Noah’s Ark on the Balkan Horizon

Noah’s Ark on the Balkan Horizon

From Moikom Zeqo to Carlo Ranzo: an investigation into an impossible sighting of 1575

Elton Varfi

Some questions arise from research, while others, on the contrary, end up generating it. This belongs to the second category.

For many years, a sentence I encountered in a book by Moikom Zeqo remained in my mind. Not a theory I had decided to believe, nor a hypothesis I wanted to prove: simply a sentence that, every time I returned to it, kept posing the same problem. How was it possible that, during a journey through Albania and the Balkans, someone claimed to have seen the mountains of Armenia, those linked to the tradition of Noah’s Ark?

The research that followed arose solely from this curiosity. As often happens, the answer proved more interesting than the initial question.

Page 173 of Moikom Zeqo

In 2000 I was twenty-three years old and still living in Durrës. During that period Moikom Zeqo gave me a copy of Mes Laokontit dhe Krishtit – Onufri II. That book stayed with me and over the years I reread it several times.

On page 173, Zeqo reconstructs the historical and human context in which Onufri lived and worked, one of the greatest masters of sixteenth-century Albanian iconography and a pillar of post-Byzantine painting in the Balkans. Active mainly in Berat and in several Balkan localities, the painter left a legacy of frescoes and icons of extraordinary expressive power. His works were distinguished by their rich chromatic range, made famous by the unmistakable hue that went down in history as “Onufri red”.

To do so he uses travel testimonies and descriptions of sixteenth-century Albania. It is in this context that he introduces a bibliographic reference appearing in the form “G. Sfroza” and referring to a “Viaggio 1575”, on pages 21 and 26.

«G. Sfroza në “Viaggio 1575”, fq. 21, 26 flet për një udhëtim nëpër Shqipëri.»

«G. Sfroza, in “Viaggio 1575”, on pp. 21 and 26, speaks of a journey through Albania.»

The passage quoted by Zeqo describes the Albanians encountered during the journey: armed men, dark clothing, red headgear, strong women adorned with silver coins. The traveller’s judgment is often harsh, marked by the prejudices of his time. Zeqo, however, uses those details above all to reconstruct Onufri’s environment and draws particular attention to the kësula të kuqe, the red caps, relating them to figures present in Onufrian painting.

Then, in the middle of that description, appears the sentence that had struck me: having reached the “highest and last mountain”, the travellers were said to have seen in the distance the “black mountains of Armenia”, where, according to tradition, Noah’s Ark was located.

The most interesting thing is that Zeqo does not merely report the information. He interprets it as a singular tradition preserved in central Albania: the idea that from the heights one could see the mountains of Armenia and that, together with this geographical image, the biblical legend of Noah continued to live in popular consciousness.

Moikom Zeqo’s book and the passage on p. 173 from which the research began. Editorial treatment based on a scan of the author’s personal copy.

It was precisely that observation by Zeqo that opened a question destined to remain unresolved for years. The idea that from the mountain peaks of central Albania someone might have glimpsed the very distant mountains of Armenia, intertwining them with the myth of Noah’s Ark, was too singular to be dismissed as mere curiosity. At the time I tried to trace the source directly and turned to Moikom Zeqo himself, asking for some further indication about the sixteenth-century text he had mentioned. His answer was essential: he had no more detailed information about that sixteenth-century book. With that dead end, the research stopped, leaving behind only a few fragments: an uncertain name — “G. Sfroza” —, the reference to a “Viaggio 1575” and, above all, that surprising image of the “black mountains of Armenia” linked to Noah’s Ark. The exact author, the original text and a plausible explanation of what the traveller claimed to have seen were still missing. Many years later, returning to that page, I decided to reopen the case, starting precisely from those scant bibliographic traces.

From “Sfroza” to Sforza

The first step was to identify the source correctly.

Behind the name “G. Sfroza” is Giovanni Sforza, an Italian historian and scholar who in 1915 published in Siena a pamphlet entitled Un viaggio attraverso i Balcani nel 1575. The title could easily suggest that Sforza was the author of the journey. He was not.

Giovanni Sforza had brought back to light, more than three centuries later, the account of another man. The real traveller was Carlo Ranzo, a gentleman from Vercelli who in 1575 had accompanied the Venetian ambassador Giacomo Soranzo on the journey to Constantinople.

