At certain seasons of the year the mouths of the rivers that enter the lake swarm with fish—a variety of bleak. They run up into fresh water to spawn, and in the process are scooped out by the basket-load. Certain types of water-snake also haunt the rocky shores.
These are about four feet long, and creamy white in colour (or appear so, when seen through some depth of water); and they have the characteristic wedge-shaped head that one generally associates with poison.
Given better means of transport, and better government, one may yet see Lake Van become a health resort and a bad; for its waters are certainly curative in certain types of skin disease. The writer has known an obstinate case of soriasis cured by a summer spent in camp on the lake, with regular bathing as part of the day’s programme. The effect on human hair is also very peculiar; for an English lad with ordinary light-brown hair developed, under similar treatment, an aureole of the purest gold ever seen on human head. The change seemed permanent too, at least as regarded all that was above scalp-level at the time. Later growth was unfortunately of the original hue!
This country was formerly the home of one of the great empires of ancient history; that of the Urartians, or Khaldians, who could dispute the hegemony of Asia with Assur, at the time when the first colonists were settling on the seven bare hills that afterwards were Rome. Van (Dhuspas as it was then called) was their capital; and their kings had their palace on the great limestone ridge that rises, like the vertebrae of some huge saurian, 300 feet above the alluvial plain. As a stronghold this rock was impregnable, and could turn back even Assur at her strongest; and to this day the masses of cyclopean masonry on its crest, and the scores of inscribed cuneiform tablets on its precipitous faces, bear witness to the might of its former lords. The language in which these inscriptions are written is unknown elsewhere (unless it may prove to have affinity with the mysterious Hittite, in spite of the difference of script); but fortunately a tri-lingual inscription left by Xerxes the son of Darius has enabled the records[{237}] to be deciphered. They do not, as a rule, possess as much interest as the Assyrian inscriptions; and are usually to the effect that “I, Menuas son of Ishpuinis, set up this stone, and invoke the Curse of Cowdray upon the man who throws it down.” Menuas, and his son Argistis, were the two most powerful monarchs who occupied the throne of Dhuspas; and their reigns (B.C. 820 to 760 or thereabouts) coincided with a period of decadence in the rival power of Assyria. But in 735 B.C. the Empire of Urartu succumbed before Tiglath Pileser II; though their then king, Sharduris II, was able to make good his defence of this unconquerable citadel.
The plateau of Van is at present the home of the Armenian race; but it is very doubtful whether these have any connexion with the aboriginal Khaldian inhabitants. Their own traditions absolutely contradict the theory; but their modern national writers are apt to claim such descent, now that European scientists have made out the meaning of the inscriptions. Whatever their blood may be, there the Armenians are now; but it is one of the features of that most tangled problem, the Armenian question, that members of the race are never more than a minority, wherever they are found.
Men of that nationality exist everywhere; and no “shadrach” in a blast furnace refuses more obstinately to melt and become assimilated to the rest of the iron ore, than they refuse to assimilate themselves to their neighbours. They are found elsewhere only in colonies; but even in this their original home, massacre, oppression, and the deliberate planting of counter-balancing colonies of Kurds in villages whence the original owners have been expelled, has reduced them to something less than half the present population.
As a people there are few who have a good word for them. They are said to be cowardly and treacherous; to be mere money-grubbers, and so on ad nauseam. The charges vary; but all agree that the objects of them are objectionable somehow. They seem, in fact, to be a sort of Dr. Fell of nationalities; for every one dislikes them, though[{238}] often enough they cannot tell the reason. Even the writer, who has not the least objection to thieves, murderers, and devil-worshippers, and who has a kindly feeling for a successful cheat, admits to getting on less well with Armenians than with other Orientals.
And yet there is much about them that anyone must admire. They have, in fact, much in common with the Jew, who excites much the same feeling among many estimable people! Both have the same attachment, alike to money and to their own peculiar form of religion. Both have the same power of endurance and toughness. And as both have had much the same treatment for generations, and both are nations without a country, they have developed much the same characteristics. Money and intrigue have been their only weapons; and they have naturally come to think these the most important of all things. We can have nothing but admiration for their devotion to their nation, with which their religion and their church is bound up; and they have a high sense of their duty to it, as shown by their educational institutions. Men call them a nation of cowards; but that charge at least is false. In the massacres of 1895, armed men were butchering unarmed; and there was no test of anything but passive endurance. Yet how many could have saved their lives by a mere verbal acceptance of Islam? We shall have a good deal to say to the discredit of the revolutionaries among them, the “Fedais;” but at least the terror that that very small body could inspire among Turks and Kurds in three provinces ought alone to acquit them of any reproach of cowardice.
Both as nation and as church they have a long history, for which we may refer the reader to such works as Lynch’s “Armenia.” They have been subject to the Ottoman Turks since the year 1365, when the latest of a series of Armenian kingdoms finally collapsed. But outlying colonies of their nation exist, as is well known, in several lands, notably in Persia and India.
Their Christianity dates back to 312 A.D. when the whole people was converted by the joint efforts of their king,[{239}] Tiridates, and Saint Gregory the Illuminator. The Greek Church calls them heretical; but their heresy is in truth no more than a resolution to maintain the independence of their church, which is now the sole expression of their nationality, and is prized accordingly. It is true that they refuse to accept one of the Councils that most of the world calls “General,” viz. that of Chalcedon; but they have been at some pains to insert into their version of the creed words expressly condemnatory of that peculiar “Monophysite” heresy which their rejection of Chalcedon is supposed to affirm; and their real cause for disagreeing with that Council was its recognition of the Primacy of the Patriarch of Constantinople.