Kars

The rock above the Kars Çayı has been fortified for a very long time, but the town enters the record with the Bagratid Armenian kings, who made Kars their capital from 929 to 961 and built the domed Church of the Holy Apostles before moving the seat of the kingdom to Ani nearby. Byzantine, Seljuk and Georgian rulers followed; the armies of Timur sacked the castle in the 14th century, and the Ottomans took the town in the 16th, rebuilding the fortress and making Kars the northern anchor of their Caucasian frontier.

That frontier made the town's modern history. Russian armies besieged Kars in 1828 and again in 1855, and after the war of 1877–78 the district was annexed to the Russian Empire, which held it for forty years. The Russians rebuilt Kars as a garrison city on a grid of straight streets, in grey and black volcanic stone, with barracks, a cathedral and civic buildings that still define the centre. The population in those decades included Armenians, Greeks, Russians, Turks and Kurds.

The First World War and its aftermath were catastrophic. The Ottoman offensive of the winter of 1914–15 ended in the destruction of an army in the snow near Sarıkamış; the Armenian population of the region was deported and massacred in 1915 in the Armenian genocide, affirmed as genocide by the vast majority of scholars, while the Turkish government maintains that the deportations were a wartime measure that cannot be so described. Kars changed hands several times before the Treaty of Kars of 1921 fixed the present border. The frontier with Armenia has been closed since 1993, leaving the town at the end of the road rather than on a route, and its population has grown only slowly since.

Kars is a meeting point rather than a single culture. Turkish, Kurdish, Azeri and Turkmen families live in the same streets, and the Azeri influence is strong enough that the local Turkish carries its accent and vocabulary. Nevruz on 21 March is widely kept, and the long winter shapes the social year: life moves indoors to tea houses, where men play cards and okey for hours, and hospitality to a visitor who has come a long way is taken seriously.

The âşık tradition of wandering minstrels who improvise verses to the saz has one of its strongholds here, and duelling contests between singers still take place. Folk dance in the region is performed in lines with linked arms, to the drum and zurna, and horsemanship is respected in a province known for its grazing land and its cattle. Felt-making, wool weaving and beekeeping are the old village crafts.

The town has an unusual literary afterlife. Orhan Pamuk set his novel Snow in Kars, using its cut-off winter streets and its mix of religious, nationalist and secular politics as the setting for the book, and the novel brought a steady trickle of readers to a place that had seen few foreign visitors. Locals are used to being asked about it, and opinions on the portrait are mixed. The other constant is cheese: the dairies, the highland pastures and the cheese-makers' reputation are a genuine source of civic pride.

About 90,000 people live in the town and roughly 280,000 in the province, a number that has fallen for decades as young people leave for Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. The province is one of Turkey's poorest, and its economy rests on livestock: cattle and sheep graze the high summer pastures, dairies turn the milk into gravyeri and kaşar, and beekeepers move hives through the meadows. Grain, potatoes and sugar beet are grown where the season allows. Kafkas University, a hospital, the provincial administration and the army are the main employers in the town itself.

Daily rhythms follow the weather more than the clock. Winter, which runs from November into April, means snow clearing, stocked cellars and a slow trade; summer brings a rush of harvest, building work, weddings and relatives home on holiday. Shopping is done in the central streets and at the weekly market, and the tea house is the standing social institution for men, while family visiting fills much of the rest of the week.

Tourism has become a visible part of the economy, though a seasonal one: visitors come for Ani, for the ski slopes at Sarıkamış and for the Eastern Express, which fills hotels in the coldest months and has given the town a new winter trade in guided trips and photography. The closed Armenian border remains the fact that shapes the local economy most, cutting Kars off from what was once its natural hinterland.

Kars is known across Turkey for dairy. Gravyeri, a hard cow's-milk cheese modelled on Swiss gruyère, has been made here since the Swiss cheesemaker David Moser began production at Boğatepe in 1878, and is aged in wheels for months; kaşar, a firmer yellow cheese, and çeçil, salty strings of cheese wound into a plait, come from the same pastures. Kars honey, taken from highland meadows and sold in the comb, is the standard partner, and a Kars breakfast of honey, kaymak clotted cream, several cheeses, butter and bread is a meal in itself.

The great winter dish is kaz, goose: birds are salted, air-dried and then cooked slowly, the fat used to enrich a bulgur pilaf, and a whole goose is a dish for guests and celebrations. Meat otherwise means lamb and beef, grilled or stewed in lokantas, and the region shares the eastern Anatolian repertoire of thick lentil and yoghurt soups, mantı dumplings and flat breads baked on a griddle. Hanging goose carcasses in shop windows before the New Year are an ordinary Kars sight.

Tea is drunk constantly, in small tulip glasses, and coffee is much less common than in the west of the country. Sweets are simple — honey, halva and the semolina and milk puddings found across Turkey — and the best-regarded souvenirs from a visit are the ones that keep: a wheel of cheese, a jar of comb honey and a bag of dried goose for people confident enough to carry it home.