By Brett Atkinson
The New Zealand Herald
Modern history is a presence in Turkey that confronts visitors, writes Brett Atkinson. For Kiwis, though, the welcome is always warm.
They take breakfast seriously in the lakeside city of Van in remote southeastern Turkey. An entire street is filled with restaurants that serve only the most important meal of the day and, in June last year, 51,793 local people crowded the leafy park beneath Van’s centuries-old castle to claim the Guinness World Record for the planet’s biggest breakfast.
No doubt a few of Van’s famous white cats with different-coloured eyes were mooching around the record-breaking occasion, too.
The cafes of Van’s Kahvalti Sokak (Breakfast Lane) are usually bustling with diners from 6am, just as the indigo smudge of an Anatolian dawn begins to subside.
Ask “What’s for breakfast?” and the selection easily trumps that of any Kiwi cafe.
Window displays of briny cheeses from robust fat-tailed sheep, and slabs of honeycomb and kaymak (clotted cream) combine with smoky wood-fired flatbread.
Rudimentary English menus list additional courses such as chilli-studded menemen (Turkish scrambled eggs), plump olives or cinnamon-tinged jam made from fresh walnuts. Washed down with cay (tea) or Turkish coffee, it’s little wonder most diners linger well past an hour and, for travellers, it’s the ideal opportunity to map out an essential day trip from Van.
Heading southeast towards Iran, the plains bordering Turkey’s biggest lake – six times larger than Lake Taupo – soon give way to deep river canyons and serried mountains still dusted with snow in late spring. Sparse tussocky vegetation clings to the hills, echoing the South Island’s Central Otago region, but military roadblocks dispel any promise of a vineyard just around the corner.
A recent rapprochement between the Turkish government and the PKK – the Kurdish Workers Party established in 1978 to seek greater rights for the Kurdish population – has eased tensions, and showing a “Yeni Zelanda” passport to bored soldiers now produces only a heartfelt proclamation of “Anzac!” as travellers are waved through.
Conflict amidst these borderlands is definitely no recent phenomenon, and rising dramatically from the steppe above an ancient bridge, Hosap Castle is a craggy, 17th-century testament to when this tortuous road was part of the mercantile network of the Silk Route.
Now, the partially-restored fortress crammed with hidden alcoves and chambers is watched over by furtive crows, a Kurdish grandfather and his extended family. The occasional lorry belches past en route to Iran, but Hosap’s former importance lingers as a forlorn reminder of past grandeur.
Back on the southern shores of Lake Van, another chapter of the region’s diverse history is being resurrected on Akdamar Island.
Visit in spring and scarlet poppies blanket the rocky shoreline leading to the compact Armenian Church of the Holy Cross. For New Zealand travellers the flowers echo Anzac Day, but the importance of the 10th-century church to members of the Armenian diaspora is also moving.
Almost all of the region’s Armenian people were killed or exiled by the Ottoman Empire around the same time as the 1915 Gallipoli campaign far to the west, and only in recent years has restoration resurrected fine carvings and illuminated cobalt-blue interior frescoes.
In 2010, annual services by the head of the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul recommenced after a 95-year hiatus. This was another cautious step forward in the slowly, slowly reconciliation of the estranged modern states of Turkey and Armenia.