Five take-aways about Kars and Ani.
- Kars deserves more than just an overnight stay as it is a city with much to offer in terms of culture and food (especially if you like cheese and goose!)
- The climb up to Kars citadel involves a few hundred steps but is worth it for the views of the city and surrounding area.
- The cheapest way to get to Ani is the daily bus which leaves from outside the Sugar Beet café and takes about 45 minutes to an hour each way. Departure times may vary depending on the time of year so check before you go.
- Ani is a really large area with lots of buildings dotted about the landscape. There are lots of inclines and steps so may not be easy for those with restricted mobility.
- Keep your passport on you at all times. This part of Turkey is subject to police checks and being able to show your identity may save you from some hassle.
Kars and Ani – on the edge?
As someone from a small country (the UK) I find it hard to grasp the sheer size of a place like Turkey. How can I travel 22 hours from the centre of the country and still not be at an edge. Sure, Kars is classed as Eastern Turkey, but I still had to book a 5.5 hour bus journey to get to the border.
Kars itself isn’t big, just 100,000 residents, about the same size as Huddersfield in England and just as landlocked. Most Dogu Express, (Doğu Ekspresi) tourists just stay overnight and then leave mostly for the Georgian border. I had decided to stay for a week. After only being in cities in Turkey (Edirne, Istanbul and Ankara) I wanted to taste a slice of real Turkey somewhere more alien to me. In that regard Kars did not disappoint and the trip I took to Ani validated my decision.
First Impressions - the old and the new.
As you know, from my previous post – here, I arrived by taxi at night and I knew I would have to make my way back into the centre, but how? I couldn’t see any bus stops, there are no taxi apps work here and I tried to call a number I had seen on the side of a cab, but the language barrier was impenetrable. So I walked out to the main road and waited for a taxi to come by. Three attempts and twenty minutes later I found one and used the word bus station from google translate to get taken into town for my search for a way out. I needed a ticket to Hopa in the real far east, but no buses went from there.
I decided to walk around the city. Kars seems to be an odd mix of the traditional and the modern, with flashes of more European-inspired eating places. I was intrigued by a coffee shop called Dostoyevsky’s and decided to call in. Apparently there’s no direct link between the Russian author and the city, but there was a conference about his work in 2021 (during Covid?) which marked the 200th anniversary of his birth. Kars was once disputed territory between the Soviet Union and Turkey after the First World War, and another artistic link is Mussorgsky’s Capture of Kars march — he of Pictures at an Exhibition.
But enough of all this artistic stuff — the coffee was good, and I browsed through a few books and journals scattered about, though none were in English. Oh, and thanks to all of you who’ve bought me a coffee in the past — and if you’d like to, the link is here.
From the café it was a twenty-minute walk back to my tiny apartment: a separate bedroom that was all bed, a kitchenette with two really difficult-to-climb stools, and a small bathroom. No living space whatsoever. I had to teach perched on one of the high stools, which was not good for my back — never again.
The citadel and shifting borders.
I never did figure out the town’s bus system, so did a lot of walking whilst I was there. One day I decided to go to the main tourist attraction – Kars citadel or castle. I had worked out that I could get there without having to go through the city centre, by walking along the River Aras which separated my housing area from the main part of town. It was a twenty minute walk, pleasant through a park, but the citadel is high up and there are lots of steps to conquer. I felt proud of myself at having managed it and the reward of views of snow capped mountains some of which I knew would be in neighbouring Armenia. The castle is closed off, and the few remaining rooms didn’t hold much interest, but on the way down I stopped at a small mosque that had clearly once been an Armenian church. It was a reminder of how often this part of the world has changed hands. A point made more poignant by my next visit: Ani.
Ani - the disputed relic of a city.
Ani is an ancient city that was once in Armenia but now finds itself just over the border in Turkey — and I mean just over. The River Aras, which ran behind my Kars apartment block, also marks the international boundary — heavily armed and tightly closed since 1993, after a chequered history before that. For more on this – check this video from Tom Thornton, a British vlogger.
I found that the cheapest way to reach Ani was by bus, leaving Kars once a day at 9 a.m. and returning at 12.45 p.m. The journey takes about forty-five minutes, giving around three hours on site. It was enough for me — if it hadn’t been for my plantar fasciitis I could have stayed much longer. Only one other tourist made the trip, though we picked up a few locals along the way. At one point we passed a petrol station that, for reasons I can’t explain, stuck in my mind — and will reappear in my next post.
The coach park stands before a formidable stone wall, clearly built to impress. Inside is a small courtyard with a ticket booth, café and souvenir shop. It was uncannily quiet when I arrived, though it did get busier later — not hordes, but a steady trickle.
There’s a guided tour by phone, but I preferred to wander. I’d watched a few videos about the place and had a shortlist of must-sees: the Ani Palace, the Zoroastrian Temple and the Church of the Holy Apostles. Yet what moved me most were the traces of daily life — the old roadways, the wells, the middens — and the countryside itself, alive with birdsong. I even spotted a Turkish ground squirrel looking exactly like something from a British car-insurance advert. (For those not British, an example is here.)
After nearly three hours I reluctantly made my way back to the car park, anxious not to miss the return bus. My fellow tourist was already waiting; a local family joined us and stayed aboard all the way to Kars. They were chattering away, full of the days events – whereas I was still full of the images of what I had seen and the sound of the wind blowing around that cityscape.
Kars food eaten and not eaten.
Having passed through the park on my way to the citadel, I decided to visit again on another day. filled with concrete models of Disney and other cartoon characters — oddly charming in their way. (A view of this can be seen in this video from Steph and Pete at 2.34 mins onwards.) If you keep watching, you’ll see the couple go out to eat goose, the speciality of Kars — apart from cheese. I didn’t try it, mainly because I love seeing live ducks and geese and long ago decided never to eat them again. Nor am I a big cheese fan, as you can see from this post. From a culinary point of view, maybe Kars wasn’t for me.
I did, however, try my first and only çiğ köfte. It has an interesting history: once a meatloaf made with raw meat, it was banned in 2008 for safety reasons and is now a vegetarian dish of bulgur wheat and walnuts instead. I thought it was tasty, and would have it again.
Borderlines.
At the end of my stay, I realised I had been at some sort of border. Between past and present, Russia, Turkey and Armenia. My life in the UK and a very different experience in small town Turkey. After my failure at the bus station, I was directed to a travel agency to book my bus ticket to Hopa. Although the young man behind the counter said, ‘it okay I speak English.’ It was soon obvious that he neither spoke it nor understood a word I was saying. Even using google translate didn’t help, so he went out and brought in a taxi driver who acted as interpreter. Ticket bought – I was told to come back to the agency an hour before the bus was due to leave. No doubt the start of another adventure.
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