Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - VI. Across the Arax plain and in Erivan
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ARMENIA AND THE NEAR EAST
1 5 2
rash enough to try to climb up there. It gave one a little
sidclight on the methods of war in bygone days.
On this side the fortress must have been impregnable before
the days of big guns, but it was comparatively easy of approach
on the remaining three sides, and its walls, made of stones
and blocks of sun-dried clay, could hardly have been very
strong. Nevertheless the Russians failed to take it in 1804.
At that date it was Persian, and the sirdar who governed the
town said to the secretary of the British Legation in 1814,
that " if three or four of the kings of Fireng (Europe) were
to unite to take this castle, they might just take the trouble
of going back again, for their labours would be in vain."
However, the Russians under Paskevich had no difficulty in
taking it in 1827. The Russian bombardment did fearful
havoc in this fortified town, built of such unsubstantial
materials; and one shell is said to have fallen through the
dome of the mosque of the citadel, where thousands of the
inhabitants had tåken refuge from the ram of shells.
I walked on, and suddenly, right inside the bounds of the
stronghold, I came upon the ruins of a Persian mosque with
a beautiful bluish-green dome of faience mosaic. Could this
be the one the shell came through ? It did not look much
like it, for the roof was still quite whole.
How lovely this brightly coloured architecture looks in such
surroundings. But it is a survival of Islam, and of a culture
which has never been truly Armenian.
According to a Moslem tradition this fortress was built by
the Persians at the beginning of the sixteenth century; but
this is open to doubt. In later centuries it was a continual
bone of contention between the Persian shahs and the Turkish
sultans, and the important stronghold was besieged again and
again. In 1635 the Shah Safi took the town; in 1724 the
Turks regained it ; but ten years afterwards it fell into the
hands of Nadir-Shah. After 1827 the Russians kept it. As
the Persians are Shiah and the Turks are Sunni Moslems, they
hate each other even more, perhaps, than they hate the Christ
ians; and when the Persians took the town in 1635 they razed
all the Turkish mosques to the ground still more thoroughly
than if they had been Christian churches.
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