Van

i.Lake Van and the Eastern Plateau

Van stands on the eastern shore of Lake Van (Van Gölü), the largest body of water in Türkiye and the highest great lake in the country, sitting at an elevation of approximately 1,640 metres above sea level. The lake covers some 3,755 square kilometres — a freshwater sea by any inland measure, but a strange one: its water is not fresh at all but heavily alkaline and saline, sodic enough that swimmers float in it almost without effort and that no fish but one, the silver inci kefali, can survive in its open waters. The basin is closed; what flows in does not flow out except by evaporation, and the chemistry of the rivers and the volcanic underbed has, over geological time, concentrated the dissolved salts. The result is a lake that gleams turquoise in summer light and freezes only at its eastern edge in the deep winter, surrounded by a country of high meadow, dark volcanic peaks, and small fishing villages whose rhythms have been the same for many centuries.

To the north of the lake the long ridge of Mount Süphan (Süphan Dağı, 4,058 m) rises as the second-highest peak in Türkiye after Ararat; to the north-east, on the Iranian border, Ararat itself (Ağrı Dağı, 5,137 m) crowns the eastern horizon. The eastern shore, on which the city of Van stands, opens onto a wide alluvial plain — the only stretch of relatively flat country around the lake — and behind that plain the country rises again toward the Iranian border in a series of high stepped plateaus. The terrain alone has shaped the city's history: Van has always been the gateway to the lake, the gateway to Iran, and the eastern terminus of the great routes coming up from Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean.

A high lake of soda water, ringed by volcanic peaks, with one city in the only good plain on its long alkaline shore.

ii.Tuşba and the Kingdom of Urartu (c. 900–600 BCE)

The deepest layer of Van's history is Urartian, and it is the deepest urban layer the eastern plateau carries. Around 900 BCE, a confederation of native peoples — heirs of an earlier Hurrian population that had inhabited the highlands since the third millennium — coalesced into a centralised kingdom with its capital at the base of the great rock that still rises above the western edge of the modern city. The Urartians called this capital Tuşba (Tushpa); on the cliff above it King Sarduri I ordered the fortress of Van Kalesi to be cut from the living rock and faced with massive blocks of basalt and limestone. The Urartian kings — Sarduri, Argishti, Menua, Rusa — ruled from Tuşba for nearly three centuries, controlling at their height a territory that stretched from the Caucasus down into northern Mesopotamia and west across the eastern plateau.

The Urartians spoke a language distantly related to Hurrian and unrelated to Indo-European or Semitic; they wrote in a cuneiform script borrowed and adapted from Assyrian, leaving behind hundreds of inscriptions on rock faces, on the foundations of citadels, and on bronze votive plaques. They were the great metalworkers and engineers of the early Iron Age in this part of the world: their irrigation canals, some of them still in use, brought water down from the mountains into the plain; their fortresses defended the line of the eastern frontier; their bronze cauldrons, exported across the ancient Mediterranean, are among the finest surviving objects of early Iron Age craftsmanship.

In the 7th century BCE, an Assyrian incursion overran the citadel of Van, and the Urartians shifted their capital to Rusahinili — the modern Toprakkale, a few kilometres north of the city — where the excavated remains of palace, temple, and royal tombs still mark the rise of land. The end came in 612 BCE, when the Medes, sweeping westward in the great reordering that brought down the Assyrian empire, ended the Urartian state. The city continued, under new masters, but the long Urartian millennium was over.

iii.Persians, Tigranes, and the Roman–Sasanian Frontier

After the Medes came the Achaemenid Persians, who ruled the eastern plateau as a satrapy from the late 6th century BCE until 332 BCE, when Alexander's conquests reached the Iranian world. On the south-east face of Van Kalesi, in three vertical columns of cuneiform — Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite — King Xerxes I left a trilingual inscription proclaiming the achievements of his father Darius and himself. It is the only Achaemenid royal inscription in Anatolia. Carved high on the rock, accessible only by ladder or by abseil, the inscription has survived two and a half thousand years of weathering largely intact, and is among the great epigraphic monuments of the ancient Near East.

