Turkey Guide
Northeastern Anatolia
Bleak, rugged and melancholy, northeastern Anatolia is Turkey's version of Siberia or the Australian Outback. Much of it is a high, windswept plateau segmented by ranks of eroded mountains that seem barely higher, despite impressive altitudes on the map. Four great rivers – the Çoruh, Kura, Aras (Ahuryan in Armenia) and Euphrates (Fırat in Turkish) – rise here, beginning courses that take them to scattered ends in the Black, Caspian and Persian seas. Their sources almost meet at the forbidding roof of the steppe near Erzurum, but as the rivers descend through warmer canyons and valleys at the edge of the uplands, oases and towns appear, lending much of the interest and attraction of the region.
As a traveller, you will probably have the place largely to yourself, except for the mountainous areas bordering on the Black Sea. Tourism, never exactly booming elsewhere in the region, was hobbled by the long-running Kurdish troubles in the adjacent southeast. Although these have now abated, the aftermath of a Georgian civil war to the north and an Azeri– Armenian war nearby in Nagorno-Karabakh – the latter closing until further notice the land frontier between Turkey and Armenia – have combined to choke off any subsequent recovery.
Highlights
1 Erzurum The twelfth- to fourteenth-century monuments of the Saltuk, Selçuk and İlhanid emirs at Erzurum comprise the finest collection of Islamic architecture in the northeast.
2 Ani Don't miss the ruined medieval capital at Ani, site of the region's densest concentration of Armenian churches and castles.
3 Kaçkar Dağları The glacially sculpted, wildflower-carpeted Kaçkar mountains rank as the most versatile and popular alpine trekking area of Turkey.