Van

At the eastern edge of Anatolia, Van opens onto one of Türkiye's largest lakes, ringed by mountains and dotted with the ruins of a civilization that shaped this land 2,500 years ago. The city has a quiet, lived-in quality — a university town with tea gardens overlooking the water, where the pace is slower than the western coast and the landscape feels vast and unhurried.

Lake Van and Akdamar Island

The lake itself is saline and alkaline, its turquoise surface shifting with the light and the season. On clear mornings the reflection of Mount Erek on the far shore turns the water into a mirror. A short boat ride brings you to Akdamar Island, where the Armenian Church of the Holy Cross stands close to the water's edge. The exterior carvings are among the most complete figurative reliefs to survive from medieval Armenian architecture — grapevines, animals, and biblical scenes worn smooth by centuries of wind from the lake. Inside, faint frescoes show fragments of processions and holy figures.

The City and Its Layers

Van sits on a hill above the plain, its old castle mound — linked to the Urartian period — watching over the streets below. The city grew in the Ottoman era and again in the twentieth century, absorbing waves of migration and conflict. You walk past sturdy stone buildings, past tea shops where men play backgammon, past market stalls piled with produce from the surrounding plateau. The bazaar has the feel of a trading city: dried legumes, sacks of spices, bundles of herbs tied with string. In autumn, women sell wild mountain herbs from wooden crates on the pavement.

Food, Landscape and the Way North

Van is known for its cheese, particularly otlu peynir — a sharp, herbaceous cheese mixed with wild spinach or gentian root. At breakfast it arrives at the table in thick slabs, alongside kurut — dried, salted yoghurt balls that are chewy and intensely sour. The landscape around the city is high plateau: rolling steppe, sudden river valleys, and the snow-dusted peaks of the Taurus range to the south. Heading north, the terrain climbs toward the borders with Armenia and Iran, where the road winds through mountain passes and small roadside villages that have been stopping points for travellers for centuries.