After Alexander's death the region passed through Macedonian and Parthian hands; in the 1st century BCE, Van was incorporated into the kingdom of Tigranes I of Armenia — a regional state that briefly extended from the Caspian to the Levant before being absorbed by Rome under Pompey. For the next four hundred years, Van sat on the most contested frontier of late antiquity: the long border between the Roman (then Byzantine) empire and the Sasanian Persian empire, a frontier that ran north–south through the eastern plateau and that was the scene of recurring war from the 2nd to the 7th centuries CE. The city changed hands many times. From 395 CE it was nominally Sasanian, then nominally Byzantine, then Sasanian again, with the local population shifting allegiance, paying tribute, and rebuilding its walls between each turn of the great war.

iv.The Coming of Islam and the Vaspurakan Bagratids

In 644 CE, in the early conquests of the caliphate of Osman, Muslim forces reached Van and took the city. The Arab caliphate ruled the eastern plateau as a tributary frontier for the next two centuries; the local Armenian and Iranian populations remained largely in place, paying the jizya (poll tax) and continuing the older patterns of life around the lake. In the 8th and 9th centuries, as Abbasid authority weakened in the eastern provinces, a local Armenian dynasty — the Bagratids — emerged as the regional power, ruling much of the eastern plateau through a hierarchy of princely houses. The branch that ruled the country around Lake Van was the Artsruni family of Vaspurakan, with its capital at Van and its great monasteries scattered across the islands and headlands of the lake.

The single most important monument of the Vaspurakan period is the Akdamar Church — the Cathedral of the Holy Cross (Surp Haç) — built on Akdamar Island in the south-eastern bay of Lake Van between 915 and 921 CE by King Gagik I Artsruni. The exterior of the church is carved with one of the great surviving reliefs of medieval Christian art: a continuous frieze running around the outer walls, depicting Adam and Eve, David and Goliath, Jonah and the whale, Daniel in the lions' den, and a procession of animals and saints in a style that fuses Byzantine, Sasanian, and indigenous Armenian craftsmanship. The interior preserves substantial fragments of medieval wall painting. The church was restored by the Republic of Türkiye in a major conservation programme between 2005 and 2007, and reopened as a museum in 2007; from 2010, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism has permitted an annual liturgical mass at the site, performed once a year in September.

v.Manzikert (1071) and the Coming of the Seljuks

On 26 August 1071, on the steppe near the town of Malazgirt (Manzikert) — roughly a hundred kilometres north of Lake Van, in the modern province of Muş — the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan met the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes in battle and defeated him. The defeat at Manzikert opened Anatolia to Turkic settlement and set in motion the long transformation of the peninsula from a Byzantine to a Turkic homeland. Van and the country around the lake passed almost at once under Great Seljuk rule, and the eastern plateau became the entry corridor through which Turkic populations moved west into central and western Anatolia. For the broader Seljuk story, see the dedicated essay on the Seljuks of Rûm; for Manzikert as a watershed event, see also the Konya page on the Seljuk capital.

After the Seljuks fragmented in the late 12th century, Van passed in succession through the Eyyubids (the Kurdish dynasty descended from Salah al-Din), the Karakoyunlu ("Black Sheep" Turkmen confederation, 14th–15th c.), and the Akkoyunlu ("White Sheep" Turkmen confederation, 15th c.). Each in turn ruled from Van or from one of the lake-shore citadels; each built and rebuilt the great hilltop fortresses whose ruins still mark the country.

vi.Ottoman Van — 1548, Amasya, and Vankulu Lügatı

In 1548, during the eastern campaign of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, Ottoman forces took Van from the Safavids of Iran, ending a long period of contested rule along the eastern frontier. The settlement was formalised by the Treaty of Amasya in 1555, in which the Ottoman and Safavid empires established the first formal recognition of the border between them — a border that, with later adjustments, would persist as the eastern frontier of the Turkish state into the modern period. Van became the centre of a new eyalet (province) and a strategic base from which Ottoman governance, military, and trade reached out across the eastern plateau toward Iran and the Caucasus.

Ottoman Van was a substantial garrison town and a regional administrative centre. Successive governors patronised mosques, hans, hammams, and madrasahs in the old city below the citadel. The most distinguished cultural figure of Ottoman Van was the scholar Vankulu Mehmet Efendi (d. 1591), whose Kitab-ı Lugat-ı Vankulu — the "Lexicon of Vankulu" — was a monumental Arabic–Turkish dictionary that became one of the standard reference works of Ottoman scholarship, and which had the honour of being among the very first books printed at Ibrahim Müteferrika's Ottoman press in Istanbul in 1729 (a moment that opened the long history of Turkish printing).

vii.The Old City Below the Citadel

The Ottoman city — what is now called Eski Van, "Old Van" — grew up in the narrow strip of land between the lakeshore and the south face of Van Kalesi. It was a dense, walled town of mosques, churches, synagogues, bazaars, and merchants' houses, with a mixed population of Turks, Kurds, Armenians, and a small Jewish community whose presence in the city went back to medieval times. The Ulu Camii (Great Mosque), the Kaya Çelebi Camii, the Hüsrev Paşa Camii, and the great covered bazaar all stood in this old quarter at the foot of the citadel. None of them, in their original form, stand today: Old Van was destroyed in the violence of 1915 (treated in the next section) and was not rebuilt; the modern city of Van was founded some five kilometres to the east, on the open plain, beginning in the Republican period. The Eski Van ruins — foundations, the surviving structure of the two Ottoman mosques, the line of streets — now form an open-air archaeological site at the foot of the citadel.

