Turkey at its best

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To quickly summarize our last days in Turkey, we can say that it was great and that it was not without pain that we left this country.

Ani

Ani was once the capital of a medieval Armenia kingdom covering todays Armenia and eastern parts of Turkey. At the beginning of the 11th century, Ani is believed to have had a population of over 100,000 making it a respectable rival of Constantinople and Baghdad. Today, of course, only ruins are left. For more history background and the dispute between Turks and Armenia for this site, you can refer to wikipedia!

We arrived at around 9 in the morning at the site and were the first people of the day. There aren't that much people anyway and the site is huge, so we found that we had the ruins just for us. Ani is really of a beauty that is hard to imagine and even harder to describe. You should visit by yourself. It is magical. The combination of the ruins and the landscape is breathtaking and you can't stop to admire and make pictures. We spent 3 hours walking across the site and visiting half a dozen of churches, a monastery, temples and a mosque. Some ruins have been badly damaged by earthquakes and some are still in good shape for their age.

Doğubeyazıt

After the visit, we managed to reach Doğubeyazıt by the end of the afternoon. The city is entirely Kurdish (except the 30,000 military forces....) and we found that these people are of the most hospitable that we have met so far. Also, D'zıt is much more relaxed than other cities we have been to before. We have been invited to so many cups of tea that in the end we had to refuse some invitations which is really a bad thing... but a some point, we just wanted to visit this famous palace just 5 kilometers up the city and not spending the whole day drinking tea (we did not even drink a last beer before going to Iran).

So there we went to see the Ishak Pasha Palace a Kurdish palace of Ottoman era built in 1685. The minibus left us 200m above the palace at a popular pick-nick place with a appetizing open-air butchery. We arrived just in time to see how a sheep was cut into pieces... we did not come back for the kebabis! The palace itself is terrific. As you are wandering through all the rooms and courtyards you realize how big it is. They already had central heating and most of the rooms had fire places as well. Some bad tongues would probably say that this was to keep the girls hot... anyway, one can imagine how the pasha must have felt when he received his harem's women in the marvelous dinning hall for supper!

The next morning we went to say goodbye to our new Kurdish friends and took the minibus to the border. That was the bit of Turkey we saw the past month. Time passed fast and there are lots of other interesting places we did not have time to see. It was with some mixed feelings that we went to the border.... many things we acquired during the last 30 days must be re-acquired again in Iran. But, that is probably also one of the good things when you travel... you learn to adapt to a new environment quickly; full immersion always works! How we did in Iran is in the next blog entry....

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Comments

[Le kayakiste des temps moderne]

Du rêve à la réalité
Pour avoir profité pendant longtemps de ce genre de voyage, je comprend totalement le bonheur que vous nous faites partager. Une seule chose à dire, merci. Je dois dire que ma jalousie est apparente, lorsque je vois votre voyage

[Eve]

merci pour toutes ces magnifiques images et les infos. en plus, ça nous fait travailler l'anglais :O) bonne continuation et gros becs de suisse. eve

[Lise]

Merci pour ce super topo!
Hello! Merci de prendre le temps de nous décrire vos découvertes! c'est super bien fait, écrit et illustré! on a l'impression d'être un peu avec vous dans vos aventures comme ça!! Bon séjour en Iran! Bisous de Montréal, Lise