Noah’s Ark, Mount Ararat, Drunkenness, Rape, Incest, and Armenian Pride
The snowy peak of Mount Ararat rises imperiously above Yerevan and greater Armenia and, despite being officially on the Turkish side of the border, it is a major symbol of Armenia and has been on the Armenian coat of arms since at least the Soviet period.
Please excuse the checkered background and focus on the hammer, sickle, mountain, and grapes.
But in this post, I don’t only want to talk about the mountain. See the grapes on the bottom of the coat of arms? Well, those have a special significance for Armenia. A delicious, intoxicating, darkly comedic significance.
On my way to Armenia, I met a woman on the train. “Armenia’s very famous for its wine,” she said. “It all started in the Bible. After the great flood, Noah’s ark landed on Mount Ararat, and when he came down off the ark he planted vineyards and made wine. And then . . . well, we don’t have to talk about what happened after that. But wine is still being made there today! It’s delicious. It’s a really great thing about Armenia. You should taste some while you’re here.”
It’s true. We don’t have to talk about what happened after Noah made wine on Mount Ararat. But we can, because the black humour of this story turning into a source of Armenian national pride is too good to pass up.
So, as my train-buddy said, tradition has it that God sent a great flood in antiquity to punish a world rife with evil. Noah was the only good person in the whole world, so God let him in on a little secret. “I’m going to punish everybody,” God said, “and send a great flood. Everybody’s going to die. Except you, because you’re righteous. So in order to prepare for this event, build a vast ark and take animals from each species so that they might repopulate the earth after I’ve finished making it rain.”
So Noah did. Everybody looked at Noah like he was utterly crazy as he was building the ark, but when it started to rain everybody drowned except Noah because Noah was better than everybody else.
When the waters did go down, the ark landed on top of Mount Ararat. General scholarly opinion holds that, if the flood story is based in historical fact, the biblical Mount Ararat was probably not located in modern-day Armenia. This is not important, however, for the traditional signification of the mountain. In order for the story to take on the trappings of reality, all that has to happen is for people to believe.
So, let’s say for the sake of argument that Noah’s Ark really did land on top of the Armenian/Turkish Mount Ararat. Noah and his sons climbed down off the snow-covered summit, God sent them a rainbow as a sign that he would never again send such a great flood, and then Noah got down to the business of planting the vineyard that would become a symbol of a small landlocked country called Armenia several millennia later.
After the grape harvest, Noah made himself some wine and got so drunk he passed out, naked. His son Ham entered the tent and “saw” Noah lying there. Ham went out and told his brothers Shem and Japheth about Noah’s nudity. Shem and Japheth, rather than going in to “see” for themselves, went in backwards with a blanket and covered their father up.
After Noah woke up from his drunken state, he cursed Ham and Ham’s descendants. Why, you ask? Just for seeing him naked? Well, my heathenistic friends, the general consensus is that “to see” functions as a euphemism for sex. So Ham raped his father.
If I were told this story about a major landmark of my country, I would be like, “whoa now. We should just get rid of grapes. Like, all grapes. Can’t have things like that happening. Rape is bad. Cursing descendants who didn’t do anything wrong – also bad. Let’s just. Uh. Yeah. No. Okay, if we’re going to continue to have wine in this place, we might just want to keep it on the down-low. You know, because of that terrible bad thing that happened. Which probably happened on another Mount Ararat. Yeah.”
And yet the Noah’s Ark imagery seems to be everywhere. A major wine and brandy company in Armenia is called “Ararat.” I went to their factory, which contained prominent signage about the origins of winemaking in Armenia being when Noah’s ark landed on Mount Ararat.
Ararat Brandy (Distilled Wine)
I like to imagine that Armenians, when told this story are all like, “well, that sucks but . . . wine.”
And so wine and brandy are a great source of Armenian national pride, and nearly every Armenian I meet finds a way to tell me about how good they are. And they’re right – they are good. Just . . . enjoy responsibly and make sure you educate your children to know that drunk means no and …. incest also means no.