symmetrical cone of Damavand, snowcapped and fluted with hardened ancient lava floes which retain streaks of winter snow cover. It’s a spectacular sight; one I have been wanting to see for eleven years.
I camp for the night at a spot which local shepherds tell me is named Vararu; at 3000 metres, an idyllic grassy meadow surrounded by mountains which reminds me of certain spots in Central Asia. Descending back through Rineh, where I caught just a distant glimpse of Damavand in 2003, I rejoin the Haraz Road, turning east onto a far quieter road running through the Nur Valley, which eventually descends onto the infamous Chalus Road; one of the busiest, and therefore most dangerous roads in the country. Until midnight all the traffic flows southward on the road, and it is not until around 02:00 that I dare to face the endless rush of oncoming traffic, cautiously descending and turning off at the first junction, driving up again into the hills, where I stay with an extremely friendly Kurdish family in the beautifully situated town of Kelardasht. My host here is Fahime; a very engaging, confident and ambitious young woman, who lives with her mother, father and brother in a large wooden-roofed house. Her father, an active eighty year-old with hands like the paws of a bear, still hunts for wild pigs (for food) in the nearby hills and has surrounded the house with beautiful potted plants which he sells in the local bazaar. I’d love to stay longer with the family but I have a tight schedule and so in the late afternoon I’m following Fahime and her cousin down a beautiful winding forest road to Abbas Abad on the steamy Caspian shore, where we say farewell.
Alborz Mountains, near Chaboksar, Gilan Province, Iran
The Caspian coastline of Iran is quite dramatic in places with tiers of misty, forested mountains plunging down into bright green rice paddies in a scene quite reminiscent of lowland Kashmir. However, choking traffic on the narrow coastal road, combined with totally unregulated building make for an ugly, polluted sprawl along much of its length, with only glimpses of what would otherwise be a breathtaking mountainous coastline.
It’s dark when I reach my next destination, the small Gilani city of Lahijan, famous for its tea production. Here I meet my host Hojjat, a fast-talking Gilani student in his early twenties. Despite having only just met, we get on like old friends and I’m soon sitting with an intellectual group of his friends, smoking and drinking glasses of local tea in a small chaikhana (tea-house). Just a few metres up the road from the chaikhana, illuminated in the thick night air, is the highly distinctive shrine of Sheikh Zahed Gilani, a thirteenth century Sufi grandmaster (of Kurdish origin), teacher of Sheikh Safi-ad Din Ardabili, ancestor of Iran’s Safavid Empire which lasted from the sixteenth until the eighteenth century. Though far removed from it, there’s something in the close night air, the flitting pilgrims and the good company that put me in mind of the Sufi shrine culture of southern Pakistan which is so dear to me.
Mausoleum of Sheikh Safi-ad Din, Ardabil, Ardabil Province, Iran
In the morning I leave Lahijan, heading west into a wide coastal plain filled with rice and tea plantations. I stop in the town of Fuman, another spot I had visited on my first trip to Iran, purchase some of the sweet walnut-paste cookies for which the town is famed, then head north towards the Azerbaijan border. Here the coastal plain narrows once more, overlooked by the emerald-green Talysh Mountains, a north-western sub-range of the Alborz. In the town of Asalem I turn off the coastal highway and start to climb through beautiful, thick forest, passing damp villages in a narrow valley. Rain soon starts to fall and as I climb I quickly enter the clouds, driving through fog so thick that I cannot see anything beyond the front of the truck; even sticking to the asphalt road is difficult at times. A pass tops-out at around 2400 metres, but the cloud obscures all views and I decide to camp for the night in a deserted side road on the edge of the mountain.
The fog soon disappears on the western side of the mountains as I drop into the small town of Khalkhal the following day, and the landscape becomes quite dull. I stop in the afternoon in Ardabil, one of very few large Iranian cities which I have not previously visited. I visit the beautiful shrine complex of Sheikh Safi-ad Din Ardabili, disciple of Lahijan’s Sheikh Zahed Gilani. Safi-ad Din was a thirteenth century Sufi who founded the Safaviyya Sufi Order here in Ardabil. His descendants would go on to found the Safavid Empire in 1501, a pivotal point in Iranian history in that it was the first native dynasty since the Arab overthrow of the Sassanids in the seventh century to create a unified Iranian state. The Safavids built an empire which stretched beyond Persia into much of Central Asia to the edges of Europe and the Indian Subcontinent, spread Shi’a Islam across the Persian heartland and left a fantastic legacy of architecture and arts; all things which are very much the cultural backbone of contemporary Iran. The ensemble of buildings includes the Sheikh’s shrine and a khanaqah (meeting place of a Sufi brotherhood) with numerous attendant buildings, today a museum. The architecture is magnificent, if restrained in scale, and shows strong influences from earlier Timurid architecture of Central Asia, most recognisably in the beautiful, stubby, turquoise-tiled tower which houses the sheikh’s grave and could have been taken straight from Samarkand.
Talysh Mountains, near Nav, Gilan Province, Iran
There is little else of interest in Ardabil, aside from the novelty of having to wear a coat on a July evening, and so the following morning I return to the mountains, now clear of clouds, and pick a descent towards the coast on a steep and twisting unpaved road. After a short, steep climb on a rocky track from the village of Andabil, a wide, grassy amphitheatre of rolling hills opens up, backed in the north by a steep mountainside, itself a mottled patchwork of bare brown earth and lush grass. Below me a muddy track descends into green grassy meadows, peppered with shepherd’s summer huts. Beyond the meadows I drop into a twisting river valley and the hillsides become forested with oak, ash, alder and lower down, old, scraggly, moss-covered elms growing next to the braiding river. I pass through the village of Nav which is one of the least modernised settlements I can remember seeing in Iran: picturesque whitewashed houses with wooden or corrugated iron roofs and wooden shutters over the windows. The track is rough in places, but the glorious, peaceful forest and is a joy to drive through until, after several hours I emerge onto the paved road back down to Asalem.
Dena Range, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province, Iran
Having traversed much of the Alborz, I now take myself down into the Zagros Mountains, driving from Asalem through the night via Qazvin and Isfahan almost eleven hundred kilometres south into the sweltering heart of Iran, arriving in the afternoon in the city of Yasuj, nestled at around nineteen hundred metres in the central Zagros, capital of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province. I am hosted here by Mehran, who is a Lur, an ancient Iranian people who make up much of the population of this region, and whose language is close to archaic Old Persian. Mehran takes me out of Yasuj in his car, driving through mountains with beautiful oak forests growing on dark earthy hillsides which look as if they have been raked, up into the slopes of the Dena Range which reaches an altitude of 4409 metres, making it the highest section of the Zagros. We leave the car and walk up rocky hillsides, eventually coming upon a beautiful alpine meadow where Luri nomads have made their summer camp in traditional black tents, and who give us tea with bread and butter to eat.
Mehran studies in Yasuj, but as the weekend is arriving, he invites me to meet his family in his home town of Dogonbadan, one of Iran’s original oil boom towns. We drive together in his car, dropping quickly down from the mountains through the Dasht-e Rum, the Rome Plains, where Mehran tells me that Alexander the Great forced his way (with the help of local treachery) through the ‘Gates of Persia’, and into the Persian heartland and the capital at Persepolis. It’s a real pleasure to be hosted by an Iranian family, being fed lavishly with delicious home-cooked food, but lying on the edge of the lowlands just seventy kilometres from the Persian Gulf, Dogonbadan’s mid-summer heat is ferocious, with days above forty-five degrees and enough humidity to deter any of us from leaving the air-conditioned house.
Qashqai Nomad, near Nurabad, Isfahan Province, Iran
I leave Mehran and his family the next day, taking a shared taxi back to the relative cool of Yasuj, then driving through Sisakht and up into the Dena Range on Iran’s highest road, crossing a 3150 metre pass. The views are far less dramatic than the green ridges of the Alborz, but these dry, craggy slopes teem with nomads who here, on the north-eastern side of the pass, are not Luri but Qashqai; a Turkic nation originating more recently in Central Asia who are renowned for their ‘Shirazi’ carpets. I stop on these north-eastern slopes of Dena to admire the view, and meet a Qashqai man who points out his family’s siah chador (black tent); the archetypal boxy nomad’s dwelling moored to the rocky ground by guy ropes. The hills are dotted with such tents and flocks of grazing sheep, and I imagine that, save for the motorcycles and pickups, I am seeing the area much as it looked when the ancestral Iranians were freshly arrived here from Central Asia.
It’s very enjoyable driving slowly down through small mountain villages in the afternoon, and I stop to camp in a field of golden wheat, still overlooked by the jagged peaks of Dena. In the morning I start a long drive back north, staying as closely as possible in the mountains, passing through Shahr-e Kord and then Chelgerd where the banks of the Kurang River are full of the tent-camps of Bakhtiaris, a sub-group of the Lurs whose men wear distinctive baggy trousers similar to those traditionally worn by Kurds. Leaving the river, I start climbing again through mud-brick mountain villages, over a 2700 metres pass to Fereydun Shahr, then join the main highway to the city of Khorramabad, capital of Lorestan Province.
Khorramabad, Lorestan Province, Iran
Khorramabad is an attractive city, surrounded by dry hills but with ample greenery thanks to water which is channelled in from nearby springs. Centred around the Falak-ol Aflak Castle, the city radiates out in fairly neat blocks along a small river, and the disorganised urban sprawl which marrs many of Iran’s cities seems thankfully to have been averted in Khorramabad. I spend a full day with my host Ashkan, and also meet with my old friend Reza who drives up from 50º C Shush with his father just to visit me. A student when I first met him in 2007, Reza is now a successful musician (and has become quite chubby), while his wiry and energetic father has not changed visibly at all.
From Khorramabad I head away from the mountains to Arak, the capital of Markazi Province. Though a modern, heavily industrialised city, Arak surprises me by having a beautiful two hundred year old Qajar-era bazaar, a showcase of classical Persian urban architecture with lofty vaulted passageways, a beautifully domed central hall and an old, central caravanserai; a central, watered plaza with an old mulberry tree, surrounded by two tiers of small shops and artisan’s workshops where men are busy repairing dusty old carpets by hand.
Landscape, near Karasaf, Zanjan Province, Iran
The quality of the Iranian road network is such that even small country roads are of excellent quality, and I make use of this fact heading north from Arak through watered valleys where swaying poplars, fields of melons and orchards of apples, peaches and cherries are set against barren brown and reddish mountains. I stop in the village of Delijan in Hamadan Province to admire the Ilkhanid-era Imamzadeh Hod, out amid the fields, with traces of antique faïence in its blind arches. To find ancient shrines like this sitting peacefully in the middle of nowhere is another of Iran’s great pleasures. Continuing on backroads, I enter Qazvin Province to stop at the more impressive Karraqan Towers; damaged by a nearby earthquake in 2002, with one of the two squat, octagonal towers supported by crude wooden buttresses, but whose elaborate, thousand year-old geometric brickwork is notable for having survived the ravages of the Mongols, as well as of time. I then move west into Zanjan Province, driving through striking banded red-rock hills, back into the Zagros, camping for the night near the town of Bijar in Kurdistan Province, then north again into West Azerbaijan Province and the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Takht-e Soleyman (Solomon’s Throne).
Takht-e Soleyman, West Azerbaijan Province, Iran
Takht-e Soleyman is notable as the site of one of the holiest fire temples of the Zoroastrian religion during the Sassanian era (third to seventh centuries). Destroyed at the end of the Sassanian era, it was presumably the Arabs who bestowed upon the ruins their current Semitic name. The site was partially rebuilt in the thirteenth century, though never regained its importance and today remains heavily ruined. Perhaps more interesting however than the ruins themselves is the intriguing location of the site on a high plain: built on the oval-shaped rim of an ancient volcanic crater, around a brim-full crater lake of deep blue, mineral rich, but lifeless water. Behind the ruins off to the west is another volcanic remnant; a far steeper crater known as Zendan-e Soleyman (Solomon’s Prison) where legends tell that King Solomon imprisoned monsters. It’s nice to return to the site, which was one of the places I had visited on my first trip across Asia in 2003, but the real historical significance of Takht-e Soleyman is somehow lost to me amid the jumble of rather indistinct ruins.
Borj-e Modavar and Gonbad-e Kabud, Maragheh, East Azerbaijan Province, Iran
I set off on a long, winding drive through Iranian Azerbaijan in the afternoon, passing villages of squat mud houses, sometimes with ricks of drying grass and hay atop their flat roofs, similar to those seen in some of the remotest parts of Afghanistan. By late afternoon I’m getting close to what used to be the eastern shore of Lake Urmia, and make a stop in the friendly county town of Maragheh. Though now a small and unimportant place, Maragheh was made capital of the Ilkhanid Empire in the mid thirteenth century by Hulagu Khan, grandson of Chinggis Khan. I spend a couple of hours in town seeking out the Mongols’ architectural legacy in the form of four funerary monuments; the Ghaffariyeh Dome, a squat, cubic mausoleum with a simple corbelled entrance portal covered in turquoise tiles; the twelfth century Gonbad-e Kabud (Blue Dome), an exquisite hexagonal tomb tower covered in mesmerising geometric brick reliefs which is the finest of the four; the adjacent and slightly older Borj-e Modavar (Round Tower), indeed round in section and plainer, but still with a fine entrance portal; and finally the Gonbad-e Sorkh (Red Dome), rather less graceful and adorned only with brick relief work, but located on the southern edge of town in its own small park which must also be of considerable age.
Bazaar, Tabriz, East Azerbaijan Province, Iran
Not far from Maragheh, on the northern side of Mount Sahand lies Tabriz, where I stop for three days. Backed by red mountains to the north, Tabriz is the most important city in north-western Iran, and was on numerous occasions in the past the capital of the country. A city with a majority population of Iranian Azerbaijanis (who are simply called ‘Turks’ in Iran), Tabriz feels very slightly European, lacking the exotic urban architecture of Isfahan or Shiraz, but is instead notable as a centre of commerce, one of the principal cities on the Silk Road, visited by Marco Polo in 1275. The highlight of Tabriz is undoubtedly its bazaar, said to be the world’s longest, and which is in my opinion the finest in Asia. Tabriz’s bazaar is a place of sensual delights; with its beautiful, long vaulted passageways, spot-lit and ventilated by holes in the ceiling, thronging with shoppers and merchants. The air is thick with the hubbub of commercial transactions, lengthy, animated conversations between shopkeepers and the shouts of trolley-pushing porters who part the crowds to deliver goods into the small, cave-like shops. The nose is greeted by various smells; spices and dried fruits, delicate Middle Eastern perfumes and the bitter scent of dyed wool. The eye is caught by the endless procession of oncoming faces as one walks through the crowds; by paintings, by sacks of colourful foodstuffs, confectionery, lingerie, brass ware, but most of all by the sumptuous deep reds and blacks of the carpets, the sellers of which sit in their own large section of the bazaar atop huge, expensive rugs, patiently waiting for customers, talking amongst one another over endless cups of sweet red-brown tea brought to them on silver trays by errand boys from a nearby chaikhana.
Bazaar, Tabriz, East Azerbaijan Province, Iran
The bazaar is so much more than a shopping centre, and its interconnected passageways and open spaces have historically been important not just for commerce, but as centres of social, educational and religious practices. It seems to me the architectural embodiment of the very essence of contemporary Iranian culture; drawing heavily on a great historical legacy of empires and trade, deeply human, steadfastly clinging to its own identity, oblivious to the characterless face of globalised modernity.
Tabriz feels like a good place to conclude my trip through the Alborz and Zagros Mountains, poised as it is at the edge of both ranges. From here I will continue in a north-westerly direction, towards and then across the Aras River into the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan, and on into eastern Anatolia, all lands once part of ancient Armenia.
EurasiaOverland 