viii.The Events of 1915 and the Reoccupation of 1918

The First World War found Van directly on the eastern frontier between the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire, the two powers that, in the previous century, had fought across the Caucasus and the eastern plateau in repeated wars. Russian forces moved into eastern Anatolia in late 1914 and through 1915 as part of the Caucasus campaign. From the outset of the war, Armenian revolutionary societies in the eastern provinces, armed and supported by Russia, organised against Ottoman authority; in the spring of 1915 their activities in Van and the surrounding districts and villages turned into open insurrection, with civilian violence on both sides. That April the invading Russian army, in coordination with these Armenian forces, occupied Van and set the city ablaze; the Ottoman population was forced to evacuate. Across the broader Ottoman south-east, the imperial government responded with the 1915 wartime relocation (tehcir) of the Armenian population from the war zone, decreed under conditions of insurgency and active war. Van itself remained under Russian occupation until early 1918, when, following the collapse of the Russian war effort, Ottoman forces retook the eastern plateau. The Turkish army entered Van on 2 April 1918 and liberated the city. The Treaty of Moscow of 16 March 1921, between the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Turkish Grand National Assembly government, formalised the Russian withdrawal from the eastern Anatolian provinces.

What is not in dispute is the physical effect on the city: by 1918 Eski Van was a burnt-out ruin, much of its built fabric destroyed, its Muslim and Christian populations both displaced. The reconstruction of the city, after the founding of the Republic in 1923, would have to begin essentially from nothing, and from a new site east of the old quarter on the open plain.

ix.The Republican Reconstruction

On 29 October 1923, the day the Republic was proclaimed, the new state began the work of rebuilding Van. The decision was made not to restore the old quarter at the foot of the citadel — too damaged, and too tightly bounded between the rock and the lake to allow modern expansion — but to lay out a new city on the open plain some five kilometres east. Through the Republican decades the new Van grew: a grid of avenues, an administrative quarter, schools and a hospital, then suburbs. Van Yüzüncü Yıl Üniversitesi (the Yüzüncü Yıl University of Van) was founded in 1982 and has grown into a regional centre of higher learning, with strong programmes in eastern Anatolian archaeology, Urartian studies, and the agronomy of the lake basin.

The province's economy has rested on stockbreeding, the high-meadow honey of the surrounding plateaus, the inci kefali fishery on the lake, and (since the late 20th century) on tourism centred on Akdamar, the citadel, and the lake itself. Cross-border trade with Iran — Van is the major Turkish city on the Iranian frontier — has been a constant of the modern economy, with the customs gate at Kapıköy carrying a substantial share of overland trade between the two countries.

x.The 23 October 2011 Earthquake

At 13:41 local time on Sunday, 23 October 2011, an earthquake of magnitude 7.2 struck the Van region, with its epicentre at the village of Tabanlı in the Erciş district north of the lake. The shaking caused the collapse of numerous reinforced-concrete apartment buildings in the centre of Van city and in Erciş town. A second major shock of magnitude 5.6 followed on 9 November, in which a partially-damaged hotel in central Van collapsed during rescue operations and killed a number of journalists and rescue workers. The combined toll across both shocks was approximately six hundred dead and tens of thousands of buildings damaged or destroyed.

The reconstruction effort has been substantial. New residential quarters were laid out on the eastern edge of the city; whole blocks of damaged housing were demolished and rebuilt rather than retrofitted. Some of the historic buildings of the late-Ottoman and early-Republican periods were lost. Van Kalesi, Akdamar Island, Çavuştepe, and Hoşap Castle — the principal monuments of the region — were all essentially unaffected, and the great architectural heritage of the lake basin survives. The 2011 earthquake remains, however, the formative recent event in the city's memory, and walking the modern quarters one is constantly aware of which buildings predate it and which are of the reconstruction.

xi.Lake Van: the Inci Kefali, the Van Cat, the Soda Water

Lake Van's chemistry — sodic, alkaline, mildly saline — is hostile to almost all fish life. The exception is the inci kefali (Alburnus tarichi, the "Van pearl mullet"), a small silvery cyprinid that has adapted to spend most of its life in the alkaline lake but spawns each spring in the freshwater streams that flow into it. The annual run, when the inci kefali ascend the rivers in dense schools to spawn, is one of the great natural events of the eastern plateau and supports a controlled artisanal fishery in the villages around the lake. The Turkish state has placed the fishery under strict seasonal regulation since the late 20th century; the species, vulnerable to dam construction and water-quality changes, is the subject of long-term conservation work coordinated through Van Yüzüncü Yıl University.

