Wonder and melancholy in eastern Turkey

Few corners of the world harbour the remains of as many ancient civilisations as eastern Turkey, said William Dalrymple in the Financial Times.

The region is suffused with a sense of “beauty in wreckage”, which instils in the visitor feelings “both of wonder and of melancholy”.

The historical layers are most deep and rich around Urfa, in the south, but a tour might begin further north, where the landscape is strewn with the ruins of “astonishingly lovely” old Armenian churches. Several, still adorned with radiant frescoes, lie in the ruins of Ani, a city that was one of the world’s largest in the 10th and 11th centuries, when it thrived under Armenia’s Bagratid kings.

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Its remaining “domes, cupolas and spires” rise above a “plunging” gorge on a vast, lonely steppe next to the Armenian border. Many Armenian monuments in Turkey were destroyed during the genocide of 1915-1917, and across the following decades. Among them were four churches in the gorge of Khtzkonk, 15 miles from Ani.

One church still stands there, however – the 10th-century rotunda of Saint Sergius, a “gorgeously sophisticated” piece of architecture in an exquisite setting, rampant with wildflowers. And in recent years, attitudes have shifted. The wondrous church of Akdamar, on an island in Lake Van, has been “beautifully restored”, as has the last remaining Armenian church at Diyarbakır.

From that city, with its magnificent Roman walls, you might head south to Urfa and nearby Gaziantep, at the “crossroads” of the Turkish, Syrian, Iraqi and Iranian worlds. Near Urfa lies Göbekli Tepe – one of 12 local sites dating from 7,000 to 9,000BC, which are the world’s oldest-known human settlements. Carvings of leopards and boars “conjure up a dark epoch of ancient history, fascinating but feral”. At the museum in Urfa, they stand in counterpoint with later artefacts, such as the sculptures of the classical galleries – a “marble world of pristine stillness” in which the “sense of elegy” is at its strongest.