The Ruins of Ani: A Journey to Armenia’s Medieval Capital and its Legacy by Krikor Balakian (review)

The medieval Armenian city of Ani, located in the Armenian highlands in the Kars province of present-day Turkey, was formerly one of the important nodes along the Silk Road and capital of the autonomous Bagratuni dynasty from the mid-tenth to mid-eleventh century. Its architectural ruins have attracted the attention and spurred the imagination of scholars and non-specialists alike for well over a hundred years, resulting in a number of archaeological, art historical, and other scholarly and non-scholarly publications. Known as the “city of one thousand and one churches,” Ani has over the years become one of the most studied and well known sites of medieval Armenia. The fact that it has also been subject to looting, vandalism, and cultural destruction as well as appropriation over those same years has heightened the urgency that accompanies studies of the site.

This short book provides a translation from Western Armenian of the Ottoman Armenian clergyman Krikor (Grigoris) Balakian’s Illustrated Description of the Ruins of Ani (Նկարագրութիւն Անիի աւերակներուն պատկերազարդ) published in 1910 in Constantinople/Istanbul. This short but significant work has been largely overlooked until very recent years by scholars concerned with Ani. Balakian, who after the genocide of 1915 became a bishop of the Armenian Apostolic Church in southern France, is best known for his voluminous two-volume genocide survivor-witness memoir, which was also translated into English (in abridged form) by his grandnephew Peter Balakian, English professor at Colgate University and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, along with Aris Sevag in 2010 as Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1918 (New York: Vintage Books). The present volume on Ani was Krikor Balakian’s first monograph, and it blurs the boundaries between travel account, history, scholarly study, and travel guide. It was composed after his 1909 visit to Ani in the retinue of Catholicos Matteos II Izmerlian. At the time, Ani was under Russian imperial rule, and being excavated by Nicholas Marr. Part of Balakian’s goal in writing the monograph was to raise awareness of the ongoing excavations and newly founded on-site museum (later looted and destroyed) in order to procure financial backing for those enterprises at Ani from wealthy Constantinopolitan Armenians, and also to provide an illustrated and scholarly travel guide for future Armenian visitors (or itself to serve as a substitute for a visit).

After a brief preface (pp. 5–10) that outlines the project, the book is divided into four chapters. The first chapter (pp. 11–24) charts the history of the city from its founding in the ninth century up until its depopulation at the end of the fourteenth, and largely follows the grand three-volume national history of the eighteenth-century Mkhit‘arist scholar, Mik‘ayel Ch‘amch‘ian. In so doing, Balakian makes no attempt to maintain scholarly distance from his subject, instead infusing his writing with traditional laments over the series of external invasions that led to the destruction and desertion of the city, censuring both the invaders themselves as well as the inability of Armenians to present a united front in order to defend their land. The brief second chapter (pp. 25–28) focuses upon the topography and geography of the site, while the third and lengthiest chapter (pp. 29–77) provides a detailed study with illustrations of the surviving walls, main churches, palace, catholicosal residence, citadel, and the nearby monastery of Hoṙomos. The fourth and final chapter (pp. 78–103) reviews past scholarship on Ani by western European, Russian, and Armenian scholars from the nineteenth century up until Balakian’s own day, culminating in praise of Nicholas Marr’s work of excavation. The chapter closes with Balakian’s description of his brief visit to the site with the Catholicos. The translators, Peter Balakian and Aram Arkun, have also provided a helpful glossary (pp. 107–111...