Experience the best of Van

Van lies on the eastern shore of Lake Van, a vast soda lake ringed by mountains on the high plateau of eastern Turkey. The old city grew beneath the rock of Van Fortress, a long limestone ridge that was the citadel of the Urartian kingdom nearly three thousand years ago, and cuneiform inscriptions are still cut into its cliff, one of them left by the Persian king Xerxes.

Boats cross from the shore near Gevaş to Akdamar Island, where the tenth-century Armenian Church of the Holy Cross is covered in carved reliefs of biblical scenes. Hoşap Castle, a seventeenth-century fortress on a rock outcrop, and the Muradiye waterfalls lie farther afield, and Nemrut, a volcano with a crater lake, rises at the western end of the lake.

Van's breakfast draws many Turks, a spread of otlu peynir, a cheese flavoured with wild herbs, honey with clotted cream, olives, and eggs cooked with butter and flour in the dish called murtuğa. The Van cat, a white cat often with one blue and one amber eye, is the city's emblem. Winters here are cold and snowy.