Van

Van lies on the eastern shore of Lake Van, beneath a long limestone rock crowned by a fortress. The ancient Urartian kings made it their capital, Tushpa, and the cliff still carries their inscriptions and one of Xerxes in three languages. Later it was a centre of the Armenian kingdom of Vaspurakan, with its gardens and churches spread along the lake, and the island church of Akdamar nearby stood as a seat of the Armenian church.

The Seljuks took the region after Manzikert in 1071, and the Mongols conquered it in the 1240s. In the fourteenth century Van passed to the Timurids, then to the Turkoman Kara Koyunlu and Ak Koyunlu. From 1502 it was a frontier fortress fought over by the Safavids and the Ottomans, who took it in 1548; the Peace of Amasya of 1555 confirmed their rule, and by about 1570 Van was the capital of its own province. Abbas the Great recaptured it in 1604, but the Treaty of Zuhab in 1639 left it to the Ottomans for good, with Armenians, Kurds and Turks sharing the old town.