Cablegate: Turkey"S Work On Akdamar Island Armenian Heritage Site

This record is a partial extract of the original cable. The full text of the original cable is not available.

UNCLAS ADANA 000183

SIPDIS

SENSITIVE

NOT FOR INTERNET DISTRIBUTION

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: PREL AM TU
SUBJECT: TURKEY"S WORK ON AKDAMAR ISLAND ARMENIAN HERITAGE SITE
PROGRESSING WELL

REF: A) ADANA 110 B) REID/GODFREY SEP. 16 E-MAIL

1.(SBU) Summary: AMCON ADANA conoffs and RSO Ankara visited the
Armenian Akdamar Island monastery heritage site on 9/28, finding
restoration work well underway. The work site seemed
well-organized and the project manager conducted a tour of the
closed work site. Initial site structural work largely was
completed and there was ongoing preservation work on the
monastery's interior frescoes. The site manager said that his
team included Armenian art history and architectural consultants
with whom his team was in regular contact. End Summary.

2. (SBU) In a 9/28 visit to the Akdamar Island monastery
heritage site on the southern coast of Lake Van, AMCON ADANA
conoffs and RSO Ankara encountered a reassuring level of careful
engineering professionalism and deliberate ongoing art history
preservation work. The Ankara-based Kartal Kaya-Ebru
engineering firm is leading the site team and its manager warmly
welcomed our visit. The manager, a veteran of the company's
Mostar Bridge restoration project, conducted a tour of the
normally closed work site, taking pains to show where the
company was expending additional effort to observe the heritage
value of the site.

3.(SBU) Noting that the team had worked earlier in the summer
to restore the roofs of several otherwise open watersheds in the
main annex and an adjacent chapel, the effort now had shifted to
interior preservation and structural work. He noted that the
company had located the original quarry for stone for the roofs
and had used an architectural mortar imported from France (Note:
one assistant later said that it had come from Italy. End
Note.) to best replicate a more modern bonding material more
closely connected to the original mortar bond's composition.

4.(SBU) AMCON Adana conoffs observed that the earlier roof had
been stone with additional soil-covering and the site manager
concurred that that was how the leaking roof was built when the
team arrived (ref. A). He said, however, that the team's
Armenian consultants did not know how to reproduce this type of
roof with available materials so that it would shed water. That
is why the stone roof had been used to restore the building's
watertight integrity.

5.(SBU) He also showed where polymer were being injected into
exposed decaying interior and exterior stone joints, often
supporting overlaid plaster, some of which supported fresco
images, sculpted images or paintings.
Furthermore he said that those same materials had been used to
restore most of the floor to level, finished stone walking
level. He pointed out where, in removing floor rubble, the team
had located and left open for further archeological examination,
a possible baptismal font or shallow well. He also showed where
a capstone found in the floor rubble had been reinserted in a
corresponding nearby wall area to restore watertight integrity
and a seal for a likely wall crypt and said it, too, had been
marked for further archeological examination.

6.(SBU) A four-person team was working to preserve the
remaining, damaged interior frescoes and painting higher up in
the conical dome of the main chapel structure. The lower the
level of the frescoes the more work was being done to remove
many hundreds of years of incense and wax residue to show the
original fresco pigments. Higher up the team showed us that
much less damage had taken place than below during past eras of
Armenian art disfiguration in eastern Turkey. The team leader
said that no chemical washes were being used on the frescoes and
they were all being laboriously hand cleaned. They anticipated
that their four-person team would be augmented by more experts
as weather improved in Spring 2006.

7.(SBU) Looking ahead the team said that it was awaiting the
following decisions: 1) whether to extend the timeline for the
monastery site restoration (Note: the manager said that the
original timeline plainly was too short and ongoing work was not
going to be rushed. End Note.) ; 2) whether to seal the site
with new windows, for which appropriate designs have been
located, and attempt to control its humidity or leave it open;
and 3) whether to also start work on preservation of an adjacent
150-200 year old monastery refectory and lodging outbuilding .

8.(SBU) The site manager said that several German, Italian and
Armenian "professors and art historians" had visited the site
over the past several months " and given us great reviews"
(ref. B). The team filmed the AMCON Adana visit, including the
PO noting the confidence-building nature of the ongoing work and
his encouraging the team to remain mindful of the site's
heritage value.

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