At this point the research finally had an author, an itinerary and a source to follow.

Carlo Ranzo and the journey of 1575

Ranzo crossed the Balkans as part of a Venetian diplomatic mission bound for the Ottoman court. His Relatione d’un viaggio fatto da Venetia in Constantinopoli was printed in Turin in 1616, more than forty years after the journey.

This distance between experience and publication is important. The text is not a modern topographical report compiled on the spot, but an account in which memory, impressions, information received along the way and narrative construction can overlap.

The route reaches Alessio, present-day Lezhë, and from there continues inland through the Balkans, toward Skopje and then Constantinople. It is during this phase that the passage that had attracted Zeqo’s attention appears.

The original passage

In the critical edition edited by Alessandro Gallotta in 2017, the passage is on page 75. Ranzo writes:

«scoprirno i monti neri d’Armenia, ove s’afferma esser l’Arca di Noè».

The comparison with Zeqo’s Albanian rendering is instructive. Zeqo renders the scene in an even more explicitly visual way, with “pamë në largësi”, that is, “we saw in the distance”, and speaks of the “relic” of the Ark. Ranzo, by contrast, is more terse: the travellers “scoprirno” those mountains and there, he writes, “s’afferma esser l’Arca di Noè”.

The difference does not change the fundamental problem, but shows how modern reception accentuated the visual force of a passage that was already highly evocative.

What does “scoprirno” mean?

The verb is decisive.

In the context of the travel narrative, “scoprirno” is an old form of “scoprirono” and has a visual meaning: they caught sight of, sighted, saw something appear on the horizon. Ranzo, therefore, is not simply reporting geographical knowledge or a story heard from someone. The sentence is constructed as a sighting.

And it is exactly here that the enigma arises. The travellers are moving between the Albanian coast and Skopje. Ararat and the mountains of Armenia lie enormously farther east. It cannot have been a real observation.

Schematic editorial relief map of Carlo Ranzo’s Balkan itinerary and the location of Mount Ararat. The dotted line indicates the direction of Ararat from the mountainous area before Skopje, highlighting the impossibility of the sighting described in the account.

The question, at this point, was no longer whether Ararat could be seen from Albania. Geographically, the answer is no. The question became: what did Ranzo think he was seeing, and why did he call them the “black mountains of Armenia”?

First hypothesis: a place-name error

The most immediate explanation is an error.

During a sixteenth-century journey, geographical information passed through different languages, local guides, interpreters, soldiers and populations encountered along the way. A name could be misheard, translated, distorted or remembered imperfectly many years later.

The text also mentions the “Black Mountains of Scoppia”, that is, Skopje. The close presence of mountain names and the complexity of Balkan toponymy make it plausible that “Armenia” may conceal a misunderstanding or an exchange of names. It is a serious possibility, but with the sources currently available it cannot be demonstrated.

Second hypothesis: making the journey more extraordinary

The second explanation is more literary, but perhaps even more convincing.

The reference to Noah’s Ark is narratively perfect. Ranzo reaches the “highest and last mountain” and, precisely from that extreme point, the horizon seems to open all the way to the mountains of Armenia. Not just any mountains, but those on which tradition placed the Ark.

For a sixteenth-century reader the reference had immediate force. Noah, the Flood, the Ark and Ararat belonged to a universally recognizable religious and cultural heritage. Inserting that name transformed a difficult Balkan crossing into an almost biblical episode.

Hence the suspicion: had Ranzo simply made a mistake, or had he made his own journey seem greater, more remote and more memorable than it actually was?

Alessandro Gallotta’s interpretation

Alessandro Gallotta is a scholar specializing in historical-geographical studies and in the editing of travel sources. In 2017 he edited for Phasar the critical edition of Carlo Ranzo’s Relatione d’un viaggio fatto da Venetia in Costantinopoli, enriching it with a critical essay, a transcription of the text and an analytical commentary.

His scholarly activity is closely connected with the University of Florence and LabGeo (Laboratory of Applied Geography) of the Florentine university. On behalf of this institution, Gallotta also published in 2022, in the journal Documenti geografici, an essay devoted to the cardinal points and the European geographical imagination. It is therefore to the editor who directly analyzed Ranzo’s work that one must refer in order to interpret and assess the singular claim about the “black mountains of Armenia”.

