The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians. Philip Marsden
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you. I was now caught in no man’s land – unable to get into Syria, and unable to re-enter Lebanon; I’d used up my ‘une seule visite’ visa.
Only a few carefully placed US dollars eased me back across the Lebanese border, back into the Bekaa. In a few hours’ time the allied forces would launch their offensive in Kuwait and the Bekaa Valley was the last place I wanted to be.
Once again the Armenians were able to offer me protection. Just up from the border post I found the village of Anjar, where a series of bubbling springs leave a smudge of green on the dry slopes. The village was made up entirely of Armenians and they welcomed me in. Just outside, the Syrian secret police had set up camp. I didn’t think I had much to thank them for, but the sight of all their military hardware between me and the Hizbollah was something of a relief.
There was a doctor named Caspar who ran an occasional clinic in Anjar. I’d met him in Beirut but today he was here. I found him in his surgery with a queue of patients; he said he’d be half an hour and advised me not to leave the building. So I waited beneath the anatomical diagrams and listening to the stern advice to young mothers, reflecting that in fact I was glad to be in Anjar, to have the opportunity to trace one of 1915’s few episodes of successful defiance.
The story of Anjar is a story of exile and return, and exile again. A conglomerate of six old Armenian villages, Anjar’s people came originally from an area around the mountain of Musa Dagh, at the far northern end of the Levantine coast. The town is divided into six segments, which retain the names of the villages that they left. When in July 1915 the deportation order reached Musa Dagh, Armenian opinion was divided. Some said they should resist. Others saw there was no point; the Turkish forces were far too strong and the order, after all, was only for deportation. About sixty families complied with it. They were never seen again.
The rest took to the mountain. On its seaward edge they stretched two large shrouds between the pines. One had a cross on it, the other, in English: ‘CHRISTIANS IN DISTRESS: RESCUE’. The opposite slope they defended against repeated Turkish attacks. There was little ammunition and still less food. After more than seven weeks, supplies were virtually exhausted. But then one morning, the wind blew away a sea-mist and just off the coast lay the French ship Guichen. Four thousand villagers scrambled down the cliff and were ferried aboard. They were taken south, to Port Said.
For four years they sheltered in tents on the edge of the Sinai Desert. After the war Musa Dagh came under French rule, so it was safe to go back. The Armenians returned to their beloved villages and found their clapboard homesteads half-hidden by mulberry trees, and the apple orchards a tangle of weeds. They set about clearing the orchards and restocked the mulberries with silk worms.
But in the 1930s, new pressures came to bear on the region. Eager to keep the Turks at bay, the French conceded to them the sanjak of Alexandretta – which included Musa Dagh. Once again the Armenians were forced to flee. This time the French gave them land in the Bekaa Valley. Many died in the harsh winters but others held on, convinced, like those of Bourdj-Hamoud, that it was only a matter of time before they’d be allowed back. It soon became clear after the Second World War that Musa Dagh would remain in Turkey. The Armenians resigned themselves to permanent settlement in the Bekaa, not at the camp, but at Anjar where the spring-fed soil and distant peaks reminded them of home.
Below the springs they cut irrigation ditches and planted poplars along their banks. They’d grown apples before, so they grew apples here; before long Anjar’s orchards were the best in the country. They built neat houses, neat and diligent in the old way, and laid them out in a grid with a church at its head. They prospered in Anjar; there was something about the site. One man, ploughing nearby, unearthed some old stone which turned out to be the remains of an Ummayyad palace, now one of the Lebanon’s most prized ancient sites.
During the most recent fighting Anjar had swelled with refugees from Beirut. Caspar explained to me that it wasn’t just the shelter, it was the land itself. The springs and the poplars and the abiding sense of a distant mountain; there, he said, people felt more at ease, closer to Armenia. In times of trouble they gravitated to Anjar.
Mount Sannin was undoubtedly a powerful presence. It rose steeply from the far side of the Bekaa, screening Beirut. Its snow-topped peak shone in the sun. And perhaps for the Armenians it made a good substitute not only for Musa Dagh but for that other mountain, the first mountain, the one they had fled centuries before. For local lore has it that from Anjar’s spring the first rainbow rose and, using it to navigate, Noah had steered the Ark to shore on Sannin’s rocky summit.
Caspar helped me track down Tomas Habeshian, one of Anjar’s grand old men. We met him on the church steps, a tall, straight-backed man in an astrakhan hat. He stretched out his left hand to greet us; his right was crippled with arthritis.
Driving down through the town (the Armenians forbade me to walk: ‘Not safe,’ they said) we spent much of the rest of the afternoon in Anjar’s tea-room, while Syrian jeeps bounced back and forth outside the window, and the proprietor laid his best cakes before us. ‘On the house!’ he said in honour of Tomas.
He had been little more than ten when he fled with his family up the slopes of Musa Dagh. The whole thing, explained Tomas, had really been a big adventure. No, he didn’t recall being frightened. He remembered climbing the trees and larking around the rocks, but fear, he didn’t think that was a part of it. What he did remember was Kavanes and his quixotic antics. An Armenian of the old school, Kavanes had lived all his life on the land and was full of a peasant pride that Tomas, as a boy, found comic. He was nearly sixty when they went up Musa Dagh armed only with hunting rifles and flint-locks, and a few sticks of dynamite. Early on, Kavanes stepped forward to volunteer for an attack.
‘He took the dynamite and put a pistol in his belt. Down the hill he went.’ Tomas leaned forward and hushed his voice. ‘Slowly, slowly, from tree to tree. He came out of the woods and crept up to the slope above the Turks. He lit the fuse and lobbed the dynamite down. One, two, three … Nothing! So he lit another. This time – PAF!
‘You know, I think Kavanes was more surprised than the Turks! We watched him turn and run back up the hill in fright. He felt sure the Turks were following him. They were running at him, they grabbed his coat, but still he tried to run away, pulling and pulling. He took the pistol and fired it over his shoulder, and the noise terrified him so much he thought it was him who had been shot and fell to the ground.
‘He touched his forehead: no blood! He got up and started to walk towards us. I can walk! And he looked behind him and all along, it had been a branch that had caught his coat. There weren’t any Turks. All of us in the trees were laughing so much, but he was trying to look like a returning hero!’ Tomas took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. ‘Oh, that Kavanes!’
Tomas was one of the few still alive who had survived the whole saga. He gazed now through the window, quiet and sad after his picaresque tale, and the sun brought out the creases on his face. I felt a strange awe at the alien experience of this man’s life and how its suffering had not left him bitter like so many, but poised and full of humour.
I asked him, ‘Do you have a family?’
‘Yes. In America mainly. Los Angeles.’
I couldn’t picture this proud old man in California. ‘Have you been there?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘And you liked it?’
‘I liked it.’ He looked away. ‘But I could never live there. America is no place for an Oriental man.’
Caspar passed me on to some friends who said they could put me up for the night. Four generations sat on divans around a hot barrel-stove. A two-year-old girl sat on the knee of her great-grandfather, tugging at his whiskers. Her mother, Anahid, carried in a tray of rattling glasses. It was a warm, homely room and, for a moment, I forgot all about deadlines and the hostility of the Bekaa.
A man with a feathery moustache leaned over and poured me a glass of arak. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Trying to