The other living symbol of the lake basin is the Van cat (Van kedisi) — a long-haired indigenous breed whose distinguishing feature is its odd eyes: one eye is typically blue, the other amber or green. The Van cat is pure white, large, an enthusiastic swimmer (a rarity among domestic cats), and historically a household animal of the villages around the lake. The breed is protected at the Van Cat Research and Application Centre at Van Yüzüncü Yıl University, where a sustained breeding and conservation programme has worked since the 1990s to preserve the genetic line against dilution from imported cats.

The lake itself is the largest body of water in Türkiye by surface area. It freezes only at its eastern shallows in the coldest winters; in summer it shimmers an extraordinary turquoise that is visible from the high passes of the surrounding mountains and from the air on the Istanbul–Tehran flight path. A small fleet of ferries crosses the lake; the most important is the rail-ferry that carries trains from Tatvan, on the western shore, to Van — a peculiar and locally beloved survival of an older transit system, in which the rail line from Istanbul to Tehran is broken by the lake and reconstituted on the far shore.

xii.The Monuments: Van Kalesi, Akdamar, Çavuştepe, Hoşap

Van Kalesi (Van Castle, the ancient Tuşba/Tushpa) — the long basalt ridge rising above the western edge of the modern city, on which successive layers of fortification from Urartian to Ottoman remain visible. The Urartian rock-cut foundations and royal tombs, the Xerxes trilingual inscription on the south face, the medieval and Ottoman walls above, and the ruined Ottoman mosques of Old Van immediately below combine to make the citadel one of the great archaeological sites of eastern Türkiye. Allow a full half-day; the climb to the top is steep but the view across the city, the plain, and the lake is one of the great views of Anatolia.

Akdamar Island and the Church of the Holy Cross — reached by a short ferry from the Akdamar pier on the southern shore of the lake, near the town of Gevaş, about an hour's drive south-west of Van. The 10th-century Vaspurakan church, restored by the Republic of Türkiye and reopened in 2007, stands almost alone on its small island; the carved exterior frieze and the surviving fragments of interior fresco are extraordinary. The crossing takes twenty minutes; allow another hour or more on the island.

Çavuştepe — twenty-five kilometres south-east of Van on the road to Hakkari, the Urartian fortress of Sardurihinili, built by King Sarduri II in the 8th century BCE. The site preserves the foundations of the palace and the temple of the storm-god Haldi, the original cisterns, and a number of inscriptions in Urartian cuneiform. Less well-known than Van Kalesi but in some respects more legible as a unified Urartian complex.

Hoşap Castle — sixty kilometres east of Van on the same road, the Hoşap Kalesi rises on a sharp limestone outcrop above the village of Güzelsu. Built in 1643 by Sarı Süleyman Bey, the lord of the local Mahmudi Kurdish principality, the castle is one of the best-preserved late-period feudal fortresses in eastern Türkiye. The decorated gate and the labyrinth of vaulted chambers inside repay a careful visit.

xiii.Visiting Van Today

Van is reached by air from Istanbul, Ankara, and İzmir into Ferit Melen Airport (Van Havalimanı), a half-hour from the city centre; by overnight train from Ankara via Tatvan and the lake ferry; or by long-distance bus from across the country. The land border with Iran at Kapıköy is open and is the major overland crossing for travellers coming from or going to Iran.

The city itself is best explored in two or three days: a full day for Van Kalesi and the Eski Van ruins; a half-day for the Van Müzesi (Van Museum) and the modern quarters; a full day for Akdamar Island and the southern shore of the lake; and at least a half-day each for Çavuştepe and Hoşap Castle, ideally combined into a single full-day excursion east. For travellers with more time, the volcanic country to the north — Süphan Dağı, the small crater lakes of Nemrut (the Bitlis-province Nemrut, not the more famous Adıyaman Nemrut), and the lake-shore villages of the northern shore — is among the most spectacular landscape in Anatolia.

The Van table rests on the products of the lake and the mountains: inci kefali grilled or pan-fried; the substantial Van breakfast (Van kahvaltısı) of otlu peynir (the herb-laced cheese of the eastern plateau, set with wild greens — sirmo, mendi — characteristic of the high meadows), kavut (a roasted-cereal porridge with butter and honey), murtuğa (a one-pan dish of egg, butter, and flour), local honey from Süphan and Tendürek, and clotted-cream kaymak; lamb from the high pastures; and the strong tea that anchors every meal. For recipes and a fuller account of the regional table, see our sister site TurkishCooking.com.