Eastern Anatolia

The kingdom of Urartu ruled the highlands around Lake Van from the 9th to the 6th century BC, building its capital, Tushpa, on the great rock at Van, where cuneiform inscriptions are still carved into the cliff. Further west, Arslantepe near Malatya was an important settlement from the 4th millennium BC.

For much of the next two thousand years the region was the heartland of Armenian kingdoms, contested by Rome, Persia and Byzantium. In the 10th century King Gagik of Vaspurakan built the church on Akdamar, and the Bagratid kings made Ani a capital of churches and palaces. The Seljuks took Ani in 1064, and their victory over Byzantium at Manzikert, today's Malazgirt in Muş province, in 1071 opened Anatolia to Turkish settlement. Erzurum and Ahlat became Seljuk and later Turkmen centres, and the Ottomans secured the region in the 16th century.

From the 19th century the east was a frontier with Russia: Kars was under Russian rule from 1878 to 1918, and in the winter of 1914–15 an Ottoman army was destroyed at Sarıkamış. In 1915 the Armenian population of the region was deported and massacred in the Armenian genocide, carried out by the Ottoman government and affirmed as genocide by the vast majority of scholars; the Turkish government maintains that the deportations were a legitimate wartime measure that cannot be described as genocide. The Erzurum Congress of 1919 was an early step towards the republic. In 1937–38 a revolt in Dersim, now Tunceli, was put down by the army with great loss of life, and from 1984 the conflict with the PKK affected the south-east of the region.

Eastern Anatolia is ethnically mixed. Erzurum and Erzincan are largely Turkish and conservative; Van, Muş, Bitlis, Ağrı and Hakkâri are majority Kurdish; Bingöl and Tunceli are home to many Zaza speakers, and Tunceli is also largely Alevi; Iğdır and parts of Kars have Azerbaijani Turkish communities. Nevruz, the spring new year on 21 March, is celebrated widely, especially among Kurds.

Minstrels of the âşık tradition improvise verses to the saz, sometimes in duelling contests. Erzurum keeps the bar dance, performed in lines by men with linked arms, and cirit, a horseback game of throwing blunt javelins. Oltu, in Erzurum province, is known for carving prayer beads from a black jet-like stone.

Van has its own emblem, the Van cat, a white cat often with one blue and one amber eye, said to enjoy swimming in the lake. Hospitality is deeply rooted, and visitors are often invited for tea. Kurdish music and the dengbêj, singers of long narrative songs, have gained public space in recent decades after years of restrictions.

Van, with about a million people in its province, is the region's largest city, followed by Erzurum, Malatya and Elazığ, each with between about half a million and 800,000. Kars, Ağrı, Muş and Bingöl are smaller, and much of the region is rural and thinly populated.

Livestock is the traditional mainstay: sheep and cattle graze the high plateaus, and dairies in Kars and Erzincan make well-known cheeses. Malatya's orchards produce a large share of the world's dried apricots, and the dams of Keban and Karakaya on the Euphrates generate electricity. Border trade with Iran and Georgia, public-sector jobs and universities support the cities, while many families depend on relatives who have migrated to western Turkey or Europe.

Winters are long and dominate daily life, with heating costs a major concern. The 2011 Van earthquake and the 2023 earthquake that heavily damaged Malatya led to large rebuilding programmes. Van is also a transit point for migrants crossing from Iran.

Erzurum is the home of cağ kebabı, lamb marinated and stacked on a horizontal spit, cut in slices as it cooks. The city is also known for kadayıf dolması, a sweet of shredded pastry stuffed with walnuts and soaked in syrup. Kars is famous for goose, including dried goose meat, and for its kaşar and gravyer cheeses, the latter a legacy of Swiss cheesemakers who worked in the region in the 19th century.

Van breakfast is a Turkish institution: a spread of many small dishes that includes herbed cheese (otlu peynir) and murtuğa, flour cooked in butter with egg. Bitlis is known for büryan, lamb slow-roasted in a pit. Erzincan makes tulum cheese ripened in a skin.

Malatya's apricots are eaten fresh in summer and dried for the rest of the year, and Elazığ's orcik — walnuts threaded on string and dipped repeatedly in thickened grape juice — is a traditional sweet. Tea is drunk constantly and strong.

Mount Ararat, Ağrı Dağı in Turkish, rises to about 5,137 metres above the plain of Doğubayazıt, and in clear weather both it and the smaller cone of Little Ararat dominate the view from the İshak Paşa Palace. Climbing requires a permit and a licensed agency.

Lake Van is a large soda lake at around 1,650 metres. A boat from Gevaş reaches Akdamar island and its Armenian Church of the Holy Cross, carved with scenes from the Bible. In the city, the Van Fortress rock bears Urartian inscriptions, and nearby are Hoşap castle and the Muradiye waterfall. On the western shore, Ahlat in Bitlis province has a vast Seljuk cemetery of carved tombstones, and above Tatvan lies the crater lake of the Nemrut volcano.

In the north-east, Kars has its Russian-era streets, a citadel and the 10th-century Church of the Holy Apostles, and Ani lies on the Armenian border. Lake Çıldır in Ardahan freezes in winter. Erzurum has its medieval madrasas and the Palandöken ski slopes, with the Tortum waterfall to the north, and Tunceli the Munzur Valley.

In the south-west, Malatya has Arslantepe, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and Elazığ the old hilltop town of Harput. Malatya is also a gateway to the summit statues of Mount Nemrut, which lies just across the provincial line in Adıyaman.