A visit to Kars

My image of Kars had been formed by Orhan Pamuk’s “Snow”, a dismal novel, in my view, that portrayed it as a bleak and dismal town with almost nothing to tempt one to visit. My reason for visiting was that Kars is the base for trips to nearby Ani. But while I was in Kars, I took the opportunity to wander its streets.

Kümbet Mosque, formerly the Church of the Holy Apostles

Like many places in this region, Kars has multiple influences, handed down from its complicated history. In medieval times, it was for a while the Armenian capital, before it moved to Ani. The tenth-century Church of the Holy Apostles is a lasting monument to the Armenian presence. It has been a church when Kars has been in Christian hands, and a mosque when controlled by Muslims. The building was locked when I was there, but peaking inside, it looked a fine mosque, serene and peaceful.

Although for centuries an Ottoman city, the period in the late-19th and early 20th century when Kars was part of imperial Russia is especially evident in the grid street pattern and the presence of many fine buildings from that era. Or rather, once fine buildings. For while a few of them have been renovated, most are in a dilapidated or completely derelict condition. And that is the picture for most of Kars, the air of decay and abandonment over several decades, the streets crumbling and pitted with potholes, dirt and poverty all around. I was struck by the many little cafes, where, like everywhere in Turkey, men sit and drank tea and play backgammon or card games. Except here many of these cafes have a griminess, a depressing dinginess, I had not seen anywhere else. In some ways they were reminiscent of the state-owned cafes I remember from communist times in Yugoslavia, plain and drab, tables covered with shabby table clothes, and no effort made with the decor. The pictures of Atatürk on the walls remind of the once ubiquitous portraits of Tito. But I never saw anything like the squalor of these places in Yugoslavia. Had these walls ever been repainted? Had the floors ever been cleaned? Had the table clothes ever been washed? These table clothes looked almost fragile, they seemed so old, as if they might fall apart if touched. This is the way some people live in Kars.

The problems of Kars partly stem from the general neglect that most of eastern Turkey has suffered for decades. But there was an extra reason. During the Cold War, Kars was at the end of the road, next to the closed border with the Soviet Union. Cut off from neighbouring Soviet Armenia (its own Armenian population had fled following the Turkish capture of the town in 1920), economic life was stifled. Kars was of no interest, except as a military base facing the Soviet border. And that isolation has not ended, as the border has been closed owing to Turkey’s objection to Armenia’s seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijan.

There is some evidence of the present Turkish government’s greater interest in investing in the east, its realisation that the country’s Kurdish problem is partly due to the poverty and hopelessness of those regions (Kars also has a Kurdish population). Infrastructure is being improved, new roads built, and even in Kars streets are being dug up and repaired, and some effort is being made to make it look a little bit prettier. And to be fair, Kars does have some better points. There are some nicer cafes and some decent places to eat. It is not altogether bleak. But overall, it is a depressing town, and not a place to linger. Pamuk wrote about Kars during winter, cut off by snow. I was there in summer. But I could recognise the dreariness and decrepitude he described.