Kars - the Sault Ste. Marie of Turkey

And so ends this series of similies -

In Kars right now - city of about 70 000, close to the Armenian and Georgian borders; laid out on a grid by the Russians while this was part of Russia from roughly 1870 to 1920... the Europeans are shocked that it doesn't have a city centre or even a central square. It's a real mix - big housing buildings (lots of buildings painted green), dense areas, sort of melting out at the edges until you can't quite tell where it stops being city and starts being little houses and kids and geese. Our hotel is across the river from downtown; walking the long way around took us through streets full of children and more self-built style houses, flattish roofs set back a little more from the road; then you get dumped out from that into more large housing blocks or a surprisingly ornate bridge that leads from a dingy little house to a T in the road. It all does feel quite a lot like a northern canadian city... similarly, again, it's a little hard to figure out what people do here. It's crawling with men, but there's not an obvious employer apart from a couple of factories and an immense police / military presence. There are people living in fairly expensive-looking recently built houses, people in falling-apart hundred year old houses, people in ramshackly little places, all squished side by side. Lots and lots of trees. Many statues that are not of Atatürk, which is quite refreshing, really. An amusement park that we never quite got to, although the music from it comes through the hotel window (the hotels are provided free thanks to Marlene's incredibly sweet roommate from Istanbul, whose uncle knows someone who knows someone...). I quite like it here, although walking back across the river at 10pm all that seemed to be around was bored-looking men driving SUVs looking for things to stare / glare at. Again, the world is the same everywhere...

During the day we went to Ani, right by the armenian border (we could see the border from where we were). It was, in the 11th - 13th centuries, the capital of the Armenian kingdom, and a city of about a hundred thousand people. Today it is just ruins, but quite an awful lot of them... until recently, you could only visit with military escort, but now you can wander around in the field and look at things. The city goes down a hill to a ravine overlooking the river... there's a beautiful little convent directly over the river (in the city there would have been a wall between it and the river, and several little buildings alongside it, probably, but now it's spectacularly placed there by itself). Several churches, a large cathedral, sections of wall, and so on.

Fascinating church architecture: the armenian churches (not the cathedral) are very small and circular, but quite tall, with the dome raised again above the roof. They are decorated with frescoes - one of them is almost completely covered with them. None of us knew what about armenian orthodox liturgical rites would call for such small spaces - the cathedral could hold big masses, but these would have had to be pretty private affairs. Today they are filled with swallows.

On the bus ride here we drove through Erzerum, where my great-grandfather was born and lived until he was driven out (and his family killed) in 1915. It's on the edge between eastern anatolia, craggy and rocky, and the high plains of the east. I had a tea in the bus stop there, surrounded by people eating soup for breakfast with stacks of bread. And now my battery is dying and I am off to bed.