The Crossing Place: Journey Among the Armenians (Hardcover)

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.

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.