The modern critical edition allows the passage to be approached with greater caution. Alessandro Gallotta, editor of the Relatione, considers the geographical context decisive above all: at that moment Ranzo is moving from the Albanian coast toward Skopje, so it must be ruled out that he could physically see Mount Ararat or the mountains of Armenia.

To explain the oddity, Gallotta leaves open two possibilities. The first is a simple toponymic error: Ranzo may have confused a name or misunderstood a similar one. It is a possible line of inquiry, but difficult to verify without independent documentary evidence.

The second hypothesis, which Gallotta considers more likely because it is more consistent with the spirit of the work, is that Ranzo deliberately inserted into the account a famous and immediately recognizable reference. The tradition of the Ark on Mount Ararat was known to every Christian reader; placing it on the horizon of the journey would have made the episode more interesting and memorable. This reading is reinforced by the fact that exaggerations are not uncommon in the Relatione.

An important nuance also remains: we do not know how aware Ranzo was of the scale of the geographical distortion. He may have embellished the account while at the same time lacking an exact sense of the distances between the Balkans and Armenia. For this reason it would be too simplistic to reduce everything to the word “lie”. The construction of the text may be the simultaneous product of memory, imperfect geographical reconstruction, religious culture and a taste for the exaltation of the marvellous.

From curiosity to conclusion

It is here that the research returns to the point from which it began.

Zeqo’s page had led me for years to imagine the existence of a strange tradition in central Albania: from the mountains one could supposedly see the mountains of Armenia, and together with that image the biblical memory of Noah would have survived.

A verification of the sources tells a different story. We have no independent evidence demonstrating the existence, in central Albania, of a popular tradition according to which Ararat was visible from the local mountains. What we can document with certainty is Carlo Ranzo’s account: a traveller in 1575 who claims to have caught sight of mountains which, from the place where he was, he believed could be those of Armenia.

The plausible explanations therefore remain two. The first is a material or toponymic error. The second, which during the research had seemed progressively more probable to me and which coincides with the interpretation proposed by Gallotta, is that Ranzo wanted to exaggerate, boast or in any case embellish his journey with a reference that no reader of the time could have ignored.

It would not be correct to turn this hypothesis into a certainty. But the narrative construction of the passage is eloquent: the “highest and last mountain”, the distant horizon, Armenia, Noah, the Ark. It is almost a scene built to be remembered.

A horizon that did not exist

In the end, the most fascinating part of this story is not discovering that Ararat cannot be seen from Albania. A map would have been enough for that.

It is the path followed by a sentence. In 1575 Carlo Ranzo crosses the Balkans. In 1616 his account is printed. In 1915 Giovanni Sforza brings it back to the attention of scholars. In 2000 Moikom Zeqo uses it to reconstruct Onufri’s historical environment and reads in those words the possible survival of a tradition linked to Noah. Many years later, that same page gives rise to a question and pushes the investigation backward, all the way to the source.

Perhaps Ranzo confused a name. Perhaps a report heard during the journey became distorted in memory. Or perhaps he decided that, from the highest point of his itinerary, his readers deserved to see something more extraordinary than the mountains actually in front of him.

If so, the device worked perfectly.

The mountains of Armenia were not on the horizon. Noah’s Ark could not be seen from the Balkans. Yet those few words, more than four centuries later, continue to generate questions.

Perhaps this is precisely the most successful part of Ranzo’s account: not what he saw, but what he managed to make his readers see.

Essential sources and bibliography

Zeqo, Moikom, Mes Laokontit dhe Krishtit – Onufri II, Tirana, Medaur, 2000, p. 173.

Ranzo, Carlo, Relatione d’un viaggio fatto da Venetia in Constantinopoli, Torino, 1616.

Sforza, Giovanni, Un viaggio attraverso i Balcani nel 1575, Siena, Stabilimento Arti Grafiche Lazzeri, 1915, 54 pp.

Ranzo, Carlo, Relatione d’un viaggio fatto da Venetia in Costantinopoli. Saggio critico, trascrizione e commento, edited by Alessandro Gallotta, Firenze, Phasar, 2017, p. 75 and note 141.

Rombai, Leonardo, review of Gallotta’s edition of Carlo Ranzo’s Relatione, Geostorie, 2018.

Elsie, Robert, translation and presentation of the Albanian section of Carlo Ranzo’s account, Albanian History.

Cartography of the itinerary: editorial elaboration based on modern geography, created for this article.