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| Tayyip Erdogan |
Hi Tom,
I read with great interest your "Silk Road" blog which reminded me a lot of my time in Istanbul. At that time Turkey's current President, Tayyip Erdogan was Mayor of Metropolitan Istanbuland I had to go and see him in his office officially about some matter.
After our official discussion, over the traditional glass of bitter Turkish coffee ( which I never liked very much), he happened to mention that at some time in his career he had done some job or other in the vicinity of Mount Ararat and that while he was there he had been given some aerial photographs of Noah's Ark. I expressed a lot of interest in this revelation, so much so that he offered to show me the photos. An offer which I accepted with much enthusiasm.
He asked his secretary to bring him a file from which he extracted some photos, one of which looked very much like the picture which I have inserted hereunder: ( It is not one from the Mayor's file, I found this one on the Internet, but it looks very much like the one that I was shown by the Mayor).
I found the picture to be very interesting, but looking at it through my geologist eyes, it was my opinion that Mr Erdogan's "Ark" was a geological structure and nothing more. Mount Ararat is a dormant volcano and the "Ark" could be the remnant of an old lava flow, a fault or just the product of normal weathering. The fact that the structure has a boat-like outline is, in my view, nothing more than happy coincidence.
I passed these thoughts on to Mr Erdogan. He looked amused at my explanation, but never let on what his views were on the "Ark" that he showed me.
Regards,
Deon.
Hi Tom,
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting my Noah's Ark letter. Unfortunately the pic of the "Ark" was lost in the cloud or somewhere. It's not that important and there might only be periferal former colleague interest in the old photo in any case
I was quite interested to read Bok Visser's piece on his visit to Pakistan. While I was there the Corps was also taken up the Khyber Pass. But we were taken up by train from Peshawar to the military base at the top on the Afghanistan border, accompanied by what gave one the impression of being at least half of Pakistan's armed forces - the Foreign Ministry was a little concerned about exposing the Diplomatic Corps to the possible attention of the uncontrollable Afridi tribes of the North West Frontier Province. I still have a traditional hat which is worn by the Pastun people in the area as well as a small collection of interesting stones found on the side of the track - the train was not of the express type and you could walk alongside it, faster than it could steam up the mountain.
Regards, keep well and thanks again,
Deon.
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