Turkey: From the Black Sea to Mesopotamia27th Sep 2027

Join us on an exceptionally beautiful journey into a part of Turkey seldom penetrated by mainstream tourism. Our journey takes us from the Black Sea coast deep into the Armenian Highlands crossing high mountain passes and following stretches of the ancient Silk Road. We admire the improbable blue waters of Lake Van and explore the extraordinary legacy of the Urartians, the Iron Age kingdom whose ambitious building programme left fortresses, temples and royal tombs carved into the living rock. We visit the ghost city of Ani, once the glittering capital of a medieval Armenian kingdom, now silent on its windswept plateau above the Armenian border and encounter the living traditions of Syriac Christianity in the Tor Abdin, where Aramaic is still spoken in communities whose faith stretches back to the earliest centuries of the Christian era. This is not an easy region to visit, and that is part of its reward. Eastern Turkey receives a fraction of the attention lavished on the classical sites of the Aegean coast, yet its historical significance is just as important. For those with a serious interest in history, architecture and the layered complexity of human civilisation, it offers an experience that is, quite simply, without parallel.