Kars

i.The High Plateau and the Aras Watershed

Kars sits on the high northeastern plateau of Türkiye, at 1,768 metres, in the wide grass-and-basalt country that drains east toward the Aras river and the Caspian. The country is open, treeless, and severe — among the coldest in Türkiye, with winters that begin in October and last through April, and recorded temperatures regularly below minus 30 degrees Celsius. The plateau rises from west to east; the small Kars Çayı, which gave the city its name, runs through the centre of the historic town. To the south stand the volcanic peak of Aladağ (3,123 metres) and the long pine-forested ridge of Sarıkamış; to the east, across the river Arpaçay (the Akhurian), lies the international border with the Republic of Armenia and, beyond it, the medieval ruins of Ani.

The country is the heartland of the regional cuisine and pastoral economy: the Kars-gravyer and kaşar cheeses (descendants of the Swiss gruyère introduced by 19th-century immigrant cheesemakers); the goose (kaz) cured in winter for the year; the long-tradition honey and butter of the high pastures; the Karadeniz-bred grey horses of the eastern marches.

ii.From Urartu to the Bagratid Kingdom (961)

The historic-period country around Kars was, in the Iron Age, part of the kingdom of Urartu — see our Van essay — the great northeastern Anatolian kingdom whose centre lay at Tushpa on the soda sea. After the Urartian collapse in the 7th century BCE the region passed through Persian Achaemenid, Armenian Orontid, Roman, Byzantine, Sasanian, and Arab control over the long classical and early-medieval centuries. The medieval Armenian historiographical tradition records a fortified settlement on the present site of Kars from at least the 7th century CE.

The decisive medieval foundation came in 961 CE, when Mushegh, the brother of King Ashot III of Armenia, founded the small Bagratid Kingdom of Kars as a sub-kingdom of the larger Armenian Bagratid state centred at Ani. The kingdom lasted just over a century, until 1064, when its last king Gagik II ceded it to the Byzantine empire under pressure from the advancing Seljuk frontier.

iii.The Seljuk Capture and the Long Medieval Succession

The Seljuk Turkish capture of Kars came in 1064 under Sultan Alparslan, in the campaigns that prepared the great victory at Manzikert seven years later (see our Seljuks of Rûm essay). Through the 12th and 13th centuries Kars passed in succession through Saltuqid, Georgian Bagrationi (from 1153), and Mongol (from 1239) control; the small post-Mongol Turkmen federations of the Akkoyunlu and Karakoyunlu held it through the 14th and 15th centuries; in 1502 it passed to the new Safavid Persian empire of Şah İsmail. The city kept its 10th-century citadel — the great Kars Kalesi, perched on a basalt rock above the river — through all of these transitions.

iv.Ottoman Kars — the Eastern Frontier (1534–1877)

Ottoman rule arrived in stages. Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent first took Kars in 1534 during his eastern campaign; the city changed hands several times more between Ottomans and Safavids through the late 16th century before the Treaty of Zuhab (1639) confirmed Ottoman control. Under the Ottomans, Kars was an important frontier garrison town — the capital of the Erzurum Eyaleti's easternmost sancak — and was steadily fortified through the 17th and 18th centuries.

The 19th century brought the Russian advance into the Caucasus and made Kars, repeatedly, a front-line city. The fortress withstood a Russian siege in 1828 (recovered by the Treaty of Edirne, 1829); it fell to Russian forces in 1855 after a five-month siege during the Crimean War (recovered by the Treaty of Paris, 1856); and it fell again to Russian forces under General Loris-Melikov in 1877.

v.Russian Kars — 1878–1918 and the Stone City

The Treaty of Berlin of 1878, following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, transferred Kars together with Ardahan and Batum to Russia. The city remained under Russian administration for forty years — from 18 November 1877 to 25 April 1918 — the longest of the modern foreign administrations of any Anatolian provincial capital. During this period the Russian government built an entirely new town beside the old one, laid out on a regular grid, with broad straight avenues, a new cathedral (now the Fethiye Camii), a stone-built railway station, public gardens, and several hundred apartment buildings in a regional Russian variant of the Belle Époque style — the so-called "Baltic architecture" (Baltık mimarisi) that gave Kars its long-standing local name of Taş Şehir, the Stone City. The Valilik's official architectural tour treats this stone-built grid as one of the principal architectural heritages of the city.

The Russian administration also pursued an active policy of population transfer, settling Russian, Armenian, and Russian-Jewish migrants in Kars and the surrounding districts in place of much of the previous Muslim Turkish-speaking population. The Sarıkamış pine forest south of the city was the principal Russian military reservation; the great barracks complex there, built in the 1890s, would be the site of the disaster of December 1914.

vi.The Sarıkamış Winter — December 1914 – January 1915

The First World War opened on the eastern front in late 1914. Ottoman War Minister Enver Paşa took personal command of the 3rd Army and launched an ambitious winter offensive against the Russian Caucasus Army, the objective of which was to retake Kars and Sarıkamış and to push into Russian Transcaucasia. The campaign — known in Turkish national memory as the Sarıkamış Harekâtı — opened on 22 December 1914. Within ten days it had collapsed in a winter catastrophe: the Ottoman columns, marching through deep snow at elevations above 2,000 metres, lost most of their men to frostbite, hunger, and disease before reaching the Russian lines. The Battle of Sarıkamış, fought on 2–4 January 1915, ended in a Russian victory at minor cost; the Ottoman 3rd Army was effectively destroyed. The casualty count is contested, but Turkish official sources and most modern scholars place the Ottoman dead at between 60,000 and 90,000, the great majority lost to the cold rather than to combat. The annual Sarıkamış Şehitlerini Anma march from Sarıkamış town to Allahuekber Dağları — a commemorative winter walk of the route the soldiers took — has been held since the centenary in 2014.

vii.The Withdrawal, the Brief Interregnum, and the Turkish Recovery (1918–1920)

The Russian Caucasus front collapsed with the October Revolution. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) returned Kars, Ardahan, and Batum to Ottoman administration; Ottoman forces re-entered Kars on 25 April 1918. The Ottoman defeat in the First World War later that year, however, opened the area to a complicated post-war interregnum. From late 1918 to 1920 Kars passed briefly through a series of short-lived local administrations and a renewed Armenian presence, supported by the post-war First Republic of Armenia.

