According to the Old Testament, Noah's ark wandered in the rain that flooded the whole world, and when the water slept, he stuck to Mount Ararat. Thus began the revival of humanity.
One of the main mysteries of mankind - the biblical legend of Noah's ark - remains unsolved today.
According to the Old Testament, God told Noah to make an ark out of gopher wood. The ship wandered in the rain that flooded the whole world in 40 days and nights. When the water subsided, it stuck to Mount Ararat near the border of modern Armenia and Turkey. So from the 27th day of the second month of 601 years from the creation of the world (April 2, 2369 BC), the rebirth of mankind began.
On the top of the mountain
For more than 4 thousand years, the biblical legend about the first internally displaced person has been stirring people's minds. Back in the early 19th century, residents of the Armenian village of Bayazet talked about the case of a shepherd who saw a huge wooden ship in the mountains one spring. The Turkish expedition of 1833 to Ararat confirmed the story of the shepherd: in her message it is said about the wooden bow of the ship protruding from the silt.
In September 1878, the Englishman James Bryce conquered the top of Ararat alone, who made his first ascent without spending the night in 24 hours. At an altitude of 4 thousand meters, between the blocks of solidified lava, he discovered a wooden bar, which reminded him of a fragment of a man-made structure. During the First World War, in August 1916, the Russian aviator Vladimir Roskovitsky reported that he saw from the side of an airplane a blue spot - a lake, and on its edge - the skeleton of a large ship, frozen by a quarter into the ice.
According to other sources, two more Russian military pilots, Lieutenants Zabolotsky and Lesin, saw the ark at the same time. Making a reconnaissance flight over the mountain range, they recorded a strange object in the lake at an altitude of 4.3 thousand meters, resembling a multi-storey raft. Their report was delivered to Tsar Nicholas II, who ordered two special military teams to be sent to survey the mountain.
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In the same summer, both groups climbed Mount Ararat and found a structure resembling Noah's ark. The structure was thoroughly examined, measured, and even wood samples were taken. The material for the manufacture of the ship turned out to be oleander. This evergreen tree, native to the Mediterranean, is durable and almost rot-free, and has been coated with a composition similar to modern varnish. An excellent "preservative" for the ark is also ice, in which the ship is 11 months a year. Inside, the soldiers found rooms and measured them from the largest to the smallest.
After reviewing the report, Nicholas II intended to organize another expedition to launch the ship, but then a shot from the Aurora struck.
There is evidence that the ark was seen by Soviet pilots during the Second World War. One of them fled to America, where he presented the filmed object to the special services. He may have been the first to photograph Noah's ark. At the same time, the ship was discovered on Ararat by the American pilot Ed Davis.
Inspired by these reports, the American historian Aaron Smith, who collected the history of Noah's Ark from 80 thousand works in 72 languages of the world over many years, decided to try his luck on Ararat himself. In 1951, he and 40 satellites spent 12 days at the top of the mountain, but the search was unsuccessful. “Although we did not find traces of Noah's ark, my faith in the biblical description of the flood was strengthened even more,” he later said.
Yerevan researcher Ashot Levonyan discovered a message from the French serviceman Fernand Navarre. According to Navarra, on June 6, 1955, he found a processed wooden beam in a crevice on the slope of Ararat. An independent examination in 16 universities around the world has shown that this is a kind of oak, and the age of the beam is about 5 thousand years. However, this was not evidence that the found fragment was directly related to the ark. By the way, another similar fragment is exhibited in the Museum of the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin (the spiritual center of the Armenian Apostolic Church) and is presented as a fragment of Noah's ark.
Top Secret CIA Pictures
Light on the mystery could have been shed by secret CIA images of the slope of Mount Ararat, on which the legendary Noah's Ark was possibly filmed. These photographs were taken back in the 1970s from an American U-2 spy plane that flew reconnaissance flights over Turkish territory and near the borders of the Soviet Union. Repeatedly recorded a strange object on the snowy slope of the mountain received the CIA code name "Ararat anomaly".
Porter Taylor, professor of law at the University of Richmond (USA), is convinced that the photographs taken by American spy planes confirm the Old Testament story of the Flood. According to the scientist, since the late 1950s, the US intelligence department has been hiding information about a strange object on Ararat for a number of reasons. By disclosing this information, Taylor said, the CIA would have seriously endangered the largest operation of the Cold War period - reconnaissance flights of spy planes over Soviet territory. Meanwhile, according to the scientist, the photographs stored in secret files in the archives of the CIA and the DIA (military intelligence) give an almost complete picture of Noah's Ark - 152 meters long, 25 meters high and 15.2 meters wide. These data coincide with the information given in the Bible.
Back in December 1997, the American department promised to publish secret images of the "Ararat anomaly", but it did not keep its word.
Modern expeditions
Levonyan was among the members of an international expedition that intended to search for the ark on Ararat in August 2000. It was attended by 27 people from six countries: USA, Canada, Italy, Norway, Russia and Armenia. In Turkey, citizens of this country were to join the group.
Among the participants of the expedition there were already conquerors of Ararat. Hamlet Nersesyan from Los Angeles climbed the top of the mountain in 1986. Chemist from Milan Angelo Palego visited Ararat 15 times, starting in 1985, solely in search of the ark. Once he was joined by the famous climber Reinhold Messner, who single-handedly conquered all 14 eight-thousanders of the planet.
Palego told Levonyan about his findings. In July 1989, at an altitude of 4.3 thousand meters, he came across two deep cracks running parallel to one another and forming an even rectangle measuring 100 by 26 meters. It was not immediately possible to get to the structure from the glacier. “You have to go down there on a rope about 200 meters,” said Palego, “and since the glacier has melted a lot this year, we will definitely find it this time.”
“And here we are at the foot of Mount Ararat. The dazzling white glacier on its top is just a stone's throw away … But the Turkish authorities at the very last moment, when we were already on the side of the mountain, forbade us to climb without giving any reason. We are forced to return to Armenia,”Levonyan said.
Finally, on August 4, 2009, eight citizens of Armenia received official permission to climb to the top of the biblical Mount Ararat. “At the age of 50, after 33 years of dreaming, seeing Ararat almost every day from Yerevan, I was at the top of this legendary mountain,” Levonyan recalls.
Two years later, he raised six Muscovites to the top of Mount Ararat. But bad weather and a blizzard did not allow them to admire the view from the top of one of the most famous mountains in the world. At dinner in a motel near the Bayazet fortress, when an Armenian researcher asked the head of the American expedition, Professor Richard, who had been searching for the ark for many years, if they had found anything, he smiled and replied: "No, nothing."
Is there an ark?
The mystery of the ark remains unsolved. Perhaps the French archaeologist André Parrot was right, who, in his book The Flood and Noah's Ark, published in 1953, wrote with irony: “He is indeed being sought, and from time to time, as a rule, is found again. He, like a magnet, invariably attracts people who do not quite clearly represent the border between the legendary and the real."
So does Noah's Ark exist or not? Believers do not need proof, skeptics will not be convinced by a thousand proofs.
Hamlet Matevosyan