Product Description

After centuries of prominence as a world power, Armenia has withstood every attempt during the 20th century to destroy it. With a name redolent both of dim antiquity and of a modern world and its tensions, the Armenians founded a civilization and underwent a diaspora that brought many of the great ideas of the East to Western Europe. Today, shrunk to a tenth of its former size and wracked by war with Azerbaijan and by earthquakes, its people still retain one of the world's most fascinating and misunderstood cultures. This book is a passionate and dramatic portrait of this country - the people and their massive exodus, as well as of the unique society that remains tentatively attached to the CIS. Travelling from Venice to Istanbul, passing through Eastern Europe, Beirut and Syria, and crossing the Black Sea to the Caucasus and into Armenia, the author takes us on a journey through time and history as we come to know this closed society.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38133 in Books
• Published on: 1994-05-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

About the Author
Philip Marsden has written several highly-praised and award-winning travel books -- including 'The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians', 'The Bronski House', 'The Spirit-Wrestlers' and 'Chains of Heaven: An Ethiopian Romance' -- and one novel, 'The Main Cages'. He lives in Cornwall.

Customer Reviews

The Quest for Ararat
Philip Marsden clearly harbors a special interest in eastern Christian traditions, for they run like a red thread through his three travel books. In "A Far Country: Travels in Ethiopia" he visits this sole surviving Christian nation in the Horn of Africa, surrounded by Islamic countries. "The Spirit Wrestlers" explores a plethora of religious movements, which sprang up in Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus in the wake of the downfall of the Soviet Union.

In "The Crossing Place" Marsden sets out to investigate the tragic fate of the Armenians, an ancient Christian people from the Caucasus. This mountainous region tugged in between the Black and Caspian Seas lies on the crossroads of the old Persian, Turkish and Russian realms. It is also the place were six of the world's twelve tectonic plates meet, making it one of the most earthquake-prone regions in the world. Because of this geographical position Armenia's fate is permeated with disaster, both natural and man-made. These experiences have made dislocation a continuous theme in Armenian history and provide the book with a double travel motif: not only the author is constantly on the move, but so is his subject.

Marsden became interested in the Armenians through a chance encounter in eastern Turkey. Here he stumbled on some fragmentary remains of the 1915 Armenian genocide. Intrigued by what he had found he decided to work his way back to the Armenian heartland.

The first part of the book is situated in the Near East, where Armenia had almost ceased to exist, "pushed down one of history's side-alleys and murdered". Or so it seemed, had they not been such a resilient people. Marsden picks up the trail in the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem. He learns that the Armenians first appeared on the Anatolian plains in the sixth century BC. Eight hundred years later their king became the first ruler to accept Christianity. A first glimpse of the 'essential Armenia" is caught during a visit to a famous center for Armenian Studies, the San Lazzaro monastery in Venice (where Armenians had been resident well before the city's rise to commercial and political prominence in the 12th century). According to one of its scholars the unique Armenian script developed by Mesrop Mashtot embodies an idea that can not be explained but only expressed in one word "Ararat", the mountain that is the heart of Armenia.

Marsden continues his quest in Lebanon -- by way of Cyprus -- and poses himself the question how such a mobile nation, consisting of merchants, pilgrims and adventurers, had been able to maintain its distinctiveness. Nowhere better to get a sense of that than in Beirut, which has just emerged from a brutal civil war. Here the Armenians had staunchly stuck to their neutrality but also maintained a basis for their commando-type liberation movements, operating with surgical precision in sixteen countries. Only by tapping into the efficient Armenian network of connections is Marsden able to move swiftly and inconspicuously through Lebanon and Syria. Taking the Baron hotel in Aleppo -- founded and still managed by an Armenian -- as a base camp for explorations into the last surviving Armenian villages of northern Syria, Marsden gives us a chilling account of the ruthlessness with which the Turks perpetrated their ethnic cleansing during the First World War.

From Syria the author moves into Turkey. Using the ancient city of Antioch, which for seven hundred years had been largely populated by Armenians, the ruins of Ani, capital of a long-lost Armenian state, and finally Istanbul as a backdrop, Marsden gives an excellent overview of another Armenian characteristic: their genius for building. No single ethnic group in the Middle East has made so many contributions to architecture as the Armenians. They were employed by Turkish, Persian and Indian rulers alike. Marsden conjectures that they may have been instrumental to the development of Europe's Gothic style with its pointed arch.

The second part of the book takes us to the Balkans. Since the days of the Byzantine empire, subsequent rulers of Asia Minor have used this region to exile unwanted elements. This permits Marsden to launch into one of his favorite topics: arcane religious sects. The reader is provided with a most interesting account of how the doctrine of dualism, which can be traced back to the earlier Persian religions of Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism, forms the origin of many Christian heresies. Marsden has clearly studied this issue thoroughly and makes an Armenian role in the spread of heretical beliefs to western Europe quite plausible.

Traveling through Bulgaria and Romania, Marsden "[..] became aware that the Armenians had been a much greater presence in the Balkans than [..] first imagined." More gaps in the knowledge of this, at first so enigmatic, people are filled. He penetrates deeper into their language and learns about the extent of their trading relations. In the Middle Ages they had already reached Moorish Spain, Poland and the court of the Mongol Khan. By the 18th century Armenians were connected with the Ottoman, Safavid and Moghul courts, had established an influence with Burmese and Ethiopian monarchs, and traded in Amsterdam, Calcutta, Java and Tibet.

Via the Crimea Marsden finally makes it to Armenia proper where the third part of the book is set. Recently wrested away from seventy years of Soviet domination the situation there is still very precarious. During visits to four famous monasteries in the country's northeast, the writer contemplates the so-called "Silver Age", Armenia's last period of brilliance during the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Buried deep beneath this short period of fervent monastic activity lies Armenia's pre-Christian heritage. This atavistic past is just as much part of the Armenian identity as its unique Christian beliefs.

The book closes with an account of Armenia's more recent tribulations: a devastating earthquake and the war with neighboring Azerbaijan over the region of Karabagh. Witnessing its effects first-hand, Marsden "[..] sensed that here, where the threat was greatest, the Armenian spirit was at its strongest. It was the same spirit that had driven the Armenians through the vast improbability of their history".

"The Crossing Place" establishes Philip Marsden as a worthy successor of Colin Thubron, one of Britain's best travel writers. Not only do the two share an interest in less obvious travel destinations on the Eurasian landmass, visiting people at the fringes of so-called great cultures, but their writings have also a certain style in common; a captivating prose that unfolds the power of the English language and holds the reader's attention until the end.

One of the best travel narratives of the 90s.
This fantastic book - unquestionably Marsden's best book, even though it was THE SPIRIT-WRESTLERS which won him the Thomas Cook prize - is in my view one of the best travel books of the 90s. And of course the secret to this is that it is not just a travel narrative but an absorbing quest into what really defines a people- a sense of history, a sense of place, a sense of depth, a sense of culture surviving against all the odds.

Like the Jews, the Armenians have survived stubbornly against genocide and against encroachment on their land, and they have survived by pulling together and rising again. Marsden uncovers the secret force of this people and his own strength in an exhausting and admirable journey, in understated prose of great honesty and beauty. If you think that travel writing is trite and necessarily patronising, then read this book and think again. It shows that Marsden is not just a great travel writer, but one of the most important and deepest non-fiction writers to emerge in Britian in recent years.

This book is utterly compelling, surprisingly funny, and beguiling even to those who know absolutely nothing about Armenia or the Armenian struggle.

Englishman discovers Armenians
More than an engaging travel narrative by an Englishman travelling across the Middle East, Eastern Europe, former Soviet Union and finally Armenia to discover and understand Armenians, this book tells the stories of Armenian people, stories told by different people in different countries, among different cultures, united by common heritage, language and religion, and perhaps the greatest tragedy in our history - the Armenian Genocide of 1915. The subject of Genocide is inseparable from the storyline, yet this book is not a depressive reading but an absorbing story of one man's desire to understand another culture, distinct yet interwoven with nations and peoples across Europe, Middle East, and beyond.