The decisive resolution came with the Turkish nationalist recovery of the eastern provinces. Kazım Karabekir Paşa, commander of the Turkish 15th Army Corps based at Erzurum, opened his offensive in September 1920 with the blessing of the Ankara government. Turkish forces took Sarıkamış on 29 September 1920 and entered Kars on 30 October 1920. The date is observed annually in the city as the Kars'ın Kurtuluşu, the Liberation of Kars.

viii.The 1921 Treaties — Alexandropol, Moscow, Kars

Three successive treaties between late 1920 and late 1921 fixed the modern border that the Treaty of Lausanne would, two years later, formalise as the eastern frontier of Türkiye. The Treaty of Alexandropol, signed on 2 December 1920 between the Ankara government and the First Republic of Armenia, ended the brief 1920 war and assigned Kars and Ardahan to Türkiye. The Soviet incorporation of Armenia later that month rendered the treaty technically null; the Treaty of Moscow, signed on 16 March 1921 between the Ankara government and Soviet Russia, confirmed Türkiye's possession of Kars, Ardahan, and Iğdır. The settlement was then re-signed multilaterally as the Treaty of Kars on 13 October 1921, with the Ankara government and the three Soviet Caucasian republics (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan) as parties. The boundary fixed at Kars in 1921 — the line of the Arpaçay/Akhurian river east of the city, and the watershed of the Çoruh north of it — has been the eastern frontier of Türkiye ever since. The Soviet Union briefly raised territorial claims against Türkiye in the period 1945–47 but did not pursue them; the matter was formally laid to rest in 1953.

ix.Ani — the Medieval Capital Across the Border

Forty-five kilometres east of the city, on the high terrace above the Arpaçay/Akhurian river that forms the modern Türkiye–Armenia border, stand the ruins of Ani — the medieval Bagratid capital of Armenia (885–1064), once a city of perhaps a hundred thousand inhabitants, with a cathedral, a great mosque, dozens of churches, palace complexes, and a multi-layered ring of walls. Ani was captured by the Seljuks in 1064 (the same campaign that took Kars), held briefly by the Georgians in the 12th century, sacked by the Mongols in 1236, and progressively abandoned through the 14th and 15th centuries; by the 19th century it was uninhabited.

The site lies entirely within Kars province (in the small frontier district of Ocaklı / Ani), and is administered by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2016 as the Archaeological Site of Ani (inscription #1518) under cultural criteria (ii), (iii) and (iv). The site receives a small but growing flow of visitors from Kars city; the border crossing immediately east — closed since the early 1990s — is currently inactive.

x.The Republic and the Modern Province

Republican Kars grew slowly and unevenly. The Kars–Sarıkamış–Erzurum railway, completed by the Russians in the 1900s, was reconnected to the national network in 1962. The province's economy through the 20th century rested on stock-rearing (cattle and sheep), dairy and cheese production, and the wider pastoral economy of the high plateau. Under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count the province population is approximately 280,000; the metropolitan municipality covers eight districts, the largest of which is the central Merkez (about 110,000), followed by Sarıkamış (~37,000). The 21st-century opening of the Bakü–Tbilisi–Kars (BTK) railway in 2017 — the new freight line that connects Azerbaijan to Türkiye through Georgia, bypassing Armenia — has restored some of the city's older trans-Caucasian commercial role.

The city is also known to a wider modern public through Orhan Pamuk's novel Kar (2002) — set in Kars in the depth of winter — and through the Doğu Ekspresi (Eastern Express) train service from Ankara, which terminates at the Kars stone railway station built by the Russian administration in 1899.

xi.What to See, in Order

The walking circuit of historic Kars runs across two grids: the medieval Ottoman quarter at the foot of the citadel, and the 19th-century Russian Stone City grid below it. From the central Faikbey Caddesi in the Russian-era grid, the route runs to the Kars Kalesi (the 12th-century citadel on the basalt outcrop), the Kümbet Camii (originally the 10th-century Armenian Cathedral of the Holy Apostles, converted at various periods, today an Islamic monument), the Taş Köprü (the 14th-century Saltuqid stone bridge over the Kars Çayı), and the historic Beylerbeyi Sarayı. The Fethiye Camii on Faikbey Caddesi — the former Russian-period cathedral of Alexander Nevsky, built in 1900 — and the dozens of stone-built Russian-period apartment houses along the same street are the principal monuments of the 1878–1918 Stone City.

For the wider province, the principal excursion is east to Ani — a long half-day, with the medieval cathedral, the Church of the Redeemer, and the great walls. South, the road runs to Sarıkamış — for the Russian-period barracks (now the Sarıkamış Şehitler Anıt Müzesi), the small ski resort, and the pine forests where the December 1914 march took place. North, in Ardahan province, the medieval Georgian-Bagratid churches of the Çoruh valley are the natural extension.

The northeastern stone city of the high plateau — Bagratid Kars, Saltuqid frontier, forty years of Russian administration, and the treaty-line of 1921 that drew Türkiye's eastern border.

For the parallel eastern Anatolian centre, see Erzurum; for the Urartian story of the wider eastern plateau, see Van; for the neighbouring Caucasian frontier province, see Ardahan. For Türkiye's eastern geography in the wider sense, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.