Eastern Turkey - From Trabzond to Van

In 1999, we visited Trabzond at the start of a 5 week trip to Turkey, and Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolo series still was fresh in my mind. Today, travelers require intense mental effort to conjure the glorious past from the current grimy industrial port of Trabzon, with its Russian flea markets, Russian prostitutes, flyblown markets and dilapitated bridges . Several parks with pleasant tea shops and mosques are worth a visit, especially the Aya Sophia, standing on a bluff overlooking the Black Sea.

Dorothy Dunnett's amazing combination of devious plotting with historical accuracy concentrates on the barely known period just after the the Ottoman's conquered Constantinople. The remnants of the Byzantine court fled to a far corner of the Black Sea where shifting alliances and treachery gives Nicolo his chance. Modern travelers can still conjure the bittersweet search for the past:

In the recesses of his imagination everyone, I believe , must carry a secret map given him in childhood with the sites of treasure trove marked upon it where the rest of the world sees only a town’s name, and to travel is to try and reach these sites, pickaxe in hand, hoping against hope for the ring of its blade on the buried casket. ..

Unfortunately, modernization, in all but a handful of countries rich enough to afford nostalgia, consists in pulling down just about very thing that the tourist from those few rich countries would like to see, and in putting in its place, all that interests him least about the provincial cities of his own land.The truth is that few individuals have ever traveled, in modern times, to see what other countries are like nowadays; in general people travel in search of traces of past eras and they have in consequence almost always been disappointed by what exists when they get there.The disappointments are brought about by the mis-preparation of your mind for what really exists; yet it’s the mis-preparation the treasure trove buried in your mind under certain place-names in early days which draws you on to travel in the first place. Perhaps if I’d known what it’s really like in most of Trabzon nowadays, I wouldn’t have come. Only by not knowing, by refusing to listen, by insisting on setting out with pickaxe and secret map, can you hope to find Trabezond.

Journey to Kars - Philip Glazebrook

A short drive took us to a trail that steeply climbed to the Sumela monastery which clings to the mountainside . Inside its chapel is decorated with ancient frescoes, with faces pcked and scarred by centuries of iconoclasts, christian and islamic.

We then moved inland to Erzerum, much reduced now from its medieval status as an educational and trading center. The distinctive Seljuk architecture can still be examined in the Ulu Cami and the medressehs. From Erzerum we drove to Kars, visiting the medieval Armenian town of Ani, “This is mountain scenery of the most magnificent variety. At Kale stands an old blackened castle in a desperate pass, the rushing river between sheer rock walls, the wild sharp mountains upreared against the sky. From the heights above Torut, in the very matrix of mountains, such a wilderness of peaks and winding valleys as I never saw before lay below us, threaded with rivers gleaming up through the smoky, cloudy light of the evening . This is scenery for the hand of the illustrator, and the vocabulary of the narrator, to work upon until they produce together a volume which will satisfy the romantic expectations of the armchair traveller. Here the crags ‘beetle’, the cliffs, ‘frown’, the heights are ‘dizzy’, chasms ‘yawn’, and the rivers are all ‘cataracts’”

Journey to Kars – Philip Glazebrook

We then moved south thru Igdir and Dogubayezit to Van near the Armenian and Iranian borders