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    The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians
    The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians
    The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians
    Ebook368 pages7 hours

    The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians

    By Philip Marsden

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Ebook edition of Philip Marsden’s classic travel book, published to coincide with the centenary of the Armenian massacres.

    After centuries of prominence as a world power, Armenia has withstood every attempt during the 20th century to destroy it. With a name redolent both of dim antiquity and of a modern world and its tensions, the Armenians founded a civilization and underwent a diaspora that brought many of the great ideas of the East to Western Europe.

    The Crossing Place is Philip Marsden’s gripping account of his remarkable journey through the Middle East, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus in a quest to discover the secret of one of the world’s most extraordinary peoples.

    Caught between opposing empires, between warring religions and ideologies – at the crossing place of history – the Armenians have somehow survived against the odds. This is their story – told by one of the finest travel writers at work today.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateApr 9, 2015
    ISBN9780007397778
    The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians
    Author

    Philip Marsden

    Philip Marsden has written several highly-praised and award-winning travel books – including ‘The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians’, ‘The Bronski House’, ‘The Spirit-Wrestlers’ and ‘Chains of Heaven: An Ethiopian Romance’ – and one novel, ‘The Main Cages’. He lives in Cornwall.

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    4/5

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    • 5/5
      This is a wonderful book. As a result of reading it I know so much more about Armenia and the Armenia people especially in the diaspora within the Middle East.One revelation for me was finding out about the Matenadaran Library in Yerevan which holds thousands of mediaeval MSS. The author doesn't shy away from describing the nastier aspects of his travels towards Armenia, but at the same time he writes lyrically about the natural aspects of the countries he visits as well as the gardens which the Armenian people create wherever they find themselves ending up.I read it in the e-book version and found it easy to read on my phone.
    • 3/5
      “The Crossing Place: A Journey Among the Armenians” (1993) by Philip Marsden is more difficult to define. I think it is a nice travelogue, describing Marsden’s circumvent journey through the Middle East, Turkey, then Eastern Europe, eventually ending up in Armenia, in the early 1990s. He manages largely because of his Armenian network, who help him along the way – until he actually gets to Armenia, where he is treated more suspect, every foreigner a potential Russian spy. The other element of the book, trying to identify what it means to be Armenian, is less convincing. He falls to often back to the 1915 genocide, for which there are better alternatives, if you want to learn about this. The book is perhaps too much of an attempt to eulogise a people who have suffered in history, no doubt, and who have been remarkably resilient, no doubt, but who may have been at times part of a conflict, too, not just the victim – something Marsden may realise at the very end of the book, only.
    • 4/5
      A complex, multi country odyssey to uncover the history of the Armenians - a much persecuted people. The hardship and danger incurred is clear, but results in a fascinating history.
    • 3/5
      This 1993 work opens with the author happening on a human bone while in E Turkey. "Armenians!" explains a local shepherd, harking back to the 1915 genocide as, in an early episode of 'ethnic cleansing', the Turks turned on the Armenian population.Marsden goes on to investigate the dispersed Armenians. Taking in various countries of the Levant, lands of Eastern Europe...and finally Armenia itself, he tries to get to the heart of this resilient and never-assimilated people.One sees huge similarities with the plight of the Jewish people- years of pogroms and hostility, for no very apparent reason; finding success as merchants and businessmen; a strong identification with their culture...It wasn't quite as fascinating as I'd hoped- Armenia is on my list of Places I Must Visit (we also have a relative who married an Armenian immigrant to UK). Nonetheless provides a starting point for some understanding of the Armenian diaspora.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Published in 1993, the book relates a journey in Middle Orient, Eastern Europe and then in collapsing USSR in the last months of its existence — that is 1991. It begins with a travel in Turkey to find very few remembrances of the Armenian presence — then Syria, Jerusalem and Venice. But this first journey is just a first taste of the places to go, of the people to meet, of the sentiment to feel.Then the author goes from Cyprus to Lebanon still in war, and then to Syria still peaceful to find the last remains of the Armenian genocide of 1915. This part, with all the testimonies of old survivors, is very sad and difficult to read.The second part, from Turkey to Bulgaria, Romania and Moldova is lighter: Armenian people in theses three countries are vividly described, and the atmosphere in these times of revolutions, with the communists reluctantly disappearing, is partly confuse and partly joyous.The last part, in what was still USSR (april 1991), is for me the most impressive: we forget for a time the Armenians (until the author eventually reachs Armenia and the Karabagh war with Azerbaijan) and we follow a clandestine traveler in his attempts to find a bus, a train, a boat… The book is both very well written, sensitive and erudite, and very personal: a quest for Armenia and for self-knowledge.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    The Crossing Place - Philip Marsden

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