US embassy cable - 05ADANA183

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.