Ruins with a view over a harsh land

By MICHELE HEWITSON

In the hotel room at Van there is a fruit bowl. It contains an ancient banana, two brown loquats and a rotten orange. Inside the mini-bar fridge only two sad bottles of warm beer lurk.

There is, however, a carefully rolled prayer rug, a reminder that the further into eastern Anatolia you go the more emphasis there is on the Islamic component of the modern-day slogan: Turkey is a secular Islamic nation.

Lars couldn't care less about such subtleties. At 8 am on a clear Van morning he is red-eyed and apoplectic. As we stand on the main street and watch the soldiers trundle past in their armoured personnel carrier, the usually genial Scandinavian tells us he has had a very bad night indeed.

The TV didn't work, the toilet was broken, and there was some sort of Turkish beetle in his bed. Now, he says, he needs sleeping pills. And so off we wander in search of a pharmacy, through the dusty streets smelling of horses and watermelon, past pristine pastry shops with piles of tiny edible works of art created from sweet almonds and pistachios.

Inside the pharmacy are gleaming glass counters and a nice man in a white coat whose smile rapidly gives way to panicky incomprehension. He does what anyone faced with three foreign fools miming, badly, taking pills and falling asleep, would do: calls for back-up.

Eventually, many gesticulating men think they've cracked it. A young man hands over a packet of pills. Lars is handing over a fistful of Turkish lire when another pharmacist wanders in, attracted by the circus. "No, no," he splutters, "this is for," turning to the audience and shaking violently, "for Parkinson's."

This was about as dangerous as it got in Van. We might have been forgiven for thinking otherwise.

The day before we'd travelled by road from Erzurum, the largest city in eastern Anatolia. A four-hour journey in convoy: two buses escorted by a police car with flashing lights in front, an ambulance following up the rear. A sort of Kontiki tour with armed guards.

We were going into Kurd country - there are still, we are told, about 500 members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (the terrorist sector of the movement for a separate Kurdish state) holed up in the mountains of extreme south-eastern Turkey.

But there is no danger. It is merely because we are "loved, cared for and very important guests" that in our personal police force of two, one has a loaded machine gun, the other a holstered hand-gun.

We've come this way via Dogubeyazit, a dusty, bare, little place 35km from the border of Iran - "having all these beautiful neighbours," our guide says, "there is no need to go looking for trouble" - to gaze at the legendary Mt Ararat (Agri Dagi) which at 5137m is the highest peak in Turkey. It dominates the landscape, and the area's history. This is where legend has it that Noah's Ark came to rest. Over the years people have reported seeing the shadowy shape of a boat high up in the mountain's ice-capped reaches.

But we head east, 5km out of Dogubeyazit, to the grandly named and endearingly ruined Ishak Pasa Sarayi. Building on the fortress-like palace began in 1685 started by the powerful Pashsa, Colak Abdi Pasa, it was completed by his son, the Kurdish chieftain, Ishak, in 1784.

Its 366 rooms once boasted central heating, running water, a sauna and superior sewerage systems. And its situation, high in the barren hills, ensured its governors could keep a wary eye on the low plains and watch for traders on the Silk Road below who could overnight in the palace's outer courtyards. In the inner courtyards is the harem. "Not a red light district, as some people like to think," says our guide sternly. The harem was where the Pasha and his family lived, warm from the buffeting winter winds, their flagstone floors heated underfoot by a system of clay pipes.

More recent history is evident, too, in small cannon-ball shot holes in the sandstone walls - marks of the Russian occupation of Van from 1916 to 1917. Today there is a sole armed soldier standing on a rock outside the palace, guarding, not its tourist inhabitants (we are the only Westerners) but its place on the Turkish border.

Like many of the ruins in this part of Turkey, upkeep has been spasmodic. At Hosap Kalesi the Kurdish castle built in 1643 we visit the next day, you wonder whether the only time the population look up from the plains to the crumbling pile above is when the tourist buses arrive.

Then the kids come rushing out from their flat-roofed, small-windowed houses. They have colourful knitted woollen bags to sell but what the little girls really want, for their parched lips and skin, is "cream? cream?"

You can see why, as you look across the treeless landscape where the wind has harshly carved the landscape. There was once something to protect here: the old fortress walls follow the spine of the mountain pass like the tail of an ancient dragon shedding its scales.

It is stunning but the combination of too many ruins and too much dust has us longing for coolness. An hour and a half from Hosap Castle we find it. Akdamar Island, 3km offshore in Lake Van, floats mirage-like in the vast waters. We eat fish with tomato pilaf and drink Pilsner in the balconied restaurant before boarding ramshackle ferries . The waters are said to be home to Turkey's version of the Loch Ness monster, Vannie, as elusive as the famed Van cats with their eyes of different colours.

Ahead of us is an island and on it, its terracotta ruins framed by a cloudless sky and gnarled old almond trees, in this country of mosques, is a perfect little Armenian church. This is the Church of the Holy Cross, built in 921AD, its walls carved with lively depictions of Jonah and the whale, Daniel in the lion's den, Adam and Eve. Its dreamlike charm works its magic. Even Lars will sleep well tonight.