![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/55\/2011\/06\/Turkey2011-097.jpg\" "\\"Turkey2011")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe drive to the medieval city of Ani was along a two lane road to nowhere.\u00a0 The road simply stopped when you got to the castle entrance to the city ruins.\u00a0 Along the way you felt already there was something strange\u2014 the landscape was beautifully green but there were no trees\u2014- anywhere to be seen.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My friend Mark Fairchild assured me that this place was well worth the drive from Kars and I took his word for it.\u00a0 It was a drive to the river separating Armenia and Turkey.\u00a0 There is no traffic between the two countries.\u00a0 It is not allowed, though there has been some recent talk about changing that.\u00a0 But old wounds die hard, for Ani had been once a great capital city of a great Armenian empire, an empire based on Christian values and Christian faith in various ways.<\/p>\n
Ani today is a ruins, but what a magnificent ruins it is, spanning many square miles.\u00a0 I could not walk all over the site as there were not enough hours in the afternoon and it involved a lot of climbing up and down substantial hills near the river itself.\u00a0 Once the Armenian kingdom covered all of present day Armenia and much of eastern Turkey.\u00a0 Those days are long in the past.\u00a0 Once there were between 100,000 and 200,000 people living in Ani.\u00a0 Now you would be hard pressed to find 500 living near it.\u00a0\u00a0 Once this city was on the silk road, a great center of commerce and a capital rivaling Constantinople itself.\u00a0 Unlike Constantinople\u00a0 after the Muslim conquest,\u00a0 Ani did not morphe into something else.\u00a0 It simply died and was abandoned.<\/p>\n
First references to this city come in the 5th century A.D. but it would not reach its peak of influence until well into the Middle Ages, around 1000 A.D.\u00a0\u00a0 But like the Biblical tragedy of Israel, the two sons of the great king King Gagik I quarreled and the kingdom was divided between them.\u00a0 Eventually Ani fell into the hands of the Byzantines but it was sacked by the Selchuck Turks in 1064 and the story goes downhill from there.\u00a0 In 1236 it was captured by the Mongols and then it became a part of the Ottoman Empire in\u00a0 1579. But its population declined and by the 17th century it had very few residents and little political or commericial importance.\u00a0\u00a0 It was tourists who rediscovered it in the 19th century.\u00a0\u00a0 But to see its ruins is to see what a great fall this once proud city had over time, a reminder that it can happen to great cities, great nations, great empires, great cultures, and with great speed as well.<\/p>\n
Here is another of the great cathedrals of the city.\u00a0\u00a0 Some of these cathedrals still have their original magnificent acoustics since the roof is still on the building a thousand years after their heyday.\u00a0 <\/a> The drive to the medieval city of Ani was along a two lane road to nowhere.\u00a0 The road simply stopped when you got to the castle entrance to the city ruins.\u00a0 Along the way you felt already there was something strange\u2014 the landscape was beautifully green but there were no trees\u2014- anywhere to be seen.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/a> Let us go inside the walled city and see what lies in wait and in waste.\u00a0 <\/a> The sheer scope of the place and the beauty of the landscape contained within the walls is overwhelming.\u00a0 For example take a look at this next picture of the palace of the ruler by the river towards the back of the walled city. The tower in the foreground is a Muslim tomb shrine.\u00a0 When one reads the guiding signs one realizes this was a place of vast religious life\u2014 there are more churches, and monasteries and nunneries than there are ordinary buildings. \u00a0 For example consider the great Church of St. Gregory by the river.\u00a0 Or the nunnery a little further along the river.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a> There is a drop of some 300-400 feet down to these locations from the plain evident above on which the palace and many other buildings are situated. \u00a0\u00a0 You can also see the ancient ruins of the bridge across the river that led right into the city bringing all the trade of the silk road this way (see a couple of pictures below).<\/p>\n<\/a> There is so much more to show and to tell, but perhaps here we could just suggest a meditation on Revelation 18.\u00a0 While Ani did not fall in single day or even a single year, it is not just the Babylon\u2019s of this world that rise and fall.\u00a0 So do the most Christian of cities as well.\u00a0 Think on these things.\u00a0 God\u2019s kingdom is not coterminous with any particular nation, any particular city, any particular ethnic group, for it is the kingdom of God, and it alone will never fall.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"