For kids, Noah's Ark means fun, a boat full of animals, a rainbow, new hope.
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| The Noah's Ark Thrift Shop, Harwich Port, Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Photo Credit: Marash Girl |
For Cape Codders, Noah's Ark means a resale shop full of wonderful buys, (toy animals included), but for Armenians, Noah's Ark is the beginning of Armenian History. You know the verse from the Bible, at the beginning of Genesis, Chapter 8: "But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, and the waters receded from the earth continually. At the end of a hundred and fifty days the waters had abated; and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat." (Genesis 8:1-4 RSV)
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Armenia: Mt. Ararat with Massis in the background. Detail from 18th Century French Copperplate Print
Photo Credit: Marash Girl |
The hearth of our home was from across the Atlantic, through the straits of Gibraltar, even further, beyond the colossus at Rhodes, where the towns and villages lay, by the way of the 'ten thousand', and before that, the wonder of Alexander, as he trooped his way through western Asia, on his journey to the land of rupees and maharajahs.
ReplyDeleteWe were neither cowered by that history, nor emboldened. It was but another event under the reflection of the gaze of the ark, as her glance bore down upon us from her confinement in snow and ice, in the solitude of her wood and timber. That was our pale, the knowledge that the ark was above us, and everything below was a stage on which was written the cries of Noah's children.