Erciş

At the northern shore of Lake Van, Erciş occupies a site whose history is bound up with the passage between Armenian, Byzantine and Islamic worlds. In the early Middle Ages the district was a major centre of Turuberan within the Armenian realm, and it changed hands repeatedly between Byzantines and Arabs; from the 1020s it was governed by Byzantium. In 1054 Tuğrul’s Seljuks took and sacked it after an eight-day siege, and the Turkish conquest was secured after Manzikert in 1071.

During the fourteenth century the town’s defences were strengthened by the Ilkhanid vizier Ali Shah, and it subsequently passed into the Qara Qoyunlu sphere before becoming part of the Ottoman Empire. These changes tied the settlement to the wider contests of eastern Anatolia, where fortifications, dynastic overlords and frontier warfare shaped local life.

Lake Van itself altered the town's fate. From the eighteenth century rising water slowly submerged the old Archesh, until few buildings, churches or houses remained visible and the historic core of this lakeside town lay under water.