lost city maps

(and now I'll stop the self-indulgence & get back to the sorts of matters for which this blog was created!)

Check out Virtual Ani--an online cartographic and textual resource on the ruins of Ani, a medieval Armenian city that was once the capitol of a kingdom encompassing extensive lands on both sides of the modern Turkey-Armenia border. A thousand years ago, the city had a population of over 100,000, but after successive invasions and trade shifts it declined, hosting only a small settlement for centuries, and becoming a ghost city by the nineteenth-century. Various (mostly European) travellers re-"discovered" the ruins in the subsequent decades, writing raptured accounts of the lost city, and later launching photographic and archaological expeditions--among other things, the site features a number of travel accounts, expedition diaries, and a wonderful series of stereoscopic photographs from the 1870's. It focuses on Ani, but also includes entries on a number of other Armenian sites throughout Eastern Anatolia. While I've come across the occasional troubling assertion--particularly some passing references to the Kurds--most of the information seems generally sound, based on what I know about the area and its recent history.

Given the fraught battles over that history, though, the VirtualAni project not only a resource for historical images and texts--it's a political statement of sorts. The Turkish Republic's stewardship of Ani, and other Armenian sites in the region, has ranged from malice, to neglect, to a crude and problematic "restoration" process. And although the site is now afforded some protection and is accessible to tourists (after decades of being off-limits due to its location in a heavily-fortified "military zone" near the border), the official signs apparently obscure the site's Armenian origins, in keeping with the state's denalist attitude towards the legacy of the Armenian presence in Anatolia. So VirtualAni functions not only as an information resource, but as a re-inscription of that history, a way of mapping out a claim to an Armenian past in this land.

Ani continues to play an important symbolic role in constructions of Armenian identity and territoriality--both in official, state-sponsored manifestations (postage stamps; history textbooks) and popular culture: see, for example, this label for a Yerevan-brewed beer named after the city:


And while maps and messageboards aren't enough to free Ani's contested history from competing nationalist agendas, I'm glad to see that the interactive map part of the site is available in Turkish. I wish could explore the messageboards more easily (due to a free hosting service they're infested with pop-up ads and strange formatting, at least in my browser)--I'd like to find out what kind of conversations the project is fostering. (Thanks to Ayda for passing it along!)