Mount Ararat is the highest mountain in Turkey (5137 m a.s.l.). It is located in eastern Turkey on the border with Iran and Armenia in a territory that historically had been part of Armenia.
According to an interpretation of a passage of the genesis at the end of the universal flood, which covered all the lands emerged with water, the mythical ark of Noah, containing a couple of all the animals of the planet, ran aground on the top of this mountain.
This Christian interpretation has spread since the twelfth century. The belief that the mythical ark is located on top of the mountain has persisted throughout the seventeenth century and beyond, also fed by the difficulty of accessing the top of the mountain for its height and the perennial glaciers.
Even today, although there is no scientific evidence to support it, archaeological expeditions continue in search of the ark.
A wooden fragment apparently belonged to the ark and found on Mount Ararat is preserved as a relic in the museum of the cathedral mother of Etchmiadzin, center of the Armenian church and Unesco heritage.
In 1949, aerial photographs were taken of what appears to be the hull of a stranded ship. This was considered an optical effect and dubbed the Ararat anomaly, for scholars it would be nothing more than a deposit of sediment and ice.
In 2010, a joint Turkish and Hong Kong expedition announced that it had discovered an unusual cave on the Ararat with wooden walls at an altitude at which it is believed that human settlements never existed and dated the wood (through carbon testing 14) to 4,800 years ago.
The group’s spokesman, Wing-Cheung, said that it is not 100% the ark, but 99%.
One of the members of the Mcgivern expedition dissociated, claiming that some pieces of wood found on the Ararat had probably been brought there specifically by some Kurdish labourers who knew about the expedition.
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