Susanne Güsten
The
Armenian monastery of Varagavank stands teetering on the brink of
collapse in the mountains above Lake Van, in eastern Anatolia. Built a
thousand years ago, and once the seat of an archbishop, it
was forsaken in 1915. The monastery's buildings have more recently been
used as stables, as a Kurdish villager named Mehmet Coban explained.
“The manure was piled this high,” he said, marking the spot with his
hand. His clan found the church like this when they settled in the
former Armenian village in the 1950s, he recalled. Having shoveled out
the dung, Coban now shows visitors around the church and dreams of
making the village rich by turning it into a tourist destination. When
he enlisted authorities to support the project a couple of years ago, it
emerged that a prominent Turkish media executive in Istanbul held the
deed to the monastery. His grandfather had amassed vast landholdings
around Van